New York, New York
New York, New York
Oakton, Virginia
Posted: 11-Oct-24
Location: Cupertino, California
Type: Full Time
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Salary Details:
Preferred Education:
Introduction
“Kids find their people at Tessie!” Serving gifted students and their families from Pre-K to Grade 12, Tessellations (Tessie) provides an appropriately challenging experiential education that recognizes and nurtures the individual strengths of gifted learners, empowering them to confidently express who they are and pursue a meaningful life. Often when students start at Tessie, it is the first time they feel like they’re interacting with intellectual peers. Whether discussing every airplane model that was ever built since the first flight or explaining to another student the concept of infinity, students greet each other’s interests with kindness and awe. Tessie teachers foster their students’ curiosity and are appropriately attuned to the corresponding sensitivities that some of these learners display. Exploration, openness, and a commitment to meet the developmental needs of all its students is what you’ll find at the heart of this new and still developing school.
Born out of the demand of Silicon Valley’s families, Tessie opened in 2020 through a collaboration between a group of like-minded families and educators. In just four years, Tessie has grown from serving 30 gifted learners online to almost 300 on a 9.4-acre main campus, as well as an additional local nature campus that provides easy access to the outdoor exploration—a key part of the project-based program. Tessie’s promise is to support gifted learners in their education and development so that these young people develop the mindset and skills to contribute to creative and innovative life-changing solutions.
Tessellations at a Glance
Mission: Tessellations provides challenging experiential education that recognizes and nurtures the individual strengths of gifted learners, empowering them to confidently express who they are and pursue a meaningful life.
Vision: We are a community of imaginative, empathetic, productive, and passionate lifelong learners who advance an equitable and sustainable world.
Values
- Wonder, curiosity, and deep learning
- Rigor, resilience, and courage
- Kindness, generosity, and integrity
- Open-mindedness and adaptability
- Acceptance of self and harmony with others
- Connection with and respect for nature
Facts and Figures
Founded: 2020
2024-25 Schoolwide Enrollment: 267
- Pre-K: 34
- Lower School (K-5th): 158
- Middle School (6th-8th): 75
- High School (9th grade only this year): 8
Student-Faculty Ratio: approximately 5:1
Employees: 80, including 73 full-time faculty
% of Faculty with Advanced Degrees: 40%
Operating Budget: $15 million
Tuition: $41,000 for PreK–Grade 5, $42,500 for Grades 6–8, $49,500 for Grades 9–12
Financial Aid: $1.25 million to 10% of students
Total Funds Raised, 2023-24: $7.5 million
Parent Participation in Annual Giving: 88%
On the Web: Tessellations School (https://tessellations.school/)
Governance and Administration
Tessellations currently has a seven-person Board of Directors. To bring a school from an idea to a fully functional PreK-Grade 12 school (currently serving students in 9th grade only) requires the dedication and commitment of each board member, and each board member is incredibly invested in the long-term success of the school. The board is made up of a collaborative group that understands the need to now transition from supporting all of the start-up operations to a group focused on long-term fiscal sustainability and viability. The board is actively expanding to ensure that they have the full range of needed expertise as well as to make sure that they are right sized for the much bigger school they are today. They are also invested in their own learning, including working with an outside governance expert to make sure their work is both appropriate and at the highest level.
The founding Head of School and Executive Director Grace Stanat was the right individual to build and grow Tessie at the appropriate rate for durable success. The school is now ready for the next stage of leadership and is looking for a system-oriented and experienced Head to guide this transition. The goal is to evolve the school from start-up mode to a more mature, yet still innovative institution. The right policies and protocols are needed to support the vision of a fully operational four-division school, serving over 300 students from preschool to grade 12. Driven by parent generosity in support of Tessie’s story, the school’s first five years have been marked by consistent fundraising success. Additionally, the school’s marketing and external online presence has been polished and professional, especially for a school so early in its development.
The Program
At its core, Tessie is designed to serve gifted kids well and meet their needs at a high level. Progressive education principles guide all decisions around Tessie’s program. The resulting curriculum is student centered, project-based, experiential, and innovative. As the school moves into a more established mode, additional work is needed to make sure the curriculum is in equal parts appropriately challenging and sufficiently skill-building for its students at each age and stage. Tessie has done an especially good job developing strong socioemotional programming throughout the curriculum. The student body shows up as kind, curious, all-in students who exhibit humility and lack the peer-to-peer competition or one-upmanship that can be prevalent in highly academic communities.
In the preschool, the curriculum is play-based, following best practices to foster empathy, collaboration, communication skills, and a love of learning. From the Lower School upwards, project-based learning with an emphasis on social justice and outdoor education is a throughline. Notably, Tessie is designed with differentiated education, including math and literacy groupings by ability rather than grade. Top-notch music, fine arts, drama, math enrichment, and debate programs bolster the core academic areas.
Tessie’s high school just opened this year and is still very much evolving. Opening a brand-new high school avoids the problems of wrestling with tradition. Thus, Tessellations High School is already being heralded nationally as a progressive school to watch. Having attracted an impressive group of founding faculty, the approach to curriculum is even more progressive than in K-8, with the school leaning fully into Competency-Based Learning, Mastery Transcripts, and the findings of ChallengeSuccess (a Stanford-based research group dedicated to improving the well-being of high school students). The inaugural 9th grade class only numbers 8 and will expand yearly until an eventual enrollment of approximately 300.
