restoring pride
Reflections on education, student success, and renewal at St. James’ Episcopal School
developing
CHARACTER
creating community
//
an interview
with
Debbi David St. James’ Head of School
“
the energy
of a school balance it gives me joy.
f e e d s my o w n e n e r g y. it gives me
.
DEBBI DAVID MOVES QUICKLY THROUGH THE HALLS OF ST. JAMES’ EPISCOPAL SCHOOL AS SHE HELPS TEACHERS AND STAFF PREPARE FOR THE START OF THE YEAR. The new head of school is wasting no time. Her agenda is ambitious. “We can become one of the city’s leading math and science schools,” she says with a quiet confidence informed by her wealth of experience as a classroom teacher, curriculum specialist and administrator. “I want to restore pride in this school and revive the definition of St. James’ as an institution where academic excellence, character development and a strong sense of community are bound together by mutual trust and common moral values.”
David believes strong school communities can accomplish great things. “I am adept at diagnosis and prescription within a school community. I can see what is working and what’s not. And I know how to create the tincture that will heal,” she says. “I build the harmonious, powerful, happy, high-performing communities that propel student success. “The energy of a school feeds my own energy. It gives me balance. It gives me joy,” says David. It was not, however, the life she originally sought for her-
I build the harmonious, powerful, happy, highperforming communities that propel student success.
Three years later, sta rounded by my wond a surge of confidenc had ever felt before. I
self when she was a teenager growing up in Buffalo, New York. At 19, David joined a Catholic convent outside of Philadelphia, certain she wanted to be a nun. She left two years later, deeply politicized by the inhuman and punitive practices of the order but with her belief in a God of love unshaken. After earning an English degree from Niagara University, she intended to become a novelist. An opportunity to teach at a Manhattan independent girls’ school led her, instead, to the front of an English class with Caroline Kennedy as one of her fifth-grade students. “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I’d never prepared to be a teacher or even intended to teach. But it seemed to work. “My first year, Columbia University’s Teachers College asked to have some of its students sit in on my class. We were studying ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.’ There was a moment in the class when the students realized that the story was analogous to the life of Christ. They grabbed the New Testaments I had in the classroom and scrambled to be the first to connect C.S. Lewis’ prose to the Gospel stories. At the end of class, the forty graduate students rose to give us a standing ovation. “Three years later, standing in a hall surrounded by my wonderful students, I felt a surge of confidence unlike anything I had ever felt before. I was a skilled teacher. It was also the moment when I knew I needed to use those skills at a school where the students didn’t have as many advantages.” David took a job in an inner-city public school in Buffalo, where a high percentage of the kids were abusing drugs. One day, a beautiful straight-A student rolled up her sleeve to show David an arm covered with needle tracks. At 15, the student was hooked on heroin and asking for help. “That began my push to bring drug abuse counseling into the school. The success of that project propelled me to Yale University where I had access to the medical school and gained an understanding of not just the children abusing drugs but, more important, of how to equip us to help them.”
anding in a hall surderful students, I felt ce unlike anything I was a skilled teacher.
David took her new skills where she thought she could do the most good: a teaching job in a New Jersey lockdown facility with much harder cases. “I’m proud of the amazing literary magazine the students produced my first year. The stories erupted from this place of extreme anger and emotion. But I was over my head. My basic tool had been, and is still, to love children into submission. And these kids were beyond that.” Eventually, David moved to Wilton, Connecticut, where
there is an
elegance to a
well-structured
curriculum
she taught junior high English in the public schools. After four years, she spent a year as a temporary curriculum adviser to the superintendent. The next year, he asked her to take over curriculum development for the entire district. Now president
of the ERB Testing Corp., her former superintendent remains David’s fan and friend. “It was then that I understood where my world of middle-school English fit into the overall panoply of learning,” David says. “I was addicted. I fell in love with how curriculum can encompass the depth and breadth of a complete education. There is an elegance to a well-structured curriculum.” David has been immersed in the details of pre-K through high school curriculum ever since. She understands the innovative theories and tracks the hard data from ongoing research to learn what helps students learn, as well as what doesn’t. Her success founding an Edison Charter School in cont.
