On June 25, Lakeside’s Board of Trustees appointed Ryan Boccuzzi as the 12th head of school, who has served as interim head since the departure of Dr. Kai Bynum. Mr. Boccuzzi, who is Lakeside’s former assistant head of school and Upper School director, was unanimously chosen from a group of more than 100 other candidates, 13 semifinalists, and three finalists. Tatler spoke with Mr. Boccuzzi about his new role and what he aspires to accomplish in it.
When asked about what he wanted the community to notice first about his new role, Boccuzzi said that he wants them to know he is no different than he was before. “I am still the same person that people have known for the past four years.” Many Lakesiders know him as one who has led significant changes to Lakeside’s campus and culture, including the Invisible Device Policy and the new Rooting & Rising Initiative — but when asked about what he expects to change with his new role, he responded that it “doesn’t mean I have 12 ideas that I’m going to launch tomorrow.” What has changed, according to Boccuzzi, is his time scale. He is now responsible for “even broader, longer term decisions,” which allows him to “dream a little bigger” about where Lakeside will be in the next five or 10 years.
As for where the school is heading, last spring, Lakeside opened the $60 million, 39,000-square foot T.J. Vassar ’68 Center for the Sciences and Humanities, and is now renovating Allen-Gates Hall to refit it with an engineering and design lab. Boccuzzi noted that the robotics team will finally move out of “basement and corner spaces,” referring to where the team currently works in the basement of the Parents and Guardians Association building.
In Boccuzzi’s words, Lakeside has “amazing programs doing really cool things, operating in some spaces that don’t necessarily match that program all the time,” offering having all sports on-campus and a theater capable of seating the entire student body as two examples of additions he would love to have. Currently, Saint Nicholas Hall, the only auditorium on campus, could seat 425 out of 595 Lakeside students. The Middle School gymnasium will be expanded, and this is the last year Lakeside will have a fifth grade. Lakeside will be a seven-grade school for the first time since the early 1970s, and the ninth-grade class will grow from about 150 students to 165.
When asked how he would address criticism that students feel left out of major decisions, he first brought up the gender-neutral bathrooms in the Vassar Center. “There’s some gap there between what we heard from a focus group and what got created,” he conceded, adding that the school had allowed students to contribute to the process of building the Vassar Center in a multitude of panels and surveys. On the invisible device policy, he argued that “the adults are trusted to be the educators of the community,” which is why the school chose not to poll everyone.
“I hate when someone asks for my opinion, but I know they might not even read it,” Mr. Boccuzzi explains regarding the lack of school-wide surveys. According to him, the surveys are partially a numbers issue: The administration cannot possibly know and simultaneously respect 900 students’ views on every topic. He also acknowledges that the day-to-day pressure of being a student is something students “know better than we do.” Boccuzzi’s proposed solution is increased communication that informs the administration’s decisions by holding lunch meetings, including the opinions of newer students, and most importantly for him, having an open door for anyone who spots something in his blind spot.
Mr. Boccuzzi’s first wish would be that every student, family, and community member felt a “deep sense of belonging”. He adds that, “there are students who are not feeling that connection, that makes it harder to take risks. It makes things harder to dream big, to put yourself out there, to do all the things that we know are actually the best part of a Lakeside education.” In Boccuzzi’s words, he has a sense of what is going on in Lakeside’s community. That understanding is “the foundation on which all decisions are made,” adding that the important question is whether Lakeside is “continuing to evolve our spaces and our ideas, so that we are preparing our young people for the ever-changing world that they are entering into.”
Mr. Boccuzzi said he is glad to be an educator at a moment when education is going through a transformation, citing that information scarcity is rapidly becoming a problem of the past thanks to artificial intelligence. The task educators face, as he sees it, is teaching students when they should insist on being “the creative agent”, and how to know which AI tool to reach for when appropriate. He believes the goal for schools is teaching students “to know what to do when they don’t know what to do,” a line he first heard in graduate school nearly two decades ago.
“For our newest students, I hope that they will quickly find that I am someone who wants to celebrate their entire experience here with them,” Mr. Boccuzzi says. He hopes that those who don’t know him well will feel comfortable coming up to him and starting a conversation, and he looks forward to building those connections. Four years after arriving as assistant head of school, Mr. Boccuzzi hopes to continue to show up for the “highs and lows” for all Lakesiders. He sees that familiarity as the very thing that equips him for this role.“It’s gonna be a great, exciting new iteration for me,” he said. “But it’s a real gift to already know this community so well.”
