George Hess, the founding Board Chair for Baltimore Curriculum Project (BCP), has been at the BCP helm for nearly 30 years. Since 2017, he and Mike Nicollini have split leadership duties as Co-chairs. In 1996, the year BCP was founded, he was tapped by Dr. Muriel Berkeley, BCP co-founder, to serve as Board Chair for the newly created educational nonprofit.
We spoke to George about his tenure and his passion for BCP and education.
How did you get involved with BCP?
I was friends with Muriel and was CEO of Hess Shoes. But well before that, I was a very bad student at the Park School. When I was ten years old, I played hooky and took two buses and a streetcar to the A&P in Pikesville, where I would carry packages to people’s cars. Someone told my mother, and my father spoke to his friend Henry Callard, who was headmaster at Gilman School. He agreed to take the first Jewish kid at Gilman. From 5th grade on, the school was phenomenal and had a profound effect on me. Education [became] to me the most important thing I could experience. I went on to Dartmouth College, then went to the Union Theological Seminary for a week, realized that I was Jewish, and came home to Baltimore.
I joined the Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC) and quickly gravitated to the GBC education committee, which led me to a fair amount of interaction with the heads of the Baltimore City Public Schools. Education is very important to me, and I fought with various City Schools heads about improving public education in the 1970s and 80s. I didn’t make much progress.
I knew Muriel from her work with the Abell Foundation and through her husband, Al, who is my friend. Muriel was trying to find a curriculum that could improve Baltimore schools, and that is how she found Direct Instruction. She asked me to lead the BCP Board, and I jumped at the chance.
What’s kept you inspired for 30 years?
Between Muriel and now Laura Dougherty, who has been BCP President and CEO for 13 years or more, we’re making progress. We are definitely showing the school system that if you have good supervision of teachers, good teachers, and are constantly on top of the supervisors of those teachers, good things happen. BCP principals know that they’re getting support from us, and we know what they’re doing because we meet in those schools. We have people in those schools all the time. I feel a part of all that. There’s something very satisfying when you know that you’re doing something to improve kids’ education, particularly for me, who has cared so much about education from the get-go.
There are too many BCP leaders to name who’ve helped us reach our goals and expand our founding vision, from our Principals and BCP staff, past and present, like Jon McGill, the past BCP Director of Academics, and Harold S. Henry. Jr., who was the Principal at Frederick Elementary when the school joined the BCP network and is now BCP’s Chief of Schools.
Another highlight are the Instructional Coaches at every BCP school. These educators help teachers and students and are an important part of the teaching team – and a distinction of our educational model.
Talk about the early years with BCP introducing Direct Instruction to City Schools, before BCP became a charter school organization.
Some teachers embraced it quickly. Some didn’t like change, but Muriel was very persuasive. She didn’t give up. I would sit and watch her work with the teacher, and I could see the difference it made. This month, BCP is one of three school networks nationwide to be awarded the inaugural Silver Star Award for exceptional, long-term commitment to utilizing Direct Instruction programs with fidelity by the National Institute for Direct Instruction.
How has your BCP board experience differed from your other civic and philanthropic work?
I’ve been around different boards from a business sense and from a charitable board sense. I helped to found the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies and am lightly involved in our synagogue, Beth El. I’ve been on the board for Gilman for 55 years and was chair from 1990 to 1994.
Organizations are only as good as their people. My Co-chair, Mike Nicollini, really cares. He’s a damn fine executive. So you start with the guy running the ship, and then each person who is a committee chair has a BCP staff person or people that Laura Dougherty designates.
Reflecting on the past 30 years with BCP, what’s the greatest lesson you’ve learned?
Patience. If you have good people, you have to give them time and make it happen. And you can’t become complacent about the organization.
What’s your favorite BCP accomplishment?
Lots of things pop into my head, but one of the greatest things is our model. We have a very notable group of people who care on our Board. Unlike most school boards who by and large don’t know much about many of the schools, our Board does. We have our meetings in our schools, and we hear from our Principals.
We also have a lot of great teachers and instructional coaches in BCP. We’re always trying to improve not only the teachers, but the curriculum that we have. Right now, we have a new math program, Reveal Math, that we’ve launched in nearly all our schools.
Thank you, George, for your wonderful leadership over the past three decades!