Career Center

POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT: HEAD OF SCHOOL
START DATE JULY 2023

MISSION

We believe education is a rich, subtle exploration and questioning of the world, not a means to an end. Since 1965 Saint Ann’s School has brought together gifted children and passionate teachers in a fierce pursuit of knowledge, skill, and artistry. We cultivate a joy for learning through a deep and rigorous curriculum, in which the arts are an essential presence. So that every child will flourish, we eschew grades, rankings, and prizes in favor of ongoing dialogue and teacher reports. At Saint Ann’s we offer our dreams to those who will share theirs with us.

Saint Ann's is currently engaged in a community-wide review of the mission statement as part of the decennial accreditation process. A primary goal of the review is to ensure that the school's commitment to equity and belonging are embedded in the mission statement.

OVERVIEW

Since its founding in 1965, Saint Ann’s—an independent, non-sectarian day school serving students in preschool through grade 12—has embraced a commitment to education for its own sake, oriented to the capacities of each individual student, free of the encumbrances of formal grading, prizes, and rankings. Saint Ann’s is unabashedly committed to an education that is a deep and meaningful exploration of the arts and academic disciplines, through which students come to a profound understanding of, or at least grapple with, the human condition. Saint Ann’s strives to be an equitable community, constantly open to inquiry, in which each member feels a sense of belonging.

Over the course of its fifty-plus years, Saint Ann’s has earned a distinctive reputation for its unique pedagogy, including its commitment to teaching without the use of formal grades, its reliance on detailed narrative reports about each child, and centering the arts in its academic program. The school’s accomplished teachers bring to the classroom experience as authors and scholars, working artists, composers, performers, and filmmakers.

In December 2021, Head of School Vince Tompkins announced that the 2022-2023 school year would be his last as head of school at Saint Ann’s. The board of trustees has begun the process of searching for a new Head of School and is seeking a dynamic leader to begin in July 2023. The successful candidate will be a highly experienced educator who has the capacity and vision to build on Saint Ann’s success and take the school to even greater heights. The Head of School serves as the School’s leader, responsible for fostering a community committed to excellence, a climate of care, and intellectual growth among students, faculty, and staff.

At a Glance

Founded: 1965
Total students: 1,100
Students of color: 36%
Total faculty: 375
Faculty of color: 26%
Faculty with advanced degrees: 115
Student/teacher ratio: 7:1
Financial aid budget: $12.5M
Students receiving aid: 32%
Endowment: $32.5M

SCHOOL HISTORY

Founded with the vision to create a school for intellectually gifted children, Saint Ann’s first opened its doors with approximately 60 students in the undercroft of an Episcopal church in Brooklyn Heights in 1965. From its very first year, the school has sustained several commitments: a deliberate rejection of formal letter or number grades, curricular rigor and richness, and the quest to be a community constantly open to reinvention. The founding Headmaster Stanley Bosworth insisted that the curriculum range over all the major symbolic languages of the culture, instead of just words and numbers, and that it be entirely rigorous in each of them. Actors, painters, and musicians joined the faculty, and with a pedagogical approach that treated the arts as co-curricular and emphasized cross-divisional teaching, Saint Ann’s rapidly established its sustained reputation for artistic as well as academic excellence.

In 1966, the school moved into its main building at 129 Pierrepont Street, which is currently home to the middle school and high school. After years of continual growth, Saint Ann’s School formally disaffiliated from St. Ann’s Church in May of 1982 having been granted a charter from the Board of Regents of the State of New York. Although the structure changed, the original mission and educational goals remained unchanged. Saint Ann’s has expanded into six divisions spread over eight buildings, where over 350 faculty and staff serve approximately 1,100 students.

Today, Saint Ann's is engaged in a process of reviewing how it tells the story of the school’s history as part of the decennial accreditation process.

