Twenty faculty and staff members, commencing their milestone 10th, 15th, 20th, 25th and 30th years of service, were celebrated by their peers and Spence trustees at a reception hosted by Head of School Bodie Brizendine. Along with initiating the Tenure Party tradition in 2009, Brizendine has made her personalized tributes a hallmark of the annual salute to sustained and dedicated service to teaching and learning.

“A scholar of depth and passion,” “both a visionary and a force,” “plurality personified,” “disarmingly easy,” “the bedrock of fine teaching,” “a model of accessibility and high purpose”—Brizendine’s poetic accolades revealed insights about the honorees, while acknowledging the exceptional contributions each makes to the life of the School.

This year’s honorees spanned Spence’s academic and administrative divisions, representing colleagues in Modern Languages, Arts, Performing Arts, Mathematics, Physical Education, Science, History and English Departments as well as the Resource Center, Food Services, and the Business, Admissions and Advancement Offices.

2014-2015 Honorees

30 Years
Eileen G. MacLellan, Lower School Physical Education Teacher

25 Years
Elizabeth Casanova, Director of Lower School Science
Marie-Hélène Estrade, French Teacher, Grade 10 Dean
Isabel Jimenez, Salad Prep Cook
Marianne McCarthy, Visual Arts Teacher
Elena Rocha, Spanish Teacher

20 Years
Constanza Melo, Spanish Teacher

15 Years
Julie Abbruscato, English Teacher
Paul Hennessee, Music Teacher
Laura McCallum, Head of Visual Arts Department
Michele Murphy, Director of School Affairs, Director of Academic Technology, Mathematics Teacher
Alice Park, Resource Center Teacher and Reading Specialist
Celinés Pimentel, Spanish Teacher, Grade 9 Dean
Marcos Rosales, Lower School Visual Arts Teacher
Joanne Yoon, History Teacher

10 Years
Richard Hutzler, Director of the Annual Fund
Cornell Owesny, Latin Teacher
Susan Parker, Director of Admissions
Mildred Ruiz, Business Office Associate for Accounts Receivable
Elsy Waring, Spanish Teacher

Excerpts of Head of School Bodie Brizendine’s Tenure Citations

Honoring 10 Years
RICHARD HUTZLER, Director of the Annual Fund
For 10, full years Richard Hutzler has been raising the money to make the everyday possible at Spence. Actually, everything we do, day in and day out, has a piece of him in it…Plurality personified, Richard is also a poet, a college professor, an actor and just about the best resource I know for recommended theater and literature. With complete dedication and without complaint, Richard is that “man behind the curtain,” but this time, unlike Dorothy’s guy, the man is very real and the levers he pulls, work.

CORNELL OWESNY, Latin Teacher
A scholar of depth and passion, Cornell brings to life, on the page and in the discourse, the worlds of ancient Greek and Rome through the poetry and prose of classical literature. Like Ovid, himself, Cornell works to transform the classroom into a furious battle scene, a strange island of fulsome magic, a lonely beach holding one, abandoned lover watching a ship disappear on the horizon. His tools? Rhetoric, imagination, patience, commitment and personal passion. His reward? A small but mighty group of young scholars who follow challenging text after challenging text, finding the remarkable depth of study that sometimes eludes the best of scholarship.

SUSAN PARKER, Director of Admissions
A gatekeeper, a community builder, a strategist, Susan Parker is both a visionary and a force! A former teacher, division director, activist and scholar, she has all the pieces to bring forth year after year, class after class, the intellectual and humanitarian life force of this school: our students. We trust her just as we trust our mission and our purpose…We look backwards with awe and forwards in anticipation for her wonderful work in delivering to us all the promise held within every 5-year-old and every middle-schooler and every upper-schooler she ultimately sends our way.

MILLIE RUIZ, Business Office Associate for Accounts Receivable
It’s nearly impossible to count the ways in which Millie has served Spence over these years, and I think her mantra is, “Can I help you do this?” Always positive, always found with her trademark big smile and quick twinkle in her eyes, she works behind the scenes to make sure all the necessary traffic of tuition and accounting gets done. Disarmingly easy and always thoughtful, Millie…is a veritable gift to us all.

