The three finalists for the top job at Lycée Français de la Nouvelle-Orléans are the charter school’s current academic director, the principal of a high-performing Uptown charter high school, and the former administrator of an immersion school in Maryland, Lycee officials announced Monday night.
Lycee’s CEO Search committee has been meeting for months to find a replacement for CEO Keith Bartlett, who is retiring at the end of the school year this summer. On Monday night, following dozens of applications and second-round interviews with five candidates, the committee announced the following three finalists for the position:
- Chana Benenson, principal of New Orleans Charter Science and Math High School. Benenson started at Sci High in 2006 as the inaugural leader of the school’s foreign language department and has been principal of the school since 2012. During that time, the open admissions achieved its first ‘B’ rating from the state — now close to an A — and secured a commitment for its long-held goal of a new building in the Biomedical District.
- Lysianne Essama, who was principal from 2007 to 2015 of John Hanson French Immersion School in Upper Marlboro, Md. Now an adjunct French professor in the area, Essama was a finalist for the Lycee CEO job in 2013 but withdrew to continue focusing on the John Hanson school.
- Marina Schoen, the academic director at Lycee. Previously a foreign-language teacher at Audubon and Lusher charter schools, Schoen was another finalist for the CEO position in 2013 and one of Bartlett’s first hires after he was selected as CEO. While at Lycee, Schoen was also inducted into the Order of Academic Palms, a 200-year-old French knighthood for exemplary service to French education.
Committee chair and Lycee board member Ben Castoriano praised all three candidates in brief remarks to an audience of nearly two dozen parents and school staff members.
Benenson, he noted, inherited her role as principal after the departure of a co-leader at Sci High, and is not participating in that school’s search for a new CEO because its board has expressed a desire for a leader with a science background, rather than hers in languages, Castoriano says. Current board members have recommended her highly, he says, noting her organizational abilities and instructional talents.
“I have not heard anything negative about her from her current school,” said Alysson Mills, another Lycee board member on the search committee. “I’ve heard extraordinary praise.”
Essama boasts not only a career in immersion education, but also a Ph.D. in physics, Castoriano said. She was a strong finalist in the previous round, he noted.
Essama accumulated a “great track record” at her school in Maryland, a public school with a diverse population, and have a “great interview” to the search committee, he said.
Schoen is well familiar to the Lycee board, giving the academic report during nearly every month’s board meeting for nearly five years now, the committee members said.
She has a “lot of institutional knowledge for the school,” and committee members also “heard some really great things from parents and other folks.”
The three finalists will next be invited to Lycee for a town hall where the public can ask questions of them, Castoriano said. After that event, the committee will recommend a single finalist to the full board, which will then evaluate that recommendation for a final decision.
Those events will take place over the next few weeks, as quickly as they can be organized as Bartlett’s retirement approaches, the committee members said.
“Our hope is, we want to do this quickly,” Mills said.
Monday’s meeting unfolded in several parts. First, the committee met in closed-door session for a second interview with one of the candidates. The committee then convened in public to announce that it was considering the candidacies of five candidates — Benenson, Essama, Schoen and two others, International High School Head of School Sean Wilson and Nicolas Debenne, leader of a public school in Marseilles, France.
During that period, a handful of parents and Lycee staff members spoke to the committee before they entered a second closed-session to determine the three finalists.
Maria Treffinger, a Lycee parent and former board member at the International School of Louisiana, spoke critically of Sean Wilson, its former principal. She described Wilson as “unresponsive” to the board’s efforts to create an International Baccalaurate program, and said the International High School of New Orleans has not shown improvement during his tenure there.
“Each year he was at the IHS, the scores dropped significantly, every single year,” Treffinger.
Treffinger said she is a friend of Schoen, and that Schoen is completely devoted to the Lycee’s success. The two used to exercise together, Treffinger said, but that came to a halt once Schoen joined Lycee because she became so busy.
“I never got to see her because she was working 16 hours a day, seven days a week,” Treffinger said.
Another Lycee parent, Sheila Sundar, said she works at Sci High under Benenson, and that she specifically feels she would be a great candidate. More broadly, Sundar urged the committee to choose a candidate with experience in operating an open-admissions school.
“Traditionally, immersion schools suffer from an inability to court the neediest kids,” Sundar said.
Another parent, Darren Beltz, did not mention any candidates by name, but recommended against overemphasizing one area of expertise. The CEO is responsible for handling a wide array of duties including finance and facilities maangement alongside academics, and will ultimately be delegating some of those duties to specialists in those areas, Beltz said.
“We’re hiring a CEO, not hiring a principal,” Beltz said.
“Keep in mind there’s a huge construction project coming up soon,” added Jethro Celestine, the school’s facilities director.
Another staff member, who said she works in special education but declined to give her name after the meeting, pleaded with the committee to keep special-needs students in mind.
“Think about what kind of candidate can fulfill the vision of French immersion school with kids with needs,” she said.
Danielle Dufauchard, a longtime Lycee parent and data analyst in the school’s administrative office, urged the committee to consider the candidates’ familiarity with New Orleans and its culture, and the need for diversity within the school.
“Every culture should be embraced in this school,” Dufauchard said. “If we have a candidate that does not believe in that, we should drop them off of the list.”
