After six years, head of Virginia Beach Friends School leaving

VIRGINIA BEACH

In six years as head of Virginia Beach Friends School, Jon Alden has helped implement a more rigorous curriculum, improved billing and budgeting and gathered community consensus the Quaker way.

This fall will be his last at the school, which is based on Quaker tenets. He said it’s time for a leader who can oversee a capital campaign and the construction of an eco-friendly campus on a new site.

“I feel like I really accomplished what I came to the school to do,” said Alden, a Pennsylvania native who is a born Quaker. The upper school, which held its first graduation in 1998, has grown and flourished, and several new buildings have gone up.

The independent school on Laskin Road serves about 220 students from preschool to high school with a focus on critical thinking, cooperation and spiritual development.

“We’re very excited Jon has given so much to the school,” said Alice Twining, a school trustee and co-chair of the search committee. “We hope the new person will build on the progress he has made.”

The search committee includes trustees, a parent, a faculty member and a representative of the Friends Meeting House, which may move with the school.

Applications for head of school are being accepted from around the country through September. Applicants do not have to be Quakers.

Twining said the Friends School plans to assemble a campus over the next five years where every building is certified by the U.S. Green Building Council. An eco-friendly location would fit in with the Quaker values of simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality and environmental stewardship, Alden said.

It probably would be the first totally green campus among the 82 Friends schools nationwide, Twining said.

Alden said it will be difficult to leave the school. “This was kind of like coming home to what I had known,” he said. “Everybody would like to see the school remain a close-knit family community.”

Every month, Alden has held “Coffee with Teacher Jon” to chat with any member of the community. He also worked with the trustees to raise teacher salaries, Twining said.

The committee hopes to have finalist interviews on campus in November and plans to name the new head of school in January. He or she would start in July.

Lauren Roth, (757) 222-5133, lauren.roth@pilotonline.com