ELSY WARING, Spanish Teacher
There’s always a bit of mystery around Elsy…She takes this generous, thoughtful, part-of-a-larger whole, secret, imaginative self into her classrooms and into our hallways. Her teaching is about culture, about stepping away from 9lst or 93rd Streets and walking into another land, another worldview, another way of being. For her, teaching is about a magical transportation and the imaginative possibilities of other cultures…all served with a healthy side order of kindness, warmth and deep appreciation.

Honoring 15 Years
JULIE ABBRUSCATO, English Teacher
Never just linear and always expansive in her marveling of rich complexities and ambiguities, Julie has about her a sense and appreciation of humanity with all of its warts and halos. She embraces the fullness of the page and the day: whatever each may bring. This is what makes her a writer; this is what makes her a superb teacher, and this is what makes her a superb teacher of writing. Her way of letting each student find her own voice and along with it a certain moral proposition and purpose, is extraordinary, and her ability to let each student believe in herself as a writer is nothing short of miraculous. This is the hard work she does, and this, along with a fierce commitment to language, is what she loves.

PAUL HENNESSEE, Music Teacher
Talk about the talent of multitudes! A composer, a musician, a vocalist, a rock star, a teacher and a musical director, Paul does it all. When he’s not writing the music for the US play, he’s leading a workshop for other musicians nationally. When he’s not rehearsing for his part in the LS Spence band, he’s playing for us at the faculty party. But mostly, he’s opening up the world of music as narrative and meaningful expression for young learners…He serves as our School’s nightingale, making sure that music surprises us in both expected and unexpected ways all the time, no matter the time, no matter the place.

LAURA McCALLUM, Head of Visual Arts Department
For Laura, making art is not a pastime, not a gift or a one-way proposition, or a sideshow of a strong liberal arts education. Rather, it is at the heart of what we do and an essential component of scholarship linking identity with message, often holding in its deep folds moral courage and human inquiry. Laura tells us that art makes us think, and she’s right…Laura McCallum will see to it that The Spence School will always be committed to the time, resources and personnel necessary for what we all see on the walls and in the hall of both of our buildings all the time: self-directed student art capturing expression, self-awareness, and yes, Keats was right, “truth and beauty.”

MICHELE MURPHY, Director of School Affairs, Director of Academic Technology, Mathematics Teacher
Michele Murphy has had a multitude of walk-on parts, a commanding amount of lead roles, and an even larger number of team membership roles, all of which she has done with her drop-dead amazing capacity to define value, gather perspective and execute purpose for immediate and future impact…With each project, each initiative, each adventure, she takes us from the margin to the center with her proactive enthusiasm and her evanescent spirit of can-do. She is the champion of our community, the bedrock of fine teaching.

ALICE PARK, Resource Center Teacher and Reading Specialist
Recognizing that learning is a shared activity, Alice is always engaged and mediating one on one with a multitude of students, ushering and guiding each young woman to her own learning while fanning the coals of confidence and possibility along the way. Giving a sense of self-agency to each of her charges, Alice tips the equation from can’t to can and from limited to limitless. Alice may indeed be a tonic to our institutional frenzy or even our favorite curator of the calm, but her work is bursting with energy, purpose and results, day after day, student after student.

CELINÉS PIMENTEL, Spanish Teacher, Grade 9 Dean
I always love it when the elevator doors open and Celinés is on board…Never in English and always in high spirit, the conversation is in full swing and someone is laughing, usually the student, and Celinés has that lifted eyebrow and open-faced magical look of joy sprinkled with a little irony—that look that defines her whenever and where ever she is engaged with students…Her work with the students is never, ever about her, and she is a model of accessibility and high purpose. She’s there for her students no matter what, and they know this. I always learn something by watching her in action…always, and we know and recognize a master-teacher at play and at work when we see her in action.

MARCOS ROSALES, Lower School Visual Arts Teacher
Master of the unanticipated, Marcos is full of surprises and wonder…just like his own art…He tends to this community and to his teaching with an unshakable belief in the promise of his own students and our School. When watching him teach, I marvel at his ability to turn his young charges away from “right or wrong” from “good or bad” and toward “this is how I see it” and to “I’m proud of this.” With…a huge and abiding affection for the young, Marcos inspires trust and partnership in his teaching. His tenderness is unmistakable, and his commitment to our growth as a thriving, multi-perspective community is a mark of his generosity and love.

