Board Announces New Head of School
Dear Members of the Miquon community,
On behalf of the Board of Directors and the Head of School Search Committee, we are excited to announce the appointment of K. Geetha Holdsworth as the next Principal of The Miquon School, effective July 1, 2023. After a thorough process, the Search Committee unanimously recommended Geetha to the Board of Directors, who voted, also unanimously, in support of her appointment to succeed Susannah Wolf. We are thrilled to welcome Geetha, her husband, Amos, and her two daughters, Indu and Devi, to the Miquon community.
Geetha has spent her life in Progressive schools, first as a student at Poughkeepsie Day School and then as a teacher there, before moving on to work at Santa Fe School for the Arts & Sciences, and Bosque School. She has experienced all aspects of Progressive institutions, teaching students in every grade, nursery through 12th, and serving as academic dean, interim head of school, assistant principal, department head, director of diversity initiatives, and curriculum coordinator. Her daughters also attended Progressive schools. Currently, Geetha serves as the academic dean at Bosque School, a Progressive school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In the spring she expects to defend her thesis, “Reflective Practices to Promote the Self-Efficacy of Principals,” for her doctorate in education. Geetha’s engagement with education transcends her roles at individual schools; she consistently presents her work at local and national conferences, including the National Association of Independent Schools People of Color Conference, Asian Educators Alliance National Conference, Expeditionary Learning National Conference, and others.
Geetha pairs her breadth and depth of experience with a genuine joy in building relationships with everyone from our youngest students to our most veteran staff members. She is a leader who works with a community to move together toward solutions, and she is eager to work with us on everything from questions of diversity and justice to refining how our program is delivered at each grade band, and how the grade bands build on each other. At Bosque School, Geetha designed and implemented immersive terms for the middle and upper schools. These annual three-week courses are intentionally designed to be interdisciplinary and push the students’ education beyond the four walls of the classroom. Similarly, at Sante Fe School for the Arts & Sciences, she helped the school refine how it delivered an Expeditionary Learning Education. In these transitions, Geetha worked closely with staff, administration, families, and students. Her approach to leadership and change begins with meaningfully engaging with what a community is already doing well and using that context to identify growth edges so she can begin to address them. She believes in setting up systems that create organizational order to sustain a community for years to come.
Geetha’s appointment as the nineteenth Principal of Miquon is the culmination of a rigorous and inclusive search process supported by Carney Sandoe & Associates, which involved participation from many members of our Board of Directors, parents, staff, and students.
Ultimately, the search committee was drawn to Geetha’s alignment with Miquon’s mission and vision. As Geetha put it during her on-campus visit, she not only shares the language of Progressive education with us, she speaks the same dialect we do. At Miquon, we believe in the power of joy and self-directed play as mediums into deep academic and socio-emotional learning. We seek to build independent, confident, lifelong learners through academic choice and time spent engaging with one another and with our campus. Our students learn to take care of themselves, of each other, and of the world. We are confident that Geetha will preserve and enhance what Miquon stands for, and that we, in turn, will benefit from her leadership.
We’d like to thank the entire Miquon community for their engagement, support, and guidance as we have worked to find a head of school who will honor the first 90 years of Miquon’s history and help lead us into the next 90.
In partnership,
Cerys St. John Richter P’21, P’24, Chair, Board of Directors
Miriam Rock ’04, Secretary, Board of Directors
