ALUMNI PROFILE
Wanda Marie Holland ’89:
Educator Follows Her Calling
 Wanda
Marie Holland ’89 is one of the younger school principals
around. For the past five years, she has worked at The Park School
in Brookline, Mass., as upper school division head. She is responsible
for grades 6–9 in the private day school for children in nursery
school through 9th grade.
“I knew from the age of 3 that I wanted to be a teacher,”
Holland says. “I always felt it in my sprit, like a calling.
I’d take my sister’s coloring books and make big red
checks on them.”
As a youngster, Holland called herself “Miss Marie,”
a name she just liked. In those days, she didn’t have a middle
name. For Holland’s college graduation, her mother gave her
a new birth certificate with an official name change to Wanda Marie
Holland.
After graduation, Holland completed a master’s in curriculum
and instruction at Teachers College while teaching part-time at
the Columbia Greenhouse Nursery School. She returned to her high
school alma mater, The Chapin School on the Upper East Side, as
a third-grade teacher. After four years in the classroom, she was
offered an administrative position as dean of students for grades
6–12.
“I planned to teach for years and years and always aspired
to school leadership, but never knew it would happen so quickly,”
she says.
For three years, Holland worked on community service, student
leadership, clubs and weekend activities. At the same time, she
taught one class of eighth-grade English, giving her a chance to
use her undergraduate English degree, and went back to Teachers
College part-time to complete a second master’s, in private
school leadership.
When a friend told Holland that the Park School near Boston was
looking for a middle school principal, Holland, who grew up in Brooklyn
and didn’t want to move away from the city, at first said
she wasn’t interested. When her friend insisted, however,
Holland faxed a résumé.
When Holland learned more about the school, she became more intrigued.
The Park School is suburban and co-ed, both changes from Chapin,
which is all girls. In addition, the school makes an effort toward
diversity, both economic and racial, Holland says. “Over time,
the world seems quite artificial when it’s not diverse,”
she says. “And [diversity] is not always [the case with] some
of the very traditional schools, which have not always been able
to recruit in their students or faculty a range of people with a
variety of experiences. I love Chapin so much, but for those seven
years, I was one of two African-American faculty.”
After extensive interviewing, Holland accepted the position at
the Park School. “I thought, ‘If I’m really going
to be true to my independent school education, I have to push myself
beyond this very comfortable place,’” and take the risk
of moving out of New York and to another school.
Holland’s duties include participating in the development
of school policies and practices, making recommendations to the
school’s head regarding the hiring and dismissal of faculty,
supervising and evaluating faculty and participating in the school’s
strategic planning. Holland also is a trustee at Concord Academy,
where she chairs the diversity committee, and recently joined Columbia’s
Board of Visitors. In 1995, she received the Alumna Achievement
Award from Columbia College Women.
Holland loves her job, and last year, she married Robert Greene,
who works in admissions at the Belmont Boys School. In their time
away from school, Holland and Greene travel as much as possible;
in the past year, they were in Hawaii, Spain and Venezuela, and
worked the Montreal Jazz Festival into their honeymoon. They’re
both music lovers: he plays saxophone and she is a singer who used
to direct the Columbia-Barnard gospel choir.
“My job is so dynamic and so complex,” Holland says.
“In one hour, I can be walking down the hall with a sixth-grader
who lost his backpack somewhere in the building and then heading
to an educational policy meeting looking at school-wide issues and
strategic planning. It goes from the big scope to the small scope,
but it’s all equally important. It’s so wonderful.”
S.J.B.
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