Student-run community meetings. K-12 social action projects. Holistic supports for students & families. Thabiti Brown wants it all. He is head of school for Codman Academy Charter Public School, one of the most innovative schools in the state if not the country. Thabiti is one of those rare people recognized nationally as both a teacher & a principal. And yet we’ll hear him speaking so vulnerably about current challenges like retaining strong teachers and balancing academic rigor with their holistic model.Thabiti talks about growing up in NYC as "a nerd’s nerd" amidst family and schools that celebrated blackness and the African diaspora. He went on to Hunter College High School, Brown University, and Teachers College. He fell in love with teaching through the Breakthrough Collaborative in Portland Oregon and then worked in New York and later in Panama. Since 2001 he has been at Codman—first as a founding humanities teacher before becoming head of school for their entire K-12 operation. He won a Milken Educator Award as a high school humanities teacher in 2005 and then in 2014 EL Education honored him with the Silverberg Leadership Award for his work as a principal.