THE SCHOOL

No two student journeys through Saint Ann’s look alike. In an atmosphere of deliberate informality, students forge close relationships with faculty and staff who empower them to make informed judgments about their course of study and to chart their own academic paths. Students have great freedom—to achieve, to trust themselves, and to find deep satisfaction in learning for its own sake. Faculty shape the curriculum and have the opportunity to communicate their enthusiasm, to use whatever they find practical, in an effort to draw out the most authentic and exceptional work from their students. At Saint Ann’s, in many ways, the curriculum is the faculty, and both are idiosyncratic.

With a belief that grades distract from the joy of learning, Saint Ann’s deliberately rejects grades, rankings, or comparisons between students. Instead, the School focuses on open, ongoing dialogue, annual parent-teacher conferences, and narrative reports to communicate what students are learning. The absence of formal grades encourages authentic relationships between teachers and students and promotes artistic and intellectual risk-taking.

The school seeks to create a collaborative environment centered around a culture of respect and inclusivity in which all people are valued and feel a sense of belonging regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious preference, or physical ability. Saint Ann’s is committed to fostering diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging in its community, its curriculum, and its culture. Through focused attention, it now counts over a third of its students as students of color and more than a quarter of the faculty and staff as well. The vision that guides this work and the steps the school is taking to implement change are prominent on its website and elsewhere.

CURRICULUM AND FACULTY

A Saint Ann’s education inculcates a love of learning, empowering students to take ownership of their studies and forge their own unique paths. The academic program is ambitious, flexible and responsive to meet the needs of individual students. Whenever feasible, students undertake accelerated or specialized work—in subject areas ranging from music to mathematics to Chinese—based upon talents and interests rather than age or grade. In the younger divisions, the classroom curriculum is chosen and developed by the classroom Head Teacher. Beginning in fourth grade, students move into the Middle School and a fully departmentalized curriculum with instruction provided by subject-area experts continues from fourth through twelfth grade. The middle and high school curriculum is offered through the following departments: Art, Classics and Asian Languages, Computer Science, English, Health, History, Interdisciplinary Studies, Math, Music, Romance Languages, Recreational Arts, Science, and Theater. In addition, high school students enroll in a host of faculty-designed seminars taught “after hours” at the end of the school day.

Instruction is driven by the passions, talents, and deep care of a thoughtfully autonomous faculty who build strong, engaging relationships with students. The teaching faculty is comprised of scholars, researchers, mathematicians, musicians, working artists, and writers. Saint Ann’s deliberately integrates and highlights the arts—including dance, music, theater, film, and the visual and recreational arts—as central elements of its curriculum, employing a cross-divisional teaching model to ensure that the faculty’s talents and passions spark students’ engagement throughout their years.

In an effort to continually create a more equitable place to learn, Saint Ann’s launched a comprehensive curriculum review during the 2020-21 academic year. Each department participated in a reflective practice identifying what equity-related skills it wanted students and teachers to possess and when and how it was equipping them with those skills. This work is a critical feature of all great education and will continue to be a defining element of teaching and learning at Saint Ann’s going forward.

Saint Ann’s accomplished Preschool, Kindergarten, and Lower School teachers have freedom to teach what they know and love—be it a Calvino story, ancient Egypt, the human body, or the Great Depression—and to carry out the joyful task of integrating the practice of academic skills into these meaningful content areas. In these divisions, curriculum is not something published in a set of workbooks, but rather a passionate intellectual foray developed and led by the Head Teacher in collaboration with an Associate Teacher. Together, they are encouraged to seek out subjects in art, history, the social and natural sciences to explore; these areas are chosen on the basis of genuine intellectual curiosity and are infused with the freshness of discovery. The curriculum is the vehicle that brings sophisticated intellectual and artistic ideas and pursuits into the realm of childhood, and is the terrain in which expert teachers and curious students build relationships, ask questions of the world, make discoveries, and ultimately cultivate a passion for life-long learning. The recent launch of an anti-racist curriculum review process in the younger divisions seeks not to replace these distinctive fields of study, but rather to bring anti-racist teaching practices, skills, and concepts into focus in all dimensions of the classroom experience. In the Preschool, Kindergarten, and Lower School, specialty classes in poetry, science, dance, visual art, math, computing, music, and recreational arts are taught by departmentalized expert faculty to supplement homeroom instruction.

