Bill Christ has always had a knack for spotting potential.
In 1987, the Baltimore native arrived in Cleveland as an enthusiastic 36-year-old teacher and school administrator who had just been tapped by the Hathaway Brown board of trustees to be the 13th head of the venerable school for girls. As he flew over Lake Erie for the first time with his wife, Diane, he remembers thinking that they were exactly where they were supposed to be. “When I saw that big blue body of water through the airplane window, I knew we had found our home,” he says.
A member of the Leadership Cleveland Class of 1992, Christ is a magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Washington and Lee, and he holds a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2005, he was designated one of 20 Outstanding Independent School Heads in the United States by Columbia University’s Klingenstein Center for Independent School Leadership. He has been actively engaged in numerous educational organizations and community agencies in Greater Cleveland, and he was named one of the area’s Most Interesting People by Cleveland magazine.
“I’ve always seen Cleveland as an inspiring place,” Christ says. “It’s big and small in all the right ways. Individual people can make a real impact here, but even more important, Clevelanders are eager to collaborate, to partner, and to do creative things together. That makes all the difference. Our school is deeply connected to the city, and there’s a wonderful reciprocity there. We have tremendous intellectual, cultural and experiential resources at our disposal. Students and faculty leverage those resources to better themselves, and then they in turn do their part to improve the region in a variety of ways.”
Over the course of the last three decades, he has tapped into that spirit of community engagement to guide HB from a distinguished school of 479 students — mainly young women hailing from Cleveland’s East Side — to an outstanding institution with a national reputation for innovation, serving 850 students from 83 different cities and towns in Northeast Ohio. “When I first got to know HB, I was filled with admiration for the quality of the school and the history of one of Cleveland’s most long-standing academic and cultural institutions,” he says. “I also was impressed with the faculty. They were warm, very dynamic, incredibly knowledgeable and charismatic. They loved the girls in their care, and they were passionate about teaching. I saw them as a powerful resource — they were the primary reason I came here. I knew immediately that we could help HB grow and aspire to become an even more impactful version of itself, and that’s just what we did.”
In a letter to the school community announcing Christ’s impending retirement in July 2016, Paul Matsen, president of the HB board of trustees and chief marketing and communications officer for the Cleveland Clinic, said, “Bill does more than embrace the HB motto, ‘We Learn Not for School, But for Life.’ He embodies it. There is no more tenacious champion for world-class girls’ education than he. While this is indeed a sad moment for us, Bill is leaving HB standing in extremely good stead.” In October, school officials announced that Christ will be succeeded by Mary Frances Bisselle, a member of the board of trustees for the National Association of Independent Schools who currently serves as head of Maple Street School, a K-8 school founded by Academy Award-winning screenwriter and bestselling novelist John Irving and his wife, Janet, in Manchester Center, Vermont.
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History describes HB as the oldest surviving private girls’ school in the Cleveland area, founded in 1876 as an adjunct to the Brooks Military School, the foremost private school for boys at the time. (Christ is fond of pointing out that the original boys’ school, which closed in 1891, has been outlived by HB for more than a century.) At the time of its establishment, according to the encyclopedia, HB had a twofold mission: “to prepare upper-class women for a career in society and to equip them with well-trained minds.” These days, the school has its sights set much higher, and graduates attend many of the top colleges and universities in the world. “We knew that education for girls had to be reinvented for today’s world,” Christ says. “Somebody had to do that; why shouldn’t it be Hathaway Brown?”
Perhaps his most notable achievement at HB’s helm is Christ’s visionary establishment of the Institute for 21st Century Education, which reimagines traditional academic architecture and allows students to explore their passions and expand their real-world skills in a variety of disciplines. “We discovered that the best way to blow the doors off school was to combine traditional academic excellence with powerful experiential learning opportunities. That was the missing link. Girls always have done well in school; that wasn’t the problem we were trying to solve. We wanted to give girls the opportunity to learn about the real world by putting them in the real world in a thoughtful, sophisticated way. And we were able to do that right here in Cleveland.”
The Institute is comprised of 11 distinct centers running the gamut from civic engagement to business and finance. Participation in the centers is voluntary, and those enrolled have the opportunity to earn special diploma designations not often seen on high school transcripts. One of the most popular choices for beyond-the-classroom learning is the Science Research & Engineering Program, which matches students with working research scientists at world-class facilities including University Hospitals, Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University and NASA Glenn Research Center.
Nearly a third of HB high schoolers take part in the program, which gives them the chance to contribute to the kinds of projects they normally wouldn’t be exposed to until college or even graduate school. A full 90 percent of girls in grades 9 through 12 also participate in the school’s Center for Global Citizenship, which immerses them in the cultures of countries around the world through the innovative international curricular programs, language study and complementary coursework. The Osborne Writing Center, which regularly brings in New York Times best-selling authors to work with students in small group settings, also is a considerable draw. The Institute has gained quite a reputation in academic circles. In the last year alone, nearly three dozen public and private schools from around the country sent delegations to HB to study its approach.
During Christ’s tenure, HB has exponentially expanded its footprint in the region and beyond. In brick-and-mortar terms, 95,000 square feet of learning space has been added to the school’s Shaker Heights campus since 1991. Upgrades include a four-story Graham Gund-designed glass atrium at the center of the school that encompasses a co-ed Infant and Toddler Center and Early Childhood program and the signature K-12 program for girls. Other campus upgrades include a natatorium, year-round turf playing field and state-of-the-art design and engineering laboratory. Christ has overseen three significant capital campaigns, and the school is now enjoying its strongest endowment in history — $53.5 million as of June 30, 2015.
He may be retiring from HB, but Christ is not quite ready yet to call it quits. “There’s still a lot of work to be done in opening up fully the possibilities for girls and women,” he says. “Around the world, wherever education is seen as a pathway for actualizing potential, everything changes. HB has been on a heroic mission, and we have developed a pretty good formula for liberating and applying the creativity of girls. I think there’s a way to continue that trajectory of firing up minds, building confidence and strength. When you create a better world for girls and women, you create a better world for everyone.”