When we started SLA and I found out that I didn’t get to site select my secretary, my wife told me that I was dead — that if I got the wrong secretary, the school was doomed to fail. I got insanely lucky, in that Diane LoGiudice chose us, and as a result, we have a kind, dedicated secretary who does everything in her power to take care of the whole school.

Every school needs that person… a great school secretary is the glue that holds the school together. They are often the "mom" for dozens of kids. They are the memory of the school for when principals forget (and we do, often.) They usually play about a dozen roles in the school above and beyond whatever the job description happens to list.

As a school principal, I am incredibly lucky to have Ms. Diane at SLA. I was really lucky in my teaching career, in that Nancy Greenhouse was that person at Beacon.

Nancy Greenhouse (in the center of the photo in the red wrap) was the founding office manager / secretary at The Beacon School in NYC. She was the person who knew how to get resources for your class. She was the person who could keep track of the student activity account for twenty different teams and thirty different clubs. She was the person who warned you about the mood of a parent when they called looking for you. And she was the person who, for almost every young teacher who started their career at Beacon, pulled you aside when you made a mistake with a student and let you know, because the student went to her afterwards.

When I was the dean at Beacon, I worked closely with Ms. Greenhouse on any number of projects. She told me about how some teachers treated the office staff as servants and how some teachers treated them like gold. I saw first-hand how she quietly juggled dozens of tasks… how she was the quiet voice in the ear of the administration, able to say things to the principal that others couldn’t always say. And she was a voice of reason and frequent sounding board for me as a young administrator-in-training. And she was very proud of me when I left Beacon to start SLA.

She was, as the principal has said, the conscience of the school. And she taught so many of us — adults and students alike — so much.

Nancy Greenhouse passed away on Wednesday, August 12th. She was still working at The Beacon School, still quietly helping to run that school. She is survived by her husband and her son Jason, Beacon Class of ’98, and the hundreds of students and teachers who were lucky enough to have known her.

We talk a lot about the importance of teachers in our schools… but too often, the support staff — the folks who do everything to make sure that the teachers can teach and the students can learn — aren’t part of the dialogue of school reform and care. So, in honor of Ms. Greenhouse — and in honor of every school secretary like Ms. Diane and Ms. Greenhouse who works hard to make our schools better — please, when you go back to your schools in the fall, on your first day back, make a point to say thank you to those people in your school who give so much of themselves, even if they never stand at the front of a classroom. Tell them how much you appreciate everything they do, and tell them that you know they do more than you are even aware of. Thank them and mean it, because all of our schools are better because of the people like Nancy Greenhouse who do this work with us.

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