TRANSITIONS Meet Mo Copeland M
o Copeland will become head of school at OES on July 1. For the past 10 years, she has been head of Saint
George’s, a K-12 school in Spokane, Washington, and before that she taught physics for 18 years in Seattle. Mo and her husband, Chris, have two sons, Daniel at Reed College and Nick at Lewis & Clark College. They also have a dog named Kootenay.
Q. What are you most looking forward to at OES?
A. The people. What inspires me to do the work I do is doing it with really smart, really passionate people. I’m going to have that in abundance at OES.
Q. How has your experience prepared you for this move to OES?
A. Having a long history as a teacher gives me a good understanding of what life in the classroom is like. I have been a head of school for 10 years, and there’s nothing like working with parents on controversial issues to get you comfortable with leadership.
Q. How has your experience helped your understanding of the education of younger students?
A. When my two kids were going through the lower school, it helped me learn about the curricular issues and how the teaching works there.
Q. What are some of the most important things students need to learn in the Lower School?
A. The curiosity, the love of learning, the willingness to ask questions and get engaged—that’s what has to happen. Kids have to love school early on. Another very important thing students need to learn is resilience, the ability to handle setbacks well.
Q. Could you tell us more about your husband, Chris?
A. Chris got his degree in biology at Dartmouth, and then he attended the
16 OES MAGAZINE WINTER 2011 16
Read the complete interview with Mo Copeland on the web.
University of Washington for
graduate school, which is where I met him. He was working on his master’s in Chinese. His science
background and the Asian connection set him up beautifully for a career in the tech transfer industry that was just
beginning in Seattle. When we moved to Spokane, our kids were really little so Chris decided to be a stay-at- home dad, and it has been great.
Q. What do you do for fun?
A. What I really like is being out kayaking or backpacking for a couple of nights so I feel like I am totally gone. There’s no cell phone and no email, and
we wake up in our little tent and cook our food and then we have the whole day to just explore.
Q. Where did you grow up? A. I grew up on Cape Cod in
Massachusetts. My family lived in Woods Hole, which is where the scientific community is. My
dad was an oceanographer and my mother was an educator, and my parents were really into sailing.
Q. What’s your view of the OES boarding program?
A. The whole international piece that OES is able to do with the boarding program is extraordinary. OES is doing its boarding program right, and keeping that going is really important.
Q. What do you think some of the challenges are for independent schools?
A. I think we have to be really, really creative during the next decade about how to fund our schools so the middle class can access them.
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