De Beer settles in as Friends’ head of school

BOULDER – The Friends’ School in Boulder has changed little since Steve de Beer took over last summer.

So far, his leadership style appears to be less the volcanic change that some heads of school institute out of necessity or to make their mark, and more like the incremental movement of a season melting into a new season.

While he talks about how much he’s learning and how he supports teachers, the job is still new to him. There’s also the feeling that de Beer is a man who takes his time.

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Forty-four years old, his previous appointment at the Stanley British Primary School in Denver, where he taught students, teachers and headed the theater department, lasted two decades.

The appointment as head of school at the Friends’ School is de Beer’s second job since graduating. Oriented toward the many small changes that will grow naturally from his background and experiences, de Beer speaks in a way that makes it clear that he is not looking for broken things to fix at the Friends’ School.

“I’m still trying to understand the culture of the place, what makes it successful. I’m trying to understand what makes it work well,” he said. Five months into the job, he characterizes what he’s done so far – made plans for a new summer theater program and marketing effort support – as “small tweeks.”

His predecessor, Polly Donald, filled her 17-year tenure with increasing enrollment from 70 to 170, overseeing construction of physical structures such as the elementary building, obtaining accreditation, filling out the staff with a music teacher and librarian, and developing curriculum and fundraising. On the other side of it, de Beer is the guy who will bring the Friends’ School, in terms of marketing at least, into the current century.

As de Beer sees it now, part of the job is as “No. 1 storyteller,” letting the community know what the Friends’ School is about, and giving it a face on the Friends’ School website, on Facebook, on Twitter, classroom webpages, and in the blog, “Among Friends Reflections from our Head of School.” De Beer spends a great deal of time in the classrooms, and he always has his phone on him. He’s the author of most of the posts for the Friends’ School’s Facebook page, and, possibly due to his efforts, readership is up. In addition, parent education events and preschool information meetings have experienced record attendance.

“I’m social media savvy and am able to parley what they (the school) is doing,” he said.”

The change in marketing was in the pipeline for the Friends’ School before de Beer came along. The school had hired Monique Davis of Davis Branding & Marketing in Denver, to modernize its way of getting the word out. De Beer is a writer who meets with a writing group a few times a month, has been published in The Denver Post and 5280 magazine, and has maintained a personal blog since 2008, making him a good fit for marketing efforts using the Internet.

Alongside marketing support, and the day-to-day activities of a head of school, which de Beer compares to being the “CEO of a small company,” he’ll maintain the 24-year-old school’s curriculum philosophy, which places an “emphasis on social/emotional development,” he said. “We encourage students to find out who they are as learners, and we keep up with the latest research (in education) and take in the best of everything.”

While student-led learning wasn’t the tradition of de Beer’s youth, he’s a firm believer in it. He said that his punitive boarding school background in the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated to him the importance of a partnership between kids and teachers. De Beer, a native of West Sussex, England, started boarding school at age 7.

“(At that time), the emphasis was on rote learning, but that’s not how I learned. I’m a visual learner,” he said. At the Friends’ School, de Beer found a philosophical match in that the teachers employ all learning modalities, visual, auditory and kinesthetic, to meet the needs of students. De Beer has a bachelor’s degree in French and linguistics from the University of York in England and a master’s degree in teacher education from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Classroom sizes at the Friends’ School are small with a high teacher to student ratio. In preschool there are three teachers to every 16 students. In the upper grade classrooms, 17 to 21 students to one teacher and one part-time teacher candidate are the norm. The teacher candidate works Monday through Thursday in the classroom, and is required to take classes offered by the Friends’ School in partnership with the University of Colorado at Denver on Friday.

In an effort to promote economic diversity, tuition is on a sliding scale in. For a full-time student the cost ranges from $6,000 to $14,000, depending on income; a family making $25,000 a year pays the lower price. A family making $125,000 a year pays the upper end of the scale. There are eight payment levels. Preschool ranges from $3,600 to $5,000 for three mornings per week. Considerable supplemental financial aid assistance is available as needed. Approximately one-third of the students receive financial assistance each year.