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Stambaugh Charter starts year with new principal
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
Landon Brown walks the hallways of Stambaugh Charter Academy, high-fiving students as he greets them with a big smile.
But the new principal corrects inappropriate dress when he sees it, too.
“Expectations,” he said. “Put your shoes on, tuck in your shirt — high expectations.”
It’s the first week of classes for students at the school on the city’s West Side and for Brown, who came to Stambaugh from Atlanta, where he spent 16 years as a teacher, middle-school and high-school assistant principal and principal. Most of that time was in urban schools, and all of it was in traditional public schools.
Alan Harper, the school’s former principal, left to start another school in Michigan.
Brown has initiated three main changes for his first year at the kindergarten- through eighth-grade building, which is a National Heritage Academies school.
As part of NHA’s college and career-readiness emphasis, rather than referring to each classroom by the name of the teacher, it’s assigned the name of a university, from Ivy League to state or regional institutions.
“It puts them in that mindset that they will be college- ready,” Brown said.
The second initiative is starting each school day with students reciting Marianne Williamson’s “A Return to Love.”
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,” the poem reads. “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”
Middle-school students will have the poem memorized by Oct. 1, Brown said.
His third objective is to increase the rigor and relevance of instruction.
Brown was active in the Atlanta community as a mentor for young people and as a member of many community groups and organizations and said he looks forward to being involved in the Youngstown community, too.
Brown, who attended Morehouse College for one year before moving on to graduate from Georgia State University, says he has a passion for education that was instilled in him as a child. Both his mother and his grandmother were public-school teachers. His father was a correctional counselor.
“School saved both of my parents,” he said. “They both grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the projects.”
Though he tells students that education doesn’t guarantee success, “it gives you the ability to make a choice.”