In the Middle School, students move to a new building and into fully departmentalized instruction. Fourth grade lays the foundation to achieve deeper self-awareness and cultivates a sense of independence, agency and self-confidence that will continue to grow throughout the Middle School. The middle school curriculum is designed to familiarize students with the breadth of curricular offerings, from the structure of language to the arts and beyond, allowing them to stretch themselves and discover new interests. Foreign language study begins in seventh grade where students are primed to select from a number of modern and ancient languages. Many of them decide to pursue two or more languages during the remainder of their time at Saint Ann’s. By gradually increasing the number of elective choices throughout the middle school years, students take on more and more responsibility in shaping their own academic and artistic experience, setting the stage for the freedom afforded by the High School.

In the High School, the curriculum is an incredibly rich and diverse one, consisting of nearly 240 courses that range from the topically familiar—like U.S. History and Geometry—to faculty-designed electives like “African Decolonization and its Afterlives” and “Number Theory” that change annually and rival the offerings of a small liberal arts college. For all four years of high school, students are afforded a great deal of choice in shaping a collection of courses—in close collaboration with their academic adviser—that will stoke their curiosity, foster new interests, and challenge their assumptions. This academic exploration is anchored by graduation requirements that include four courses in the arts, four years of English, history, language study, and mathematics, one recreational arts course per year, and three years of science, including a year of biology and a year of a physical science.

A distinctive feature of the Saint Ann’s curriculum is that the visual and performing arts are co-curricular and are as institutionally valued as core academic courses. The schedule is designed to treat these disciplines as central elements of the academic program. Art, music, and theater classes are often led by teachers who are also professional, practicing artists who aim to elicit from students the most powerful and expressive work possible, to guide their development into becoming creative, original thinkers who question the world.

The Art Department engages students in a continuous process of shaping and reshaping vision, encouraging each individual student toward deeper aesthetic insight. The process occurs across a broad spectrum of disciplines that include drawing, painting, film and digital photography, animation, sculpture, printmaking, and architecture.

The Music Department celebrates the vitality of music as students receive hands-on experience as performers, composers, and historians. The early years focus on singing, and instrumental skills are gradually introduced. High School students are offered broad musical opportunities in composition, theory, music literature, and music technology along with an extensive vocal and instrumental music program.

The Theater Department encourages the Saint Ann’s community to find transcendent moments as artists and humans rooted in love for one another and for art. In a typical year, the Theater Department stages twelve major theatrical and dance productions and hosts countless smaller performances and festivals. The department houses dance, filmmaking, playwriting, and puppetry in addition to course offerings that span acting techniques, technical theater, costume design and production, scenery design, stage painting, construction, lighting, and sound design.

COLLEGE COUNSELING

For every student, the college process is a path as unique and thoughtfully chosen as the one they have traveled through Saint Ann’s. In the same way that a Saint Ann’s education is not a means to an end, applying to college represents much more than the destination. For students, it is a process of discovery, pondering who and what they are, understanding how they learn best, and what kind of educational community works for them. Saint Ann’s approach to the college process is inclusive, equitable, and provides resources for students so that all graduates have access to the best-fit institutions whiles also embracing alternative pathways that support Saint Ann’s graduates’ ongoing learning and development. 

