Sarah D. A. Baker
Each month RG175 does a "deeper dive" to get to know one of our Independent School colleagues. This month we are spotlighting Sarah D. A. Baker. Sarah has spent her life in independent schools, having fallen in love with schools and schooling when she attended The Episcopal Academy, in Merion, PA from Kindergarten through the 12th grade. Sarah did her undergraduate work at Duke University, intending after graduation to follow her parents into the field of law after a “break” to teach and coach at The Agnes Irwin School in Rosemont, PA. Mere months into that prospective break, Sarah felt a sense of home that she had only ever found in schools, and she knew that her career plans had changed.
After Agnes Irwin, Sarah served her alma mater Episcopal in its Advancement Office and later as a teacher and Form Dean in the Upper School, eventually concluding her time at Episcopal as Chair of the school’s English Department. In 2010, while working at Episcopal, Sarah returned to school at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and earned her M.S.Ed. Since her graduation from Penn, Sarah has served as a mentor and frequent panelist at GSE and lectures there as an Associate Instructor on the Best Practices of Literacy Instruction.
In 2015, Sarah and her husband Scott moved to Richmond, VA, where Sarah spent five years as Assistant Head of Upper School at Collegiate School and where their two children were born. Following the COVID-19 pandemic and pleased to return to family in the Philadelphia area, Sarah eagerly accepted a position as Head of the Upper School at Tower Hill School in Wilmington, DE in 2021. After two years in that role, Sarah was appointed Head of School at Tower Hill, whose search for Head of School RG175 ran.
When she is not chasing her two small children, Sarah is an avid reader, swimmer, and cook.
What’s your connection to RG175?
I have been fortunate to work with RG175 on both sides of the search process, first as a candidate for the Head of School role which I currently hold at Tower Hill and subsequently as Tower Hill searched for an Upper School Head and a Dean of Faculty in my first year as Head.
Can you summarize your experience working with RG175?
While the experience working with RG175 has been roundly positive, for me the most distinctive and valuable element of the RG175 way has been the highly personal approach their consultants have taken in each of the three searches I have been a part of—first as a candidate and then as the client. When it is not done well, searches can feel distant, sterile, and somewhat robotic; I think this can be really hard for candidates who are so devoted to this industry and to finding the right fit for themselves as practitioners and it can also be difficult for school leaders with a pastoral responsibility to get hiring right for their communities. It has seemed to me that RG175 understands the humanity of these processes and honors that with empathy, candor, timeliness, professionalism, and tact.
If you had one thing to recommend to other candidates, what would it be?
I remember that in graduate school the great Dr. Earl Ball used to tell us never, ever to try to squeeze ourselves into the mold of a position or into the culture of a school that we knew we did not truly fit. I will pass that good advice on to candidates. I think it is tempting to try to contort ourselves to convince schools or ourselves of a fit that isn’t authentically there. Thanks to the good advice from Dr. Ball, I have tried to be radically honest with myself and with schools during all searches, and it has resulted in my finding four very happy school homes.
What do you enjoy most about your job as it pertains to Independent Schools?
Oh gosh. All of it! The privilege of being a Head of School is that I get to continue learning, tell the story of an institution with the most noble mission, create and innovate, take care of a community of adults and children, and—if that weren’t enough—serve as witnesses to cohort after cohort of families dabbing their eyes at the Lower School musical and, not so long thereafter, at graduation. Our work impacts the greatest and most important journey in any individual’s life: childhood. At Tower Hill, we say that “children are raised here.” I remind myself of that mission and that responsibility each morning as I walk out of my driveway and across the street to school holding my own little son’s hand.