A young Lycee Francais student trades a fist bump with Cam Jordan during the Saints player’s visit to the school in 2014. (via Lycee Francais on Facebook)
The finalists for the CEO position at Lycée Français de la Nouvelle-Orléans were asked as part of the application process to detail their thoughts on critical issues ahead for the school, such as improving diversity within the student body, reaching special-education students while in a full-immersion foreign-language environment, and aligning the French national standards with those set by the state of Louisiana.
The candidates were asked to choose from among several questions about the school’s future. All three tackled the question about improving diversity in the student population, while two chose to discuss special education and one chose to discuss the aligning the state and French teaching standards.
Chana Benenson, the current principal of Sci High, said in her application that she began her career as a foreign-language teacher herself, and quickly observed an interesting “anomaly:” special-education students frequently adapt to foreign-language instruction better than they do other subjects. She outlines a variety of reasons for this occurrence, and describes ways that those reasons can be used to support the teaching of special-education within the school.
Benenson’s application also includes a letter of recommendation from Mary Zervigon, chair of the Sci High governing board, who praises Benenson’s work at the school and says simply that the board decided to look in a different direction for its permanent CEO.
Lysianne Essama, the former leader of an immersion school in Maryland, opens her application by reminding the board of her previous consideration as a finalist for the Lycee CEO, and explains why her commitments in Maryland at that time required her to withdraw.
Essama offered a variety of bullet-point recommendations for improving Lycee’s recruitment from economically disadvantaged families, with some focused on recruitment and others on retention. She also relates her experience in creating the curriculum in Maryland to the question about aligning Louisiana and French national standards at Lycee, the only one of the three candidates to choose that question instead of the special-education issue.
Marina Schoen, as the school’s current academic director, gave the most detailed and extensive answers of the three candidates, using the data she regularly works with to detail progress on recruiting at-risk families and dealing with special education. Schoen described in detail the current recruiting and special-education practices, then added her own thoughts on what could still be added to improve both.
Schoen was also the only candidate to answer a third question, about the process of growing a high school onto Lycee.
The CEO Search committee has had two rounds of interviews with each finalist, and next plans to organize a public town hall within a few weeks at which members of the school community can pose their own questions to the finalists. The committee will subsequently make a recommendation to the full board, which will then make a final decision on the new CEO.