Worcester, Massachusetts, in an underperforming inner-city neighborhood propelled her to a job as Edison’s national vice president for school principal recruitment. Interviewing scores of stellar principals from all kinds of schools, David says, “I learned how to be a better principal. It was an extraordinary experience, completely different from anything I had ever done before.” It was a personal and professional high, she says, and led to her next challenge and one of the most rewarding years of her career: Working with KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), a national network of free, open-enrollment, collegeprep public schools dedicated to closing the achievement gap between inner-city and suburban schools. KIPP schools are not for the faint of heart.
It is a demanding immersion experience for the students as well as their parents. “I was the head of school evaluations, an internal accreditation program that a school must pass to be aligned with KIPP,” says David. Every year, KIPP selects 25 Fisher Fellows to work as apprentices in KIPP schools as preparation to run a school of their own. David was their mentor that year. “The fellows were awe-inspiring people. Their mantra was: Don’t talk about it. Do it. Get this work done!” “Debbi is a driven woman,” says her husband, Ron David. “She is excited about learning. Her willingness to push herself gives her license to push those of us around her to be our best as well.” A chance encounter at Chicago’s Airport Hilton ten years ago brought Ron and Debbi together as they waited for the fog to lift and planes
how to be
cont.
I learned
aprincipal better
STRENGTHENING THE MATH PROGRAM IS DEBBI’S PRIORITY THIS YEAR. “On my first school tour, I saw you were using Every Day Math, and I was thrilled. I was a member of the National Council of Teachers of Math, and I know the evidence supporting Every Day Math is overwhelming. As students matriculate through the system, they gain an intuitive understanding of numbers and mathematical concepts. Math just makes sense to them. They enjoy it,” says David. “I also know that it doesn’t work in every school. It should be phased in gradually and supported from day one with intensive parent and teacher training. While we study the program, we are inserting more professional development for our teachers, and parent training as well. We may also select supplementary materials to further strengthen the program this year.” The goal, David says, is for some or all St. James’ students to graduate with the math foundation necessary to successfully complete Algebra I in seventh grade and Geometry in eighth grade, which is the direction she believes high-achieving private schools are heading.
to return to the sky. Southern California became their home in 2004 when Ron, a former neonatologist and professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, became the Episcopal priest in charge of the dioceses of Los Angeles’ efforts to enhance hospital ministry. He works at Good Samaritan Hospital near downtown. For the last five years, Debbi was the successful head of Marymount of Santa Barbara. That killer commute is behind them, and they are settling into a more relaxed life. They take long walks with Kokie, a labradoodle whose long whiskers inspired her nickname, The Bearded Lady. They are fans of the art house flicks at the Beverly Hills Laemmle Theatre near their apartment. Most nights, they cook together, their two Siamese cats – Panda, short for Pandemonium, and Ulani – circling around their ankles. Their collection of animals includes a herd of giraffes and cows that march across the shelves of their apartment. Tall and graceful, Ron’s symbol is the giraffe Debbi has loved cows since she was a child running around her grandmother’s farm in Pennsylvania. Books fill their apartment. Ron reads one a day, mostly philosophy and theology. Debbi loves fiction; Gabriel García Márquez, Willa Cather and the Haitian author Edwidge Danticat are her favorite authors. Les Misérables, she says, influenced her more than any book she’s ever read. The Davids look forward to introducing Debbi’s daughter and Ron’s three children and their family’s four granddaughters to the couple’s new, non-commuting life in Los Angeles. At the start of her teaching career, David made up a name for herself. A woman of conscience in the turbulent 1960s, she petitioned the Supreme Court of the State of New York to live her life as Deborah Springpeace. “I wanted a name that captured who I was, and one that didn’t belong to my father or my husband,” she says. David was determined to change the world through education. “I knew there could be no peace without justice. And justice starts in the classroom,” she says. Spring? That was for the continual renewal and revival necessary to turn ideals into reality. The many parts of Debbi David’s life have come together at St. James’.
ST. JAMES’ EPISCOPAL 625 S. St. Andrews Place Los Angeles, CA 90005
PHONE
(213) 382-2315
WEB
www.sjsla.org