The Pennington School features many new faces for the 2019-20 school year.
School officials announced that 16 new faculty members have jpined the staff at the private school.
Several of the new faculty members are covering education topics that include mathematics, the sciences, English and language.
“Our hiring season begins in earnest in January. In the independent school world that is typically when the market heats up,” said William Hawkey, headmaster of The Pennington School. “People indicate that they are not returning and we start to post our positions. We schedule interviews on campus. We post our positions to a national and international pool of perspective teachers.”
The Pennington School is a private school in Pennington that focuses on students from grades 6-12. Hawkey explained that due to any number of reasons for independent schools it is not untypical to have 10% of faculty turnover each year.
“We had three or four retirements. We had a couple of relocations due to a spouse or partner going to another job,” Hawkey said. “We then had a number of young faculty that made decisions to pursue advanced studies. This is generally what we have been seeing over the last couple dozen years.”
The new faculty members are Stephanie Allen, Danielle Bahr, Rachel Burke, William Burke, Stephanie Cohen, Alexandra Crivelli, Elizabeth Cummings, Eli Durmer, David Hallgren, Stacey Inzer, Chrissie Knight, Matthew Mysliwiec, Andrea Popel, Peter Puleo, Ryan Stokes and Nathaniel Van Yperen.
Meanwhile, another newcomer is Emma Wells, who has joined the library staff.
Twelve of the new faculty members are for teaching positions and four are for administrative positions.
“I am always excited about new people coming on board. For me, it is always about the opportunity of adding strength to the teaching faculty here,” Hawkey said. “This year is no exception. I am really excited, across the board. All of these hires have really been tremendous. I give a lot of credit to our Dean of Faculty, Deborah Fermo. She did a great job of identifying a talented pool of teaching candidates.”
The Pennington School, according to the school officials, is always looking for people with advanced degrees. School officials said they like to hire experts in the field that they are going to be teaching in.
“Our teachers normally do not go through a state-wide certification program for teaching. Instead, they are what I like to call experts or specialists in their field,” he said. “If we are hiring a chemistry teacher, we are hiring a chemist, as apposed to general education person with a concentration in the sciences.”
For more information about the Pennington School, visit www.pennington.org.
