Head of School search

To the SPA community,

We are writing today to update the SPA community on the search for our next Head of School. The Board of Trustees search committee (listed below) has been working throughout the summer with our consultants, Carney Sandoe & Associates, to identify candidates to bring to campus for interviews. We have had very significant interest from a diverse, global group of candidates. We expect to bring finalists to campus in September to meet with members of the SPA community. 

We look forward to the next phase of this important search. Thank you for your support, and best wishes for an enjoyable start to the new school year.

Tim Welsh
President, SPA Board of Trustees
Co-Chair, Search Committee

Tim O’Brien ’77
Member, SPA Board of Trustees
Co-Chair, Search Committee

Head of School Search Committee Members
Lit Field ’75
Libby Hlavka
Anne Hooley
David Kansas ’85
Varun Kharbanda ’92
Phil McKoy
Chip Pearson

To the SPA community,

On behalf of the Head of School Search Committee, we would like to thank all of you who provided input through the SPA Community Survey.  We received more than 650 responses, and we are analyzing the information now. This feedback will certainly provide us very helpful input as we begin talking to candidates about the school. 

We will continue to keep the community updated on our progress through this website.  Again, our thanks to all of you who participated in the survey.

Tim Welsh
President, SPA Board of Trustees
Co-Chair, Search Committee

Tim O’Brien ’77
Member, SPA Board of Trustees
Co-Chair, Search Committee

To the SPA community,

We are writing today to provide you with an update regarding our Head of School search and the process we will follow in the coming months. Given Bryn Roberts’ exceptional standing in the independent school community, St. Paul Academy and Summit School's Board of Trustees will conduct an international search to attract the best qualified candidate to succeed him as Head of School. We are confident that SPA's reputation for excellence, as well as its mission, history, financial stability, and welcoming community will attract a pool of outstanding candidates for the position.
 
We are pleased to announce that Carney, Sandoe & Associates (CS&A) will assist us in identifying the next leader of SPA. CS&A, the nation’s largest and most-recognized educational search firm, brings a deep knowledge of independent schools from over 40 years of experience placing school leaders, administrators, and educators. We are also pleased that Bill Christ and Marsha Little will serve as our CS&A search consultants. Bill and Marsha are seasoned search professionals with long careers in independent schooling. Before joining CS&A, Bill had a distinguished 29-year tenure as Head of Hathaway Brown School in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Since joining CS&A, he has worked on a robust portfolio of leadership searches, including highly successful Head of School appointments for schools in Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, and Collegeville, MN. Bill is known for his ability to discover, evaluate, and mentor talented school leaders, and he is very familiar with SPA, having chaired the ISACS evaluation team for SPA’s 2011 reaccreditation. Marsha joined CS&A after two decades in independent school administration, most recently as Assistant Head of School at The Lovett School in Atlanta. Thanks in part to her long standing professional involvement with the Southern Association of Independent Schools (SAIS), Independent School Data Exchange (INDEX), and Global Online Academy (GOA), Marsha has a significant professional network across the country. 

Working closely with Bill and Marsha throughout the process will be our Search Committee, appointed by and drawn from members of the Board of Trustees. It will be the responsibility of the Search Committee to screen and evaluate candidates and to make a recommendation to the full Board of Trustees, which will make a final decision on the successful candidate. We hope to announce our next Head of School by fall or early winter of 2021. We are grateful to those who have agreed to serve as members of the Search Committee. Their names are listed at the end of this letter.
 
We intend this process to be as inclusive as possible, and our goal is to offer our entire community opportunities to share thoughts and aspirations along the way. Bill and Marsha will conduct a virtual site visit, which will include stakeholder meetings, later this month. They look forward to meeting as many individuals in our community as possible, including parents, students, faculty, and alumni/ae. Details about their visit will be shared in the coming weeks.
 
Additionally, we invite all community members to share feedback through this online survey, which will remain open until Friday, April 16 at 4 p.m. CST. After the virtual site visit has been completed and the survey results have been compiled, the CS&A team will create a position statement to share with Head of School candidates. 
 
While we will endeavor to remain as communicative and transparent as possible, we recognize that we may need to honor requests to work confidentially with candidates to ensure that we are able to recruit and interview the most talented leaders in the country. Additionally, we have been encouraged by our consultants and others to maintain a nimble and fluid approach in this search, given the extremely competitive landscape of leadership recruitment. We look forward to providing updates as appropriate over the coming months. All updates will be posted on our Head of School Search website, which includes a form for the community to submit questions and comments regarding the search.
 
We are deeply grateful to the Search Committee and the entire SPA community for their ongoing support and enthusiasm as we navigate this transition.

Tim Welsh
President, SPA Board of Trustees
Co-Chair, Search Committee

Tim O’Brien ’77
Member, SPA Board of Trustees
Co-Chair, Search Committee

Head of School Search Committee Members
Lit Field ’75
Libby Hlavka
Anne Hooley
David Kansas ’85
Varun Kharbanda ’92
Phil McKoy
Chip Pearson
 

To the SPA community,

After serving as Head of School at St. Paul Academy and Summit School since 2006, Bryn Roberts will retire in June 2022, at the end of the 2021-22 academic year.

