Dear Bishop Walker School Community, 

I am delighted to announce that Dr. Angelina Arrington will become our next Head of School on July 1, 2023.

     At the start of its work, our Board’s Search Committee identified its principal goal: to find a strong academic leader with a background in elementary education, a deep understanding of how to make education best serve the needs of black and brown boys, and a dedication to leading an Episcopal school.  It was also important to the Search Committee to find a Head of School who is an excellent communicator who is comfortable in any setting and who can quickly develop genuine relationships with our students, our parents, our faculty and staff, and our wider community. The Committee was not convinced that it could identify a Head of School with these multiple and hard-to-find talents in a compressed timeline and had reluctantly concluded that it would need to find an interim leader to serve after Mike Molina’s departure at the end of this academic year. Those of you who met Dr. Arrington during her visits will undoubtedly agree with our Search Committee and our Board that in Dr. Arrington we have found not an interim Head but a leader who embodies every one of those critical qualities and whom we hope will be at Bishop Walker for many years to come. The Search Committee and the full Board of Trustees unanimously recommended Dr. Arrington’s appointment to the Diocese of Washington, which has enthusiastically concurred.

     Dr. Arrington’s background reflects exactly the experience that we had hoped to find in our next Head of School.  Over the course of her 30-year career in education, she has taught every grade from pre-k to college, which has helped her gain a full understanding of child and adolescent development throughout the school-age years. Dr. Arrington spent 10 years in the elementary school classroom in both public and independent schools in the Los Angeles area, spent a year as a reading instructor at the Sylvan-in-Schools program in Compton, California, and served as a year-long mentor teacher at a charter school in Inglewood, California. She also served as an Interim Admissions Director at Pilgrim School and as the Assistant Head of School for nine years, first at The Oaks School in Hollywood and then at St. James Episcopal School in Los Angeles, where her responsibilities included curriculum development, establishing a stronger faculty evaluation and mentoring system, coordinating strategic initiatives, implementing parent education initiatives, and supervising outplacement for 6th graders. Dr. Arrington has also been a teacher of elementary teaching methods at the University of Phoenix, a clinical student teaching instructor at the University of Illinois, a grant writer and evaluator for the Black Educational Advocacy Coalition, and a leadership development and curriculum consultant for Cairo School District 1 in Illinois.

     In her visits to The Bishop Walker School, Dr. Arrington immediately connected with students, parents, faculty, staff, and Board members.  The comments we received about her from those who met her noted her “passion for working with our population of scholars,” her “deep understanding of what our scholars need,” her “experience in fundraising,” “content knowledge,” “excellent ideas,” and “thoughtful” and “nuanced” approach to the variety of topics that she was asked to address.  We agree. 

     Dr. Arrington holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Southern California, a Masters of Education from Pepperdine University, and a Doctor of Education in Education Policy, Organization and Leadership from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Her research activities have taken her to the Caribbean and Africa and she will spend some time in Ghana this spring as a West African Research Association post-doc fellow conducting classroom ethnographies and researching the effectiveness of progressive education reform in formalistic, rural Ghanaian classrooms.  

     We hope you will join us in welcoming Dr. Arrington to our community.  Her official start date will be July 1, 2023 but you may see her around BWS before then as she starts to become a part of our community.  

     We owe a great debt to Katherine Stuart and Rev. Daniel Heischman of The Education Group, our search consultants who gave us the benefit of their long experience and excellent judgment during the search process.  We are also very grateful to our Search Committee—Itea Bell Tanner, Nancy Brown, Cindi Gibbs-Wilborn, Dr. Rodney Glasgow, Sandi Hannibal, Elise Rabekoff, and Vincent Napoleon—who devoted themselves to our search for the past six months and whose focused collaboration was a model for how a Board committee should work. 

     I would also like to take this opportunity to offer our profound thanks to Michael Molina. Mike has been a transformational Head of School. We will continue to celebrate him and his tenure this spring, and we are glad to know that Dr. Arrington will have the full benefit of transition time with Mike, learning about our school and our community from him. We wish Mike the very best in his return to the Gilman School in Baltimore.         

Sincerely, 

 

Andrew W. Clarke 

Chair, Board of Trustees
Bishop John T. Walker School for Boys