Camden Louie ’08

Alumni Events

ALUMNI EAST COAST EVENTSOCTOBER 9 - 11, 2022

Last October, Rachel Skiffer, Coach Mike Talps (who retired after 42 years at HRS) and Alumni Director, Julie Kim-Beal, visited with alumni in Boston, New York City and Washington, D.C.

HEAD OF SCHOOL’S ANNUAL STATE-OFTHE-SCHOOL DINNER

NOVEMBER 2, 2022

The School hosted the annual State-of-the-School Dinner for parents of alumni, former trustees and past professional community members where they had the opportunity to meet and hear from Rachel Skiffer as well as reconnect with each other.

Introducing

Head-Royce Voices, our new alumni-focused podcast series. Each episode focuses on topics and people in the HRS Community.

ALUMNI WEBINAR: DIVERSITY AND REPRESENTATION IN HOLLYWOOD - NOVEMBER 29, 2022

The School hosted an alumni webinar panel discussion about diversity, race and intersectionality in the entertainment industry with alumni working in the field. Attendees heard from Dan Wu ’92, Cameron Johnson ’03 and Krista Marie Yu ’06. The panel was moderated by entertainment writer Olivia Truffaut-Wong ’09 and faculty member Andy Spear. Miss the webinar? It’s also available as part of our podcast series, Head-Royce Voices!

Talking with Talps

An interview with newly retired Coach Mike Talps

Meet Rachel E. Skiffer Alumni Council President Camden Louie ‘08 talks with our new Head of School

Diversity and Representation in Hollywood

A candid discussion with industry insiders Dan Wu ‘92, Cameron Johnson ‘03, Krista Marie Yu ‘06, Olivia Truffaut-Wong ‘09 and faculty member Andy Spear

New episodes added regularly. Use the QR code to access the podcast!

ALUMNI HOLIDAY PARTYDECEMBER 21, 2022

Local and alumni home for the holidays came together to reconnect at the annual Alumni Holiday Party back in person for the first time since the pandemic! They gathered at Oakstop, a coworking space founded by Trevor Parham ’01 and enjoyed food by Andrew Snow’s ’00 The Golden Squirrel Pub and Eva Allen’s ’12 Full Belly Bakery. HRS parent and Oakland entrepreneur Aminah Robinson (Chef Mimi) provided beverages from some of Oakland’s best Black-owned wineries and breweries. DJ E.T. Hazzard ’01 played fantastic music all night long.

the leap. What began as a two-year program at OUSD’s Futures Elementary School, turned into five and then ultimately to her current role as a Kindergarten and Transitional-Kindergarten teacher at Achieve Academy, an Education for Change School, in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood.

Monica loves teaching kindergarten. She refers to it as being in a ‘flow state,’ where time flies by because of the energy and activity of the students and the classroom. She also appreciates the connections she forms with her students and their families—that families are such a big part of the kindergarten experience.

But a key passion of Monica’s is her focus on early childhood literacy and reading. When she saw that the existing literacy curriculum was not effective, she lobbied to pilot a different research-based reading approach from the Center for the Collaborative Classroom called “Being a Reader”…and that’s where her Head-Royce connections have also played a major part.

During the pandemic and the sudden shift to online instruction, Monica worked with several independent schools in the Bay Area to provide daily one-to-one remote tutoring between high school students and her kindergartners in this systematic phonics-based reading instruction program, working on encoding, decoding, blending, segmenting and building fluency. She brought the students together on Zoom and then partnered them with each other in breakout rooms. But aside from the academic instruction that the kindergartners received, Monica also witnessed firsthand the incredible joy that peer teaching can bring to all participants.

Five years after graduating, Monica Valerian ’04 foretold the future. In an Alumni Note submitted for the Spring 2009 issue of the Head-Royce magazine, she predicted a partnership to come, nearly 14 years before it began.

At the time, she had just started teaching Kindergarten at Futures Elementary School through the Teach for America program, just a few miles from Head-Royce. In her note she shared, “It is my hope to forge a mutually beneficial relationship between our school communities. I know that students at Futures have much to gain from exposure to selfmotivated and academically driven students, while students at HeadRoyce would learn so much about the greater Oakland community and the achievement gap by spending time at Futures. There are many volunteer leadership positions with opportunities to tutor and mentor at Futures just waiting to be filled by eager Head-Royce students!”

Today, her hope has become a reality, and in meaningful and incredibly impactful ways, as shown in the magazine’s “Not Just a School in Oakland” article.

In retrospect, it seemed that there were many signs along the way directing Monica to a future in teaching and her work in early childhood literacy.

Originally, upon graduation from Head-Royce and acceptance to UC Davis, she had entertained the notion of becoming a lawyer, but teaching had always been in the background. Her mother had been a preschool teacher for many years and even her HRS senior project was as a teacher’s aide at Carl Munck Elementary School in Oakland. She also recalls the deep impression that HRS teachers like Peter Reinke had made on her. “He stood out as a person [who] cared and was passionate about the subject that he taught. But he also took the time to connect with students, find out what was going on in their home lives.”

So after college, when she found herself traveling in China during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, she met an athlete (an American silver medalist in fencing, no less) who suggested that she apply for Teach for America in Oakland, and she took

She lights up visibly when she talks about the partnership that she has helped form between Achieve and Head-Royce, through the Center for Community Engagement run by Nancy Feidelman. What began as a creative solution during the pandemic has formed into a long-lasting symbiotic relationship between the students at both schools that continues to take place, now in-person.

Both the curriculum and the peer tutoring were critical elements in an approach that resulted in an unheard of 90% at- or above-grade level reading ability in a district where the classroom average is considerably lower.

Throughout the process, Monica has been duly impressed by what she has observed in the Head-Royce students. She points out their ability to easily connect with her kindergarteners, the natural joy and energy they bring, the mature organizing and coordination by former and current student leaders like Sidney Shah ’21 and Amelia P. ’23 and even the way that HRS students interact with each other, with camaraderie and respect.

Monica acknowledges the realities and difficulties in the profession of teaching, as noted by the many teachers who have left the profession in recent years. But she is deeply motivated by her hope and desire to increase literacy in young children. She feels that they have a proven roadmap and the challenge is to now spread that to other classrooms, beginning with training and supporting new teachers. Monica’s passion, drive and love for teaching are evident to anyone who speaks with her or observes her in action—to a point of being contagious—which is exactly what she hopes will happen to many of the student volunteers who partner with her classroom. Like her former teacher Peter Reinke, she is well on her way to inspiring a new generation of teachers.