Janet Chance Named to Lead Penn Charter's Lower School

Head of School Darryl J. Ford announced the appointment of Janet Chance in the following letter, dated April 1, 2008, to the Penn Charter community.

Dear Friends,
I am very pleased to announce that Janet Chance will be the director of our Lower School beginning July 1, 2008. Janet impressed those of us involved in the search process with her intelligence, her thoughtfulness and her commitment to Quaker education. Those qualities, combined with her experience in curriculum design, program innovation and classroom teaching, make her an outstanding choice to lead the division.

Janet earned a B.A. from Swarthmore College and a master's in education from Harvard University Graduate School of Education. She also has a master's in English literature from Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English. For the past few years, Janet has worked as co-facilitator of Spirited Practice and Renewed Courage, a Friends Council on Education program for experienced teachers designed to enrich professional practice through spiritual reflection. She began her teaching career at Friends School in Tokyo, and taught most recently, until 2006, at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C.

Janet has had leadership and administrative experience in her previous jobs. She also has created or helped administer many exciting programs that expose students to learning and to issues that excite us here at Penn Charter, including interdisciplinary curricula, diversity, service and the performing arts. The following are three examples from a long list. In 2004, Janet collaborated with colleagues to design Quakerism in the Arts, a class combining Playback Theatre, Quaker history, archival research and discussions of ethical questions. She created the Women's History Show, a curriculum in which eighth grade students researched, collected oral histories, and then wrote and performed an original theatrical revue. In 2001, with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she conducted an exchange between Sidwell Friends and students from Window Rock High School, located on a Native American reservation in Arizona, which culminated in a student-led ancient Greek theater festival.

Janet came to our attention in a national search that included more than 50 qualified candidates, a half-dozen of whom visited campus to meet with faculty, staff, administrators and parents. Janet will return to Penn Charter several times to confer with me and with Nooha Ahmed-Lee. As you know, Nooha will leave Penn Charter at the end of this academic year to take a new position as director of Shipley's middle school. I am grateful for Nooha's decade of service, a time during which she led our program to become research-based, implemented the Responsive Classroom and introduced us to Columbia University's Reading and Writing Project. Building upon this success, Janet will attend Mel Levine's All Kinds of Minds Workshop this summer and receive training in the Reading and Writing Project. Most of all, Janet will be at Penn Charter several times this spring and summer to confer with Nooha, me and Lower School faculty. Working together, I am confident that we will effect a smooth transition.

A search is always an interesting process. Of course, we learn about the candidate. It turns out that Janet, in addition to her credentials in education, is a mezzo-soprano who enjoys performing a range of music, and she is conversant in Japanese and French. We also learn about ourselves. Our Lower School program is blessed with a dedicated and experienced faculty, and it is enriched with a curriculum that has evolved as we have acquired knowledge about how children develop and learn. We are committed to nurturing what we have worked hard to create and to finding new ways to grow and innovate.

Darryl J. Ford
Head of School