In ‘blink of an eye,’ leader ready to retire
Passalacqua, mainstay at Desert Academy, oversaw creation of athletic programs, campus move over 21 years
Terry Passalacqua stood on an empty stage in a rain-soaked tent on the Desert Academy campus, watching as staff members picked up discarded graduation programs, and students clad in green and white caps and gowns rushed to hug loved ones in the parking lot outside.
Minutes before, he had finished handing out nearly 40 diplomas to the Class of 2017, and the tent was filled with hundreds of the graduates’ loved ones. They quickly dispersed when Wednesday’s event was over. Passalacqua’s brief remarks during the ceremony didn’t include a mention that this would be his last time presiding over a graduation ceremony as head of the private International Baccalaureate school.
He is retiring at the end of the month. Yann Lussiez, assistant head of school at Desert Academy and a former principal at El Dorado Community School, will succeed him.
It was the school’s 22nd commencement ceremony and Passalacqua’s 21st, including the years when he worked there as a teacher and a coach. He only felt emotional once in more than two decades of graduations, he said, when he realized that the graduates hadn’t even been born when he joined the school’s staff in 1996. “A blink of an eye,” he said. “It’s like I’m still on the train,” Passalacqua added. “It’s not the end.”
He isn’t sure what will come next, he said, but he would still like to teach a class now and then.
Passalacqua led the school through major changes — introducing new sports programs, transitioning to an International Baccalaureate school and moving to a larger campus. His quiet leadership style set a tone that will be missed, teachers, parents and students said.
Maida Rubin, who graduated from Desert Academy in 2007, said Passalacqua “treated us like people. … He made you love school. He set a great example for something I want in my life: Passion for my work.”
Passalacqua’s career began back in his native Ohio, where he once harbored dreams of becoming a baseball player. While studying psychology at Kent State University, he volunteered to help in a
special-education class at a local school. “I became fiercely interested in learning, what it takes to learn,” he said. Passalacqua stayed at Kent State to earn a master’s degree in educational leadership.
He and his wife, after visiting the Southwest, decided to settle in Santa Fe in 1985. Passalacqua volunteered at the Little Earth School, and taught and coached at Santa Fe Preparatory School — where he built the track and cross-country teams into powerhouses — before joining Desert Academy in 1996, under the leadership of then-Head of School Larry Barr.
Passalacqua quickly began building up Desert Academy’s athletics program, adding volleyball, soccer, cross-country, swimming and basketball within a few years.
While teaching government and economics, health, psychology and world history, Passalacqua “just recruited, recruited, recruited” for the sports programs, he said. Passalacqua would tell a kid, “You never went out for track? Well, let’s give it a shot.”
The school had opened with a class of about 30 students just a few years before his tenure started. He liked the way it focused on the social and emotional learning that comes with academics, he said, adding that Desert Academy’s leaders worked to give students a sense of the world around them.
“We want them to think as a global culture, to think that sometimes other cultures can be right,” Passalacqua said.
In 2008, when Passalacqua was serving as assistant head learner, the school took the concept further, earning authorization from the nonprofit International Baccalaureate organization to offer its rigorous, globally focused programs. Passalacqua credits then-Head of School Ray Griffin with initiating the process.
And in 2012, Passalacqua oversaw the school’s move from a 20,000-square-foot building on Camino Alire to the 26-acre campus on Old Santa Fe Trail that previously was the home of a math and science academy. Desert Academy paid $6.9 million for the property and moved in with the hope of expanding its enrollment to 250 students.
Instead, the academy’s student population has remained at about 175.
This year’s graduating class of 39 students was the highest in the school’s history, following a record low of 13 last year — an anomaly, Passalacqua said. Most classes range from 25 to 30 students.
School leaders haven’t given up hope of seeing growth. They are quietly initiating a capital campaign to raise $7 million or more to expand and renovate the campus, with plans for a gym and dormitories. Passalacqua and Lussiez are talking about ways to attract international students.
Desert Academy is not alone in its struggle to recruit new students. Private schools around the country are seeing enrollment numbers stagnate or drop. A recent National Center for Education Statistics report, analyzing 2014 data, said private school enrollment nationwide had dropped by more than 14 percent in a decade, from 6.3 million to 5.4 million.
In Santa Fe, a growing number of choices for parents and students entering middle school and high school — including charter schools and K-8 public schools — have increased competition for private schools, Passalacqua said. Desert Academy’s tuition of about $19,000 a year is not affordable for many families in the city.
But Desert Academy’s leaders can address the challenges by playing up the strengths of a school that pushes its students into deeper inquiry about issues that impact the region around them as well as the world, he said. It inspires students to see larger connections.
Former Desert Academy student Ross Hunt said Passalacqua was the first teacher he encountered who “approached the human person as a whole, to be contemplated and understood, rather than divided into subjects and disciplines.”
Paul Hedrick, an English teacher at the school for 10 years, said he still recalls specific feedback that Passalacqua gave him while watching him teach a class. Passalacqua taught him how to “work the room,” giving attention to every single student as he kept the conversation flowing.
“I actually thought I knew everything I needed to know to be a successful teacher,” Hedrick said. “I was surprised at the depth of his perception at how I taught and how I could get better at teaching. … Every day, when I am in my classroom in front of my kids, I think of something he has mentioned to me over the years.”