On October 9th, Allan Gately Gehant became CRLS’s new Interim Principal. Gehant previously served as the Assistant Principal to now Interim Chief Operating Officer Damon Smith, a position he held for only two years.
“My first role at CRLS was as the boys’ rowing coach twenty-four years ago,” Gehant explained. After a year of coaching, he became a math teacher, then a Dean of Students and Dean of Curriculum and Program (Science), until he became Assistant and then Interim Principal.
Gehant was always drawn to education and mathematics: In eighth grade, when his school struggled to find a teacher, Gehant ended up helping a lot. His parents joked that he practically taught the whole class.
“I come from a family of educators,” Gehant told the Register Forum. “My mother was an English teacher. My father’s mother taught in Chicago Public Schools. My mother’s sister was a speech pathologist, so we definitely have teaching in our family history.”
After middle school, Gehant tutored as a high schooler and majored in math and education in college. Teaching came naturally to him; after all, it was in his blood.
Administration, however, was entirely new. When Gehant started teaching at CRLS, he was assigned a mentor, Elizabeth Curry, who told him during one of their first meetings, “You’re going to get a master’s, and it’s going to be in administration.” Curry explained that she’d seen many strong teachers decide late in their careers that they wanted to enter a more administrative role, by which point it was too late. “Do it early,” Curry advised Gehant. She was one of the first people Gehant called when he got news of his recent promotion.
As Assistant Principal, Gehant has found it important to connect with both students and staff. Often found wandering the halls and greeting students at the front door, Gehant prizes in-person conversations above emails or digital communication.
“I can’t imagine doing the job in a different way,” he said. Being a part of the community, even if it just means popping into clubs, is important to him. “Seeing students who are so happy about being at the student paper, being in a room and working on Rubik’s Cubes, playing Dungeons and Dragons,” he said, “was a great bookend to every Assistant Principal day.”
As Dean of Students, Gehant looked through students’ exit data every year, checking what college major parting CRLS seniors chose, and changing CRLS curriculum to keep up with demand.
One year, “it popped off the page to me that we had a whole ton of criminal justice majors, and we didn’t really have a criminal justice program,” Gehant explained. “I had to work hard to find a science teacher willing to teach forensics—Mr. Bartholomew, thankfully, stood up.”
While Gehant has some changes he’s looking to make at CRLS, he believes that listening to student and teacher demands is most important. New initiatives should be based on community needs, rather than administrative whims.
“It’s important for us not to just jump into new things all the time,” Gehant said. “I love to dive into spreadsheets and look at the data and let that inform where I think the work should go.”