JOANNE YOON, History Teacher
Joanne Yoon is one of those teachers who without drawing attention to herself sets up structures for learning that push her students into realms of both self-reflection and understanding. Like a good architect, she builds for learning, allowing her students to take charge and to take responsibility. They become historic figures in the time frame studied and converse online with one another while in character. They don’t just study the history, they live it. Reaching beyond the text and beyond the obvious, she brings learning to life and life to the learning. With untiring dedication and careful preparation, Joanne lets every student lead in some way.

Honoring 20 Years
CONSTANZA MELO, Spanish Teacher
There’s something about her that makes us all realize that here is a woman of unquestionable reliability, here is a woman of a certain wholeness. Constanza assumes good will in others all the time…Respect and gratitude are permanent residents in her DNA, and if she can, she’ll be the first to step forward when someone or the School needs something, anything. Her hand is always up: her outreach always there. Her teaching, too, reflects these values. Her students matter most to her, and she makes sure that they know this in her classroom and in the hallways. She’s our queen of dependability, our mistress of calmness and purpose.

Honoring 25 Years
LIZ CASANOVA, Director of Lower School Science
Part scavenger, part improv artist, Liz Casanova can and does make any room, any bus, any corner, any backyard, any anything, a classroom. And not only that, but she lets her students know that they too, while individuals, are part of a team called a class and part of an even larger team called humanity…Saving oysters, building bridges, hosting science fairs, growing basil, making pesto for the homeless: for Liz and her charges, all of that is high learning…For her and for them, learning is doing something and about as far away from intellectual abstract as one can run.

MARIE-HÉLÈNE ESTRADE, French Teacher, Grade 10 Dean
For Marie Helene, there is no such thing as not doing, and her world, corner to corner, is softly edged with purpose and remarkable results. Her expectations for her students are always high, and the support she lends in meeting these expectations is unending…She believes in reciprocity, and she gives more than she would ever take, making her a model of generosity and commitment. And above all this is that certain artistic sensibility she holds…Her worldview is one of many perspectives, integrated with a shared purpose of what it means to be human, no matter your story, no matter your history. Her teaching is highly contextual and relevant to her young students in whom she always holds both good faith and high promise.

ISABEL JIMENEZ, Salad Prep Cook
She presides over our kitchen with grace, purpose and humor, and she makes each one of us feel as if she has made and is serving something just for us and not for the rest of that long line standing behind you. You just feel special when you’re around Isabel. With heart-stopping humanity, she smiles across to you as she hands you your lunch, and you know once she does that you’re at home in the world and at home in Spence.

MARIANNE McCARTHY, Visual Arts Teacher
Two words: she cares. And three words: she cares deeply…She shows her students and the School the unbelievable education one can have through seeing, through keeping the periscope of the eye open and alert, through speaking one’s truth through imagery…And as students follow her lead, they learn to love the ambiguities held by their own lives…Just as she graces the seventh floor gallery with installation after installation, so does she grace our conversations and mission with ideas and reflections.

ELENA ROCHA, Spanish Teacher
Elena Rocha has about her that rock-like reliability that makes us all turn to her…Elena greets us, her students and every day with truly unflappable optimism and true dedication…Her sense of what it means to be a teacher is full, clear and to the purpose, and students clamber to her for this…She brings to every student a sense that they, too, can transcend book learning to deeper connections between language and culture…Elena is a magnet for those special, adolescent years of both come hither and go away. For them she is a rock—a rock of judgment—free reliability—a rock of candor and truth…And this, too, is why all adults turn to her as well, all the time and for many things.

Honoring 30 Years
EILEEN G. MacLELLAN, Lower School Physical Education Teacher
Eileen MacLellan is like the School’s wake-up call early—very early—in the morning. Exuberant, relentless, loving and alive, she greets every day as a possibility for herself, for her students and for the School…Never mistake her uncorked joy as her sole contribution. This is one smart cookie who gets the world right over and over again…So, don’t hold back, Eileen, keep waking us up and keep making us jump with both surprise and heart-stopping revelation.