If you are like me, remembering 2006 might be a challenge. In 2006, the members of SPA's current senior class had not yet started kindergarten, and some of their current teachers were still students themselves. The most popular social media site in 2006 was MySpace, Google had just overtaken Yahoo as the most-used search engine, and the iPhone was still a year away from its first release. Our son William, now a college sophomore, had just started his adventures in the Lower School. Katherine, now a junior, was still in preschool, and our seventh-grader James would not be born for two more years. As a community, we had not yet even begun to imagine enjoying performances in the Huss Center, and it would still be many years before students made new discoveries in the Schilling Center. Indeed, 2006 almost seems like ancient history.

To say that Bryn has led the SPA community through an extraordinary period seems like quite an understatement. Our world and our community have changed in ways that none of us could have imagined since that year when we were fortunate enough to have a hockey-loving historian join us as our new Head of School. In the midst of these rapid changes in the world, Bryn has led the evolution of SPA from being a wonderful school with a proud legacy into a vibrant institution that is preparing students to make remarkable contributions to the world in the 21st century.

A few examples help to illustrate the breadth and depth of the transformation of SPA that Bryn has led. During Bryn's tenure, SPA developed programs in computer science and engineering, and added substantially to the school’s scholarship endowment. He expanded the faculty, increased significantly the school’s enrollment, and expanded the diversity of both groups.  Students have won countless awards in academics, the arts, and athletics. And, as I alluded to earlier, he led the fundraising and renewal of the Upper School that featured the construction of the Huss Center, the Schilling Center for Math and Science, and the renovation of Old Main.

When you walk up the stairs toward Bryn’s office on the Randolph Campus, you can’t help but notice the words of SPA’s mission statement on the wall: “shaping the minds and the hearts of the people who will change the world.” I know that each day he has walked up those stairs, Bryn has taken that message to heart. His vision was that the  students in his care would learn the values and skills that would enable them to make significant, positive contributions to the world that we all share. His daily decisions about every aspect of the school were rooted in that aspiration.

The cumulative impact of those many decisions since 2006 have truly transformed SPA. Under Bryn’s leadership, nearly every aspect of SPA has evolved to meet the rapidly increasing expectations of a school in the 21st century. Through innovative strategic planning, genuine care and support for his team, and an unrelenting commitment to the school’s mission, Bryn has positioned SPA and its students to make the world a bit better for all of us. Bryn’s most important legacy is that thousands of students who have come through the doors of SPA since 2006 will shape the world in countless ways. Our community and indeed our world are, and will continue to be, much better off because of Bryn’s leadership at SPA.    

Each of us in the SPA community has benefited from the wise, caring, and thoughtful leadership Bryn has provided for so many years. Over the next year, we will have many opportunities to recognize and thank Bryn for all he has done for our community, and for many of us individually.  It has been one of the great privileges of my life to work alongside such an inspiring leader, and all of us on the Board of Trustees want to express our deep gratitude to Bryn for all that he has done for SPA. We look forward to many opportunities in the next year to celebrate Bryn with all of you.

Bryn’s reflections on today’s announcement are in his brief note below, and in the coming week, we will provide the entire community with the details of the search process for SPA’s next Head of School. In the meantime, please feel free to reach out to any Trustee if you have questions.

Tim Welsh, President
Board of Trustees
St. Paul Academy and Summit School
 

To the SPA community,

As you know from Tim Welsh’s very kind note, I will retire in June 2022 which will mark the end of my sixteenth year as the Head of School at St. Paul Academy and Summit School. It has been a marvelous experience and an honor to lead SPA, and I know that this is the right time for me to step away and for the school to embrace new leadership. My retirement date was set several years ago and there was a clear plan for my last two years. Following the completion of the capital campaign for the Upper School, I intended to concentrate on major strategic issues drawn principally from the school’s strategic plan while preparing for the arrival of my successor.

Such has not been the case thus far. COVID intervened and the challenges of responding to the vicissitudes of life in the pandemic have consumed my time. COVID has been a harsh master, yet I am proud of the way that we--as a school community--have adapted to the stresses and unpredictability of the last year. The needs, interests, and safety of our students have remained our priorities even as we, the adults, wrestled with our own anxieties, struggled to interpret public health data, and debated how to apply shifting guidance on best practices for schools in a pandemic.  

This unremitting passion for students defines SPA at its best. It has been a privilege and great fun for me as an educator to lead a caring community that prizes the unabashed pursuit of excellence. Charles Eliot, one of Harvard’s most famous presidents, suggested that beautiful facilities were all well and good but it was the character of the people in the buildings that truly mattered. SPA passes Eliot’s character test with flying colors.

Few educators and school leaders have enjoyed the opportunities and support that I have received throughout my tenure as the Head of School at SPA, for which I am deeply grateful. I look forward to next year. I hope that we will be beyond the worst of the pandemic and thus able to focus on renewing the expansive bonds of our community and envisioning the next stage of this remarkable school’s evolution.

I am excited about SPA’s future, not just through June 2022, but in the decades ahead.

Best wishes,

Bryn S. Roberts
Head of School