With current Dean of Students Max Delgado stepping into the Upper School principal position, and the Schilling Center for Math and Science opening in the fall of 2018, changes won’t be new for the Upper School students  of St. Paul Academy and Summit School. In addition to these changes, the administration will be instating a new position into the leadership team: the academic dean. According to Head of School Bryn Roberts, “We envisage the dean as supporting all of the departments, overseeing the curriculum, working with the principal, working on professional development on teaching, helping everyone make the most out of the experience and take full advantage of what is there.”

Although the announcement and the decision is new, there has been talk about administrative restructuring for many years. The administration understood that the amount of work that gets done by the leadership team is enormous, but the use of an extra person would be extremely helpful.

“Even had Chris Hughes not been going off to become a school Head, we were going to make some changes because we realized that while they were extraordinary at what they did — Chris Hughes, Max Delgado, and Judy Cummins before [Delgado] — it was an extraordinary amount of work for two people, and we were concerned that we were not getting everything done that we needed to get done,” Roberts said.

The Academic Dean will act as almost an Assistant Principal, in that they will work closely with Delgado to work on school curriculum.

“Everybody knows that what drives life at the Upper School is the academic program, and we know that this is what draws people here. The goal [with the new position] is to make sure that everybody has the things that they need, so that we are still passionate about the traditional liberal arts but we are also very innovative,” Roberts said.

With the addition of the Schilling Center for Math and Science, new technology will be put into place, and as a result, the school will need to stay up to date and in touch with the changes that come.

“We know that when the Shilling Center for Math and Science opens, we know that we aren’t building a bigger school and that this is going to be an incredible facility for the upper school, and that is going to be creating new opportunities and demands,” Roberts said.

With this new position being added also comes the search for applicants, spanning from right at SPA to across the country.

“The searches will be starting promptly, and [Assistant Head of School] Cindy Richter oversees these, and we are going to be posting the jobs and receiving applications within the week is my guess. As to whether it will be internal or external: we don’t know. There may well be applicants from inside the school, but we are going to look broadly,” Roberts said.

The new dean will take position in summer of 2018.

This story is reprinted from The Rubicon print edition: Feb. 2, 2018.