Saturday, November 07, 2009

Sandia Prep Head Stepping Down

By Andrea Schoellkopf
Journal Staff Writer
          The headmaster of Sandia Preparatory School will step down at the end of the school year, after nearly 24 years of heading the private school.
        A successor is expected to be announced on Friday.
        Dick Heath told the board of trustees two years ago he would retire at the end of the 2009-2010 school year. He is the longest-serving headmaster in the school's 44-year history.
        Heath said he wanted to avoid a sense of crisis for the school and "give everybody time to get adjusted to the idea the old fellow is moving on."
        The board hired a consultant last year to start a national search, and it is down to two finalists after an initial pool of 52, trustee Kelli Cooper said.
        The finalists include Mike McGill, the upper school principal at Park School in Baltimore, and Steve Albert, associate head of school from Hotchkiss School in Connecticut.
        "I think we're going to build on what we have," Cooper said. "... We've got our buildings, we don't have to do that anymore. We can focus on faculty development, additional programs at the school and sustaining what we have."
        During the search, she's found that many other independent school headmasters have an average tenure of eight to 10 years.
        "I think Dick has built (today's) Sandia Prep from the ground up," she said.
        Once the Sandia School for Girls, it has been on Osuna Road since 1966. It started admitting boys in 1974.
        Heath, previously a principal at a St. Louis private school, joined Prep in 1986 when there were 270 students and a graduating class of 11. The school now has 670 students and a graduating class of 101.
        Since Heath arrived, the school has made $21 million in improvements, including a new cafeteria and library, the Russell Student Center, the Barbara Simms classroom building, a new fieldhouse and a performing arts center.
        Heath also wanted to find ways to engage students in their school.
        "My idea was that high school ought to be the best time of your life," he said.
        One of the problems, he said, is that families would send their children to Prep for middle school, but then they would go on to larger high schools to participate in certain sports or other programs the small private school didn't offer.
        The school, while still small, had a "no-cut" policy for sports and activities, in which everyone who wanted to play could be on the team. As the school grew, the community wanted to keep that philosophy in place.
        "It was difficult to maintain that," Heath said. "We ended up adding teams left and right to maintain that."
        But what the "no-cut" policy did, he said, was engage students in the school who may not have been good enough to make a varsity squad, for instance, but still enjoyed playing sports and being part of the school's team. Recently, 28 girls came out for a new dance team.
        Prep started building on other programs, such as chorus, which drew student involvement by traveling to Seattle, Washington, D.C., and New York City. The group has grown from 12 girls to 70 boys and girls in about five years.
        An outdoor leadership program has drawn 60 high school volunteers who take trips throughout the area and accompany Prep middle schoolers on camping trips, he said.
        Cooper, who has had three children attend Prep, said Heath has made tough decisions but always erred on the side of a student and his or her family.
        "If a parent has a concern about their child, and they go to Dick and express it, he will always make the decision with the kid in mind first," he said.
        The highlight of his career, Heath said, was being able to hand diplomas to all three of his daughters.
        He said he'll remain in Albuquerque, where his wife Nancy teaches kindergarten at Mary Ann Binford Elementary, and possibly seek either college-level teaching positions or consulting with other independent schools.
       

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