recently graduated members of the Class of 2021 who assist me in the Main Office, to adjunct faculty teaching in the Performing Arts & Communication strand of our electives program, to the newest alumni faculty employed as full-time teachers educating students in our core humanities, math, and science lines.

We meet as a team of educators during the week and for in-service trainings regularly. I think you can imagine my distinct pleasure facilitating those discussions to hear PBA alumni talk about how to best work with individual students, grade level cohorts, and advisories from the perspective of teachers. “I really love when that kid speaks up in class because he approaches the material so differently,” one confided with me recently during an off-campus lunch.

Teaching isn’t always a walk in the park with any age group, let alone teens. Keeping the students engaged throughout the week, first thing in the morning, before and after lunch is a labor of love.

But watching these previous students work to lead our community as teachers is really gratifying. The PBA alumni teachers understand the school’s values, participated in many of the same programs they now lead, and identify with the challenges their students face since they wore their shoes not long ago.

We have featured all of these alumni in previous issues of the What’s New, but I will give you the rundown on their areas of responsibility as PBA employees.

Chris Knight and Lia Sutton are graduates of PBA’s Class of 2021. They were excellent, organized students and effective peers. As a student, Chris competed on a co-op tennis team with Maryknoll School for four consecutive years. As one of two office assistants and coach of PBA’s first e-sports team, Chris is known for his deejay-smooth voice on the school intercom and his reliable oversight of the e-sports team into the championship tournament for Super Smash Brothers.

Lia, along with Class of 2020 alum Emily Axt, was one of two students that pitched the Social Committee to me when they were students with the goal of enriching the school’s social events calendar. With their planning support and leadership, we launched the Friday Night Socials program and were able to resume those evening social activities with the student body even during the pandemic. We look forward to next Thursday’s Winter Ball planned by this year’s senior class the Class of 2022, facilitated by none other than Lia.

Zach Agcaoili is a Class 2014 alum who teaches Intro to Drama, Beginning Taiko and Conversational Korean as part of our electives program. He has taught at PBA for four years. A former lead member of PBA’s elite performance taiko group Hyaku Sen Ki Kai Taiko, Zach Sensei is responsible for identifying emerging taiko talents from his beginning groups (those that have not already been identified from the Hongwanji Mission School Taiko Program) and motivating them to excel in that character developing performance medium.

Brandon Nitta is a Class of 2014 grad leading the balance of our music classes. He teaches Music Appreciation, a required elective for ninth graders meant to introduce them to the medium, Beginning and Advanced Guitar, and Rock Band. Brandon, as it turns out, was one of a few students who pitched the Rock Band class to Head of School Emeritus Pieper Toyama. And as a music teacher, Mr. Nitta is something of a pied piper himself. He has more than a few students who jam with him after school on a regular basis, and we look forward to hearing them play at next week’s Winter Ball.

Paris Hitchcock is a Class of 2013 alum working in tandem with the teachers overseeing PBA’s senior year, inquiry and project-based curriculum known as the PeaceBridge Project. She is also simultaneously pursuing her Masters of Education at UH Mānoa, which gives her the unique opportunity to reflect with her students on the expectations and design of graduate level work – the same sorts of challenges we hope many PBA alum will pursue – and on the challenges of being a high school senior at PBA. Paris was a senior when I still ran the senior year program at PBA, and I am especially excited to co-teach a Social and Cultural Anthropology segment of PeaceBridge in spring 2022.

Finally, Lisa Roerk is an alum of PBA’s Class of 2014 that graduated from Oregon State University with a degree in Zoology, emulating in no small part the academic pathway of PBA’s other Life Sciences teacher Van Velasco. While I lament, as an Oregon Duck, that U of Oregon lost out in the recruiting competition to bring Ms. Lisa to our campus, I pat myself on the back that she teaches math at all levels and Wilderness Survival and Conservation in our electives program. We look forward to engaging her skills set in the science classroom next year.

In sum, I want to say how gratifying it is again to work with these young teachers who shared the halls with us as students and share them again as teachers. It is a very fine indicator of the long-term benefits of PBA’s educational program, and it warms my heart. I express my gratitude to PBA’s teachers of the past, present and future for the important work that you do.

Warmly,
Josh