The three finalists to be the next CEO of Lycée Français de la Nouvelle-Orléans met with the charter school’s parents and staff Tuesday night in a crowded town hall meeting, explaining how their very divergent backgrounds each position them to lead the school to continued academic strength while building the city’s first French-immersion high school.
The candidates — Sci High principal Chana Benenson, Lycee academic director Marina Schoen and Lysianne Essama, a former French-immersion school leader from Maryland — all offered fairly similar ideas for the school’s policies and plans. All three agreed that the different campuses will likely soon need their own principals, and that special-education students are best educated alongside other students as much as possible, rather than separately.
Where the three differed, however, was in the ways they said their careers up to this point have prepared them for the job.
Schoen described herself as the internal candidate for the position, and repeatedly emphasized that she wants to continue the school’s academic growth from her past five years there while tackling larger challenges as well. With almost every question, Schoen drew a direct connection from efforts already begun under her leadership to the plans for the school’s future. About the preparation for the high school, for example, Schoen described the planning she has already undertaken to choose the type of diplomas it will offer and to align the middle-school classes with it.
Schoen said she sees the CEO position as an opportunity to bring the vision she has developed for the school over the past five years to reality, and to expand her dedication to the school beyond academics. She said she has enjoyed the work she has done fundraising so far, for example, but would like to build on that experience as CEO.
“What’s exciting to me is build from what we have,” Schoen said. “I’m really excited to have the opportunity to take it forward, to new heights.”
Benenson, by contrast, positioned herself as an ardent fan of the school’s mission from just up Nashville Avenue at Sci High, but also as well experienced in the creation of a high school with a highly specialized mission. She began her career fluent in French and teaching foreign languages, and at Sci High rose from a classroom teacher to the school’s leader after helping the school grow from the first Eastbank high school open after Hurricane Katrina to one of the highest performing in the city.
Like Sci High, Lycee is a model that both the city and the entire country are eager to watch and perhaps emulate, Benenson said. They will face some of the same challenges — such as creating dual-enrollment programs with local universities, while making them available to the school’s entire open-enrollment population — as well as the same opportunities of attracting national investment, Benenson said.
“I think all of my career has been preparing for this,” Benenson said. “All of my experience has been preparing for a specialty high school program.”
Essama acknowledged in her comments that she is an outsider, not as familiar with the details of the school’s current organizational structure or the conversations around the high school diploma structure. She described that outsider status as a strength, however, and one with many direct connections to Lycee — including her nearly 20 years both teaching and leading a French-immersion school in Maryland.
At one of her first jobs, building a physics education laboratory in Cameroon, Essama had to engage in outside fundraising — which will likewise be crucial in paying for the creation of Lycee’s high school. In both instances, Essama said, the key is connecting the school’s mission to potential donors.
“We need to make sure we know them, and we know what they want to see in the school,” Essama said. “It’s important that they feel invested.”
Questions were posed to the candidates by moderator Jeremy Hunnewell, the consultant leading the CEO-search process, after being submitted by parents and staff members in the audience. The town-hall meeting also included about an hour of socializing with the candidates, and was held at the school’s Johnson building after a massive Uptown power outage knocked out electricity at the school’s campus on Patton Street.
Ben Castoriano, chair of the board’s CEO-Search committee, said the effort is now coming to a close. The committee members will appear at the board’s next full meeting to discuss their thoughts on the candidates, and the board will make its selection.
The Johnson campus of Lycee Francais. (Robert Morris, UptownMessenger.com)
