Trey Blair Named Next Head of Lower School
Head of School Eric Lombardi announced Wednesday, December 13, that Trey Blair will be Fort Worth Country Day’s next Head of Lower School. Blair’s appointment follows a comprehensive national search. He succeeds Shari Lincoln, who returned to the Middle School classroom this academic year after serving as Lower School Head from 2007-17. Blair had been acting as Interim Head of Lower School since May 2017.
Head of School Eric Lombardi announced Wednesday, December 13, that Trey Blair will be Fort Worth Country Day’s next Head of Lower School. Blair’s appointment follows a comprehensive national search. He succeeds Shari Lincoln, who returned to the Middle School classroom this academic year after serving as Lower School Head from 2007-17. Blair had been acting as Interim Head of Lower School since May 2017.
“There are many reasons Trey was a hot commodity on the Lower School Head search circuit the last two years. He is gifted and humble, devoted and playful, smart and wise. Trey’s knowledge of the educational landscape and his desire to add to that knowledge are invaluable in his role as a school leader,” Lombardi said. “His devotion to Fort Worth Country Day runs deep. We are lucky to have had the Blairs in our community these four years, and we are ecstatic about having them for years to come.”
For Blair, Fort Worth Country Day is home. “My wife, Katie, and I have moved around a lot, and this is what my kids know as home. This is truly the first place that I’ve established roots in my professional career,” Blair said. “I want nothing more than to go on that 20-year, Club Viginti wall [at Fort Worth Country Day]. It’s a goal of mine. I love this community and its people, faculty, staff, students, parents, everyone. This is the first school I’ve worked at where I feel we don’t compromise academics. Here, we are free to really explore what education should look like, and we are not locked into one mode, one curriculum. Because our faculty is so strong and stable, we have the freedom and flexibility to do what is best for the kids. I am blessed to continue calling FWCD home.”
Below is the letter Lombardi sent to the community:
I do not often get the chance to go into detail about wonderful individuals on our faculty, staff or administrative team. Let me take this rare chance to tell you about Trey.
Shari Lincoln, Lower School Head from 2007 to 2017, deserves most of the credit. It took two different openings, first six and then four years ago, for her to get Trey to be her Assistant Head of Lower School, but she lured Trey here from Kentucky Country Day (Louisville) in 2013. Trey brought with him a wonderfully varied set of skills and experiences, from camp counseling, to coaching (varsity/JV baseball), from teaching kindergarten to teaching fourth grade, and from being in a Montessori environment to being surrounded by a more traditional curriculum. Add those experiences and skills to a wonderfully bright mind, a refreshingly humble demeanor, and a deeply relational disposition, and you have a gifted servant leader. Give a man with those gifts four years to work closely with a tremendous lower school educator in Shari, and you have the best Lower School Head on the market anywhere.
A key component of Trey being the best is his love for kids. At his core, Trey is deeply committed to helping students, which he does by knowing each of them and engaging with all of them. As a leader these last four years and especially in his six months as Interim Head, with the kids as his priority, Trey works to mobilize, empower and team with the adults in those children's lives to maximize potential and to address challenges. Having witnessed him in action, both faculty and parents were effusive in their support for Trey as our next Head. The Lower School community appreciates his accessibility, his sense of teamwork, his knowledge and, most importantly, who he is as a person.
In his tenure thus far at Fort Worth Country Day, Trey has been a valued contributor among our larger faculty community, using both his sense of humor and his professional skill set to lead the Faculty Education Committee (FEC) from 2015 to 2017 and to serve as Director of Summer Programs in 2016-17. He has served as Lower School Curriculum Committee Chair since his arrival in 2013 as well as Assistant Varsity/Head JV Baseball Coach. He set a fantastically high bar in 2014-15 as an FWCD Fund co-chair with his partner-in-crime, Coach Brady Benoit. And during the 2014-15 academic year, Trey served as a chair in our Assessment of Inclusivity and Multiculturalism (AIM) work, overseeing a subcommittee devoted to the task of auditing the School’s financial aid process.
Trey holds a BA in Political Science with a minor in Anthropology from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where he was a Varsity Baseball Academic All-American in 2004. He earned an MA in Educational Leadership from Saint Mary’s College of California (Moraga) in 2007, as an Honors graduate. In 2011, Trey participated in the Klingenstein Summer Institute through Teachers College at Columbia University in New York City. In January of this year, he began pursuit of a doctorate in education at Texas A&M.
We are so fortunate to have taken Trey off of the market for the long haul. When I think about what he has already done in his short time as a school administrator, I relish imagining what he will do for the Lower School at FWCD in the years to come.
A part of the celebration of identifying and hiring Trey needs to be about our Search Advisory Team. In October, our consultants handed over the files to me and eight passionate educators from our Lower School: Dorrine DeChant (Visual Arts); Natasha Hatcher (Spanish); Tammy Wolford (Head Librarian); and one teacher from each grade-level team, Lisa Davenport (K), Chloe Anderson (1), Kristal Takacs (2), Alison Gee (3) and Alicia Schordine (4).That group worked with me to identify 12 candidates with whom to conduct in-depth video conference interviews. Wonderful conversation starters and follow-up questions, copious notes along with in-depth debriefs led the team to identify six semifinalists for further, all-team interviews, from which they identified, two weeks ago, our two finalists. The process worked. The team identified the best Lower School Heads on the market.
My gratitude to all of the parents who shared their thoughts, to all of the Lower School faculty for filling out various surveys and making time for interviews, and, mostly, thanks to the members of the Search Advisory Team for their commitment to the School and to their colleagues.
Congratulations to Trey and his wife, Katie; their daughter, Natty Mae '30; and son, Rhodie (2).