COLLEGE MATRICULATION

Students from the class of 2021 matriculated at the following colleges and universities:

American University 
Amherst College 
Barnard College 
Boston University 
Brown University 
Colby College 
Columbia University 
Cornell University 
Duke University 
Georgetown University 
Harvard University 
Lafayette College 
Middlebury College
New York University 
Northwestern University 
Oberlin College 
Parsons School of Design
Pomona College 
Princeton University 
Savannah College of Art & Design
Stanford University SUNY - Binghamton 
Swarthmore College 
Trinity College – Dublin
Tufts University 
Tulane University 
University of Chicago 
University of Miami 
University of Pennsylvania 
University of Southern California
University of St Andrews 
Vassar College 
Wesleyan 
University Williams College
Yale University

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

Brooklyn is the most populous borough of New York City. The people who call it home create Brooklyn’s rich tapestry of neighborhoods, each with their own unique history and culture. Diverse in every conceivable way—racially, ethnically, linguistically, culinarily, and artistically—Brooklyn offers a world of experiences and activities in your own backyard along with ready access to everything else the city that never sleeps has to offer. From the galleries of the Brooklyn Museum to the cherry trees of the Botanical Garden and Prospect Park, from world-class sports and concerts at the Barclays Center to the Cyclone and the aquarium in Coney Island, Brooklyn truly has something for everyone and its wonders delight residents of all ages. Brooklyn offers convenient transportation access to all boroughs of New York City, making it simple to explore world-renowned cultural institutions like The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, Broadway, and Lincoln Center. Thousands of smaller venues throughout the city mean it’s never hard to find a play, a concert or a performance, and the restaurant scene is a foodie’s dream.

Saint Ann’s is located in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, just over the bridge from Manhattan. The Head of School townhouse, located in historic Cobble Hill within walking distance from the school, provides a quiet home base in a residential neighborhood with easy access to shops and restaurants while serving as a ready space for hosting school events.

DESIRED QUALITIES AND QUALIFICATIONS

Saint Ann’s School is searching for its next Head of School. We seek an inspirational leader who values freedom, space, and time for students to explore their passions and develop a lifelong joy of learning. The arts are central to that mission. Our students become critical thinkers and artists who question, challenge, and shape the world around them. As a school striving to reflect the diversity of New York City, we are looking for a leader who can ensure we deliver an exciting, challenging, individualized education that promotes the well-being of the whole school community.

We seek a leader who will thrive on being an active and visible presence in the life of the school. We seek a leader who will deeply listen to the community and build meaningful individual connections. This leader will need to balance the skill and practice of running a complex organization with the patience, commitment and vision for fostering what is already a vibrant and dynamic learning environment. The next Head of School will need the intellectual intensity and willingness to be bold enough to reimagine how the school’s daring approach to teaching and learning will drive Saint Ann’s School into the future.

While we are aware there is no recipe (or single set of ingredients) for the perfect Head of School, the following attributes would be highly desirable:

1. Skilled Community Builder and Communicator

• An individual who relates to and connects all of the school’s stakeholders while honoring its commitment to individualism and its mission of daring, creative education
• Emotionally intelligent leader who listens to different constituents, seeks to understand and connect the community, builds trust and creates a shared vision

2. Standard Bearer and Celebrator of Intellectual and Artistic Vitality

• Delights in the arts and the mind, with an intuitive sense of interacting with children to develop their innate artistry and sense of empowerment
• Appreciation for the craft, commitment and passion of great teaching, and a commitment to sustaining the freedom Saint Ann’s provides teachers to spark each student’s individual passions and interests

3. Pathfinder for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging

• Experience celebrating the richness of backgrounds and experiences of the whole community, making all feel welcomed and valued, building tools and engagement with challenging issues that go beyond any particular framework or structure
• Support a culture of resiliency, goodwill, and accountability
• Advocate for and invest in the well-being of the entire school community

4. Adept Improviser

• Imagination, joy and humor while sustaining and providing structure
• A belief in the importance of creative chaos
• Skilled at hearing and using many voices in decision-making
• Adaptable during challenges
  

TO APPLY

Interested and qualified candidates are invited to contact the consultants in confidence. Candidates will ultimately need to submit the following materials as separate PDF documents:

• A statement of interest expressing why this particular position appeals to them;
• A current résumé;
• Additional materials may be requested.

to:

Bob Fricker
Search Consultant
bob.fricker@carneysandoe.com

Heather Flewelling
Search Consultant
heather.flewelling@carneysandoe.com