This is a transcript of an interview conducted over Google Meets on Thursday, March 12th 2026. It has been edited for length and clarity. To listen to the full interview, click this link to our spotify.
When people are asked about our school community, they usually respond to the diversity of our community. Besides our diversity, what specifically about the Malden High community has piqued your interest?
I don’t think you should discount the diversity too quickly. It’s a pretty special thing, and I’ve worked in a lot of different kinds of schools. It’s a pretty great thing about your school and about your community. So that is something that everybody loves, and I’m sure they all do give that as an answer. Malden is also a pretty special place; it has a lot of history—it has a really interesting history all back before the Revolutionary War, but it also has culture in the present. I’ve learned in Malden, there’s also a real tradition of community engagement, whether that’s students speaking up or parents being involved with the schools. I think Malden has a lot more community engagement, not just in the schools, but in politics and in running the community than most places and that’s pretty special. I have friends who live in Malden, and I like the idea of being principal of the school where some of my friends’ kids will go. I better do a good job!
We assume that you learned a lot about Malden High School during the interview process, both because you probably researched and prepared during the interview process, as well as when you were touring and meeting faculty and students. What are the strengths you see within Malden High School that you would like to keep in place? What are some places for improvement that you recognize and want to address in MHS?
I do not think I’ve spent at all enough time there to really be able to answer that question. I don’t know what grade you all started there, but I’ve spent one day in the Malden Public Schools, and you’ve all spent thousands. So the real trick as a principal is to come in listening. There are things that people are very proud of at the school, The Blue and Gold newspaper being one of them. I saw a lot of those things even just in my one day there in the school, but I don’t know what all those things are. It’s the sports; it’s the activities; it’s different classes that are special there. It’s the relationships that people have. There’s so many things, and I don’t want to pretend that I know those things. One of the biggest jobs coming in is to ask lots of people— students, teachers, and families—what the things are that they care about most. I think it’s the job of the principal to help strengthen those things and support the people who have been leading them. The flip side of that is to ask people what needs to be better. Hopefully you can build enough trust that people will really answer that question, because I’m sure every single student in the school and every single teacher has something that they think could be better, even if it’s just the needs of a few people who aren’t being met, or maybe programs that haven’t been developed. But I don’t know what those things are, and I don’t think you would want a principal coming in pretending that they know what those things are. A superintendent I once had, had the phrase, ‘I’m going to hit the ground listening,’ a version of ‘hit the ground running.’ I really like that phrase. I’m going to try to hit the ground listening and learn as much as I can from all of you and all the teachers and families and try to shape that into a good plan to help make the school even better.
How do you plan on building connections and gaining the trust of the students and staff at the high school?
I think that’s an easy thing to do if you’re an educator and you love meeting people, talking to them, listening to them, trying to accomplish things together, and appreciate what they’re doing. The only hard thing is that it takes time and there’s a lot of people. So, I think you have to be visible, you have to be active, you have to be interested, and little by little you form a lot of relationships and you hear a lot of things. I’ve been a principal before, and right now I’m not a principal. I work in a central office, and I’m really excited to be a principal again because I love doing that. Being a school principal, think of how many people you get to meet. You hear what they need or what they want. You get to try to help them. It’s a really great thing. I’m lucky to get to do it.
What about your background has most prepared you for this new role?
We all have different backgrounds and different paths, and I think one of the things you have to learn is what’s special about your path. We all want to be a hero of some kind, but most of us are not, and we just have a normal path. And then you learn, what does your path give you that can be helpful? I would say the thing about my path is that I’ve been in a lot of different kinds of schools. When I was your age, I went to a fancy private school for three years, so I got to see what that was like. I was an undergraduate at Harvard College, and I got to see what that was like. Through most of my career, I’ve worked in some very challenging schools in Lawrence, in Boston, so I’ve seen what that’s like. Then I’ve had my own kids go through schools in Lexington Public Schools, which is another school system. I think the thing that I have is that I’ve seen a lot of different kinds of schools, and so the thing that I can bring is experience seeing what lots of different students in different places have and love. Even though I don’t have roots in the community, I’ve moved from community to community, what I can bring is an awareness of what other schools are like. I even taught in a school in South America, in Bogotá, Colombia, and I’ve worked in schools in Guatemala. So my thing, I guess, is awareness of education in lots of places. Then I need to work with people who have deep roots in the community so together we can give you the best experience possible.
What’s one question that you’d wish we had asked you? What would your answer be?
Maybe “what were you like as a student?” I think that’s pretty important. Even though we get trained, we have lots of experience as adults: we also carry with us what we were like as a kid and as an adolescent, and that impacts us a lot. I think that shapes the way I work a lot. I didn’t really like school. I was an okay student; I had too much energy. I was always out of my seat. I was always bothering people, but I was also interested, and I played sports, and I did community service and all kinds of things, but I was not good at sitting still and listening. And so, I got in trouble a little bit in school for being like that because I was the kind of kid that was just running around too much. It was probably tiring to be my teacher. I think that makes me appreciate that even the kids that aren’t perfect in school, they’re just as good as everybody else. I really appreciated the teachers who could get past that and form a good relationship with me. Then, in the end, I grew up a little bit and kind of calmed down and was able to find my way. So, I think what you’re like when you’re your age and younger, it impacts you for your whole life. I guess that’s something that I bring with me, even though I’m getting kind of old so that is a long time ago.
One more question. We’d like to follow up more about your experience in Guatemala and Colombia.
It’s a really special thing to me that I’ve gotten to do this. I’ve worked in a children’s home in Guatemala. I worked in a private school in Bogotá, Colombia, and then I led some tours for teachers and visited schools a number of times in Guatemala. I’ve been to a lot of different schools. The school in Colombia that I worked in was a private, Catholic school. There were about 1,000 students in the school. They were all Colombian, and they were all Catholic, except for my kids. It was really interesting to compare that to this country. We take for granted the diversity we have, but this was a school where 997 kids had all grown up in that country, and then three of them didn’t, which were my three. It was interesting to see a place that doesn’t have as much immigration and a school that didn’t have as much diversity as all the schools I’ve worked in here. Then, in Guatemala, I spent time in rural schools. That is really eye-opening because they’re really glad to have a classroom and to have a teacher, but there’s nothing there. There’s no materials. Maybe there’s the national curriculum, which is just one book for the subject area. There’s no computers. Kids are walking sometimes an hour to get to school or more. It makes you realize how lucky we are and how privileged we are, and that even when we compare one school to another in this country, we sometimes forget what we have. Then when you look at many places in the world that are just trying to get a school kid to be able to go to school, you really appreciate more what we have. In Central America, in Guatemala, for example, you have to pay to go to middle school. There’s no public middle school. You have to pay, and a lot of families don’t have money. So you only have to go to school through 6th grade. Many, many, many people are done with school at the end of elementary school. You know, we sort of take for granted that we get to keep going through high school. I think it’s good to appreciate what’s been built, even though it can always be better. I think that’s made me a more appreciative person. It also just makes education seem much more important when you realize what people are—some people in the world are trying to get access to it. And we’re pretty lucky to have access to it. We just want to take advantage of it. So I hope that didn’t sound like a big lecture, but it’s been very, very interesting. I hope maybe some of you have seen those kinds of schools. But if not, I hope you get a chance to.
About the Author
