I recently heard the news that Sam Nash had died. I was deeply saddened to hear the news even though I knew Sam had been ill for a long time and had never fully recovered from his wife Lola’s death a number of years ago.
I was sad in part that his passing might go unnoticed in a community he served so well. The marks of his legacy are everywhere, even if his role in shaping New Haven’s current landscape has faded.
Sam died on July 19 at Maplewood at Strawberry Hill, an assisted living facility in Norwalk.
I first met Sam as a young teacher at Hillhouse High School. It was not an accidental meeting. Sam’s espoused theory of school change and the actions he took were one and the same. And Sam believed deeply in the power of teachers to make a significant difference in schools, so he went out to find teachers to partner with.
It took me a while to recognize that my own hiring at Hillhouse happened in great part because of Sam. The year I was applying for a job, Sam with George Foote and others opened up High School in the Community. That opened up a number of vacancies at Hillhouse as many teachers there went to start the new school.
A number of years later, Sam and George teamed up again to open Sound School, another small, innovative design that preceded the Gates Foundation small schools movement by 30 years. Magnet schools, schools of choice and many other elements of New Haven Public Schools, remain today.
I always had the image of Sam rising for breakfast and opening up the latest edition of the Federal Register and scratching down notes as to what grant to get, what teacher to contact, and how to get the ball rolling. In my years at Hillhouse, 1970 to 1980, we received a number of Sam grants. A group of us launched the freshman cluster and then, with Sam’s help, accelerated that effort with Title VII funds. For two years in a row we were named as the highest performing secondary recipient, showing double digit gains in reading for our ninth graders. That experience influenced a number of important educators including my wife Joanie (who went on to be one of the founders of Common Ground), Ed Joyner (now running for the Board of Education), Ed Murray, Terry Freeman, Chuck Shepard, Jane Baljevic, and others.
We also received a state Humanities Council grant for an artist in the classroom and the presence of this medium created phenomenal art and gave students a reason to come to school and persist in other areas of study. It too received an award.
Sam was a hard-eyed devotee of John Dewey. Hard-eyed in the sense that he understood that Dewey had to be read critically, while at the same time his knowledge of Dewey allowed him to read critically the nostrums of reform that promised easy fixes. High School in the Community – its design now is not at all the design he launched – heralded his faith in the assets of every school community; Sound School his faith in the integration of doing and thinking; our work at Hillhouse his faith in finding talented educators and giving them the support to go deep in making changes.
Brilliant, talkative – to a fault – optimistic in the face of great and persistent challenges, we will miss his voice as we continue to wrestle with many of the problems he attacked so creatively many years ago.