As Tessie matures, the administration will need to delicately balance teacher autonomy and empowerment while ensuring the quality control needed at a highly successful school. A positive culture of collaboration exists between faculty within grades and often divisions, yet work still remains for the same cooperation and knowledge to exist across divisions and programs to ensure alignment and appropriate progression of the curriculum.
Tessie represents a brilliant idea that still needs bolstering to actualize its promise of what is possible with its gifted and open students and its invested and dedicated parent body. The nature campus, the semiannual family camping trips, and the academic and enrichment programs need to be developed and systematized so that the nascent potential of Tessie can be realized.
Gifted students tend to have gifted parents, resulting in a community of fully invested, highly engaged caregivers, many of whom are high-achieving and highly successful in their fields. By and large, the parent body is a down-to-earth group that avoids social competitiveness and status symbols to create an environment inclusive for all. They tend to be supportive of the school and invested in its success. As the school has grown quickly, of late, there are a few more vocal concerns around greater classroom consistency, more transparent and timely communications, and greater stability with faculty and staff.
A strong admissions process that identifies, admits, and supports kids who need Tessie and whose needs Tessie can meet continues to be a hallmark of the school. One part of the admissions process involves evaluating and identifying students as gifted through a Gifted Qualitative Analysis (GQA) process based on the methods of Annemarie Roeper, a pioneer in gifted education. While incredibly effective, examining whether the full scope of the labor-intensive process is sustainable or can be streamlined remains an open question.
Opportunities and Challenges for the Next Head of School
Consistent with the high demand for strong progressive gifted education in Silicon Valley, the school has grown tremendously over its first five years. While growth is the first stage for long-term success of a start-up school, even more important is how a new school transitions to its next stage of development. The key transition pieces are multi-layered. First, the new Head will need to understand the school’s history and do a quick audit of the entirety of its programs. While striving for sustainable excellence, they will need to set up the systems, policies, and organizational structure to ensure that Tessie is delivering a consistently high-level experiential program for its gifted learners and a joyful learning-focused and excellence-aspiring environment for its teachers. Tessie currently has 16+ directors or program leaders; the Head will need to examine roles and program needs to make sure they are appropriately distributed and defined. As the focus moves from building to honing the school’s programs, a different balance of teachers and leaders will likely be needed. Similarly, in the development stage, both parents and board members have contributed greatly to Tessie’s programs and departments, and a reevaluation of appropriate roles and boundaries in sustaining a school will be crucial.
Devoting the time to determine a communications strategy will be vital, as the Head determines the appropriate cadence, transparency, and tone of the school’s messaging. The Head should think about exuding professionalism, reassurance, connection, and deep knowledge of the school and programs.
The admissions process at Tessie is already highly developed and honed, and the hiring process needs similar attention. The school needs a Head who can establish rigorous and efficient hiring practices both to bring in excellent teachers—in skill and in mindset— and to establish the needed onboarding and professional development practices to support their transition and growth throughout their hopefully long tenure at the school. Ultimately, the Head should prioritize freeing teachers from organizational and parental distractions, so that teachers can focus on the student experience, and work to grow and develop teachers to be the most effective possible.
Having gained the appropriate knowledge of Tessie’s culture and history, the new Head will be able to bring the focus back to creating and systematizing a high-quality, student-centered, academically challenging school that fosters curiosity and love of learning in gifted students of all ages and stages. This will help them ensure mission and programmatic alignment across and within divisions and limit or remove siloes. The Head will then be able to provide clear messaging for role responsibilities while also fostering a universally respectful working culture.
Qualifications
Experience and Skills
- Advanced degree and at least ten years of experience in a senior administrative position in an education setting preferred.
- A student-centered and proven people manager who can empower others, make them feel safe, and hold them accountable.
- Deep experience with and commitment to progressive education.
- Understanding of the complex needs of gifted population.
- Experience and skill with a deeply invested, highly educated, and high-achieving parent community.
- Proven track record of turnaround success, building or growing a school, or experience and success navigating and improving a complex, cross-divisional, cross-program school.
- Significant classroom experience.
- WASC or other similar association accreditation experience.
- Someone who has worked at and learned multiple schools and systems.
- Successful fundraiser preferred.
Personal Characteristics
- Kind, empathetic, collaborative, and curious.
- A charismatic, open, friendly person who enjoys being with people.
- Resilient, unflappable, and skillful at calming and connecting during times of high stress or conflict.
- A flexible and adaptable relationship builder.
- Someone who loves to fix problems with strong follow-through.
- A systems thinker.
Application Requirements and Search Process
DRG is conducting this search on behalf of Tessellations. Interested candidates should submit, as soon as possible, materials including the following:
- A cover letter indicating why they are particularly interested in and qualified for the position
- A current resume
- A statement of leadership philosophy
- A second writing sample of your choice (newsletter, article, talk, parent email, etc.)
- A list of references (references will not be contacted until the finalist stage of the search and only with candidate permission)
Application materials should be uploaded directly on the DRG website (www.drgtalent.com) by visiting the Tessellations listing.
Anticipated Search Calendar
- Application Deadline: November 25, 2024
- Semifinalist Interviews (on Zoom): Week of December 9, 2024
- Finalist Visits: Weeks of January 13 and January 20, 2025
- Starting Date: July 1, 2025
This position description is based upon material provided by Tessellations School, an equal-opportunity employer.
To apply for this position, please click HERE.
Jennifer Fleischer, Senior Talent Consultant, jfleischer@drgtalent.com
Andy Watson, Senior Talent Consultant, awatson@drgtalent.com
Merav Schwartz, Associate Talent Consultant, mschwartz@drgtalent.com