Sanford Presents Alumni Awards to Five Who Make a Difference
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Head of School Mark Anderson joins 2011 Alumni Award winners Bill Shaw '50, Kenny Mitchell '93, Michael Stadnisky '01, and Peter Fleischut '96 in Quigley Hall. |
During Homecoming 2011, Sanford honored five individuals for their outstanding personal and professional achievements and their contributions to Sanford.
Congratulations to:
Bill Shaw ’50
Kenny Mitchell ’93
Peter Fleischut ‘96
Michael Stadnisky ‘01
Bill Wingerd (Head of Upper School ’55-66)
Click on the name, or scroll down to read more about our 2011 Alumni Award recipients.
William Shaw ’50
Bill Shaw retired in 2005 from a long, distinguished career as a psychologist specializing in children’s academic and social development. He worked in the Claymont School District for 35 years, and had a private practice for some 30 years, some of which overlapped with his time in the schools. Bill was recognized as a pioneer in the use of behavior modification.
He came to Sanford after graduating from high school elsewhere to put in an additional year to prepare him for college. And what he was found here was not only education, but also inspiration and motivation. His greatest champion and inspiration was Sanford founder Ellen Q. Sawin, better known as Mother Sawin. “She believed in me,” Bill says. “She really helped me to pull myself up by the bootstraps and gave me the opportunity to grow.”
Bill matriculated at the University of Delaware the following year, but he also stayed on at Sanford as a dorm counselor for two more years, taking charge of up to 20 Lower and Middle School boys. Mother Sawin recognized that he had a gift, and she convinced him to pursue a career as a teacher, which evolved into a career as a counselor and later a psychologist. He says that he wanted to help others students just the way Mother Sawin had believed in and helped him. Mother and Bill continued a strong relationship as friends and colleagues until her death.
After earning his bachelor’s degree, Bill began teaching in Delaware’s Claymont School District (now known as the Brandywine School District). He simultaneously worked toward a master’s degree in counseling and then became the first-ever elementary school counselor in Delaware. He was so popular and so effective at his work that principals from the middle schools and high school were instructed to call him in crisis situations.
His work in the schools and with state agencies motivated him to return to school for additional coursework and practicum to better understand students’ learning difficulties and he received certification as a school psychologist. Bill was a pioneer in the use of behavior modification to advance students socially and academically. He saw the benefits of these methods not only for children with mental disabilities but also for children with normal abilities who were struggling to reach their potential.
Beginning in the early 1970s, he opened a private practice as well, in which he worked with children, families, and adults. He had a special interest in teaching parenting skills and in helping young adults and adults with physical and psychological problems who came to him through the State of Delaware Vocational Rehabilitation Program. Although he retired from the school district in 1989, he continued in his private practice until 2005.
In addition, he was a consultant, workshop presenter, and trainer of interns and practicum students. He worked as an instructor at the University of Delaware teaching Assessment and Behavior Modification courses. Bill was a member of numerous professional organizations and is proud to have been elected by his peers to be the Delaware state delegate to the National Association of School Psychologists as well as the president of the Delaware Psychological Association.
Bill gives of his talents in other ways, too. He loves golfing, and he has been a volunteer instructor in golf for years, now working with the group First Tee, which uses golf to teach children life values. He serves his alma mater as well. For more than a decade he has been a loyal member of the Sanford School Alumni Association.
Bill, Mother Sawin would certainly be proud of what you have accomplished. She was certainly right, for you did indeed have a real talent and passion for helping children and adults—thousands of them over the years.
Kenny Mitchell ’93
Kenny Mitchell always loved sports, and he was very good at them. Those of you who are of Kenny’s era remember that he was a member of that first Sanford basketball team to win back-to-back state championship titles and that he went on to play basketball at Dartmouth College and professionally in Portugal. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that Kenny is still making a name for himself in sports. These days, however, he is working on the business side of the game, as the Director of Sports Marketing for The Gatorade Company.
Kenny earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Dartmouth College in 1997. There, he was a co-captain, All-Ivy member of the men’s basketball team, and led the nation in assists. After college he embarked on a three-year professional basketball career, which included playing in Portugal and on several U.S.-based semi-professional teams, including the ABA team Delaware Blue Bombers.
He retired from basketball and briefly worked for a digital marketing and advertising agency before returning to Dartmouth and its Tuck School of Business. He earned his MBA from Tuck in 2004. While there he received a Consortium Fellowship as well as the Wally Jones Leadership Award.
Immediately upon graduation he joined PepsiCo, makers of Gatorade and of the first product line that Kenny worked on, Tropicana juices. Within a year he moved over to Gatorade, which makes not only the sports drink we all know but also a litany of sports nutrition products.
Kenny worked his way up the marketing ladder at Gatorade to his current position as head of sports marketing. Kenny’s work is varied and can take him from internal advertising and promotional strategy sessions to external meetings to negotiate new partnerships with athletes, sports leagues, and teams -- to places like China, where recently he accompanied Gatorade spokesman Dwayne Wade to appear in Shanghai. In November, Kenny will be traveling to Australia with Michael Jordan on a similar trip.
A key marketing strategy for Gatorade is to showcase the best athletes in the world consuming Gatorade products. It is Kenny and his team who decide which sports, leagues, teams, and individual athletes the sports nutrition company should align itself with. Kenny does the negotiating and works closely with an athlete’s management and marketing team on appearances, commercial shoots, and collaborations with charities and nonprofit foundations.
Just as an indicator of the breadth and complexity of the job, Gatorade Sports Marketing works with 30 athletes in 10-12 sports. These include the major stick-and-ball sports such as basketball and baseball, including the NBA and 24 of its teams and three individual players as well as 17 baseball teams and players Derek Jeter and Joe Mauer. One of Kenny’s major marketing achievements was to help pioneer the Action Sports initiative that brought Gatorade visibility in the rapidly growing action sports arena, which includes such sports as BMX, skateboarding, and snowboarding.
Kenny says he is grateful for all of his Sanford teachers, particularly those who touched his life in profound ways. He calls Sue Dagenais, then an English teacher, “an amazing, incredibly empathetic person” and thanks her for helping him to get more comfortable in his skin as a new student of color at Sanford. He is grateful to the late Helen Vermeychuk for helping him to understand that he could be just as strong at English and other subjects as he was at science and math. He credits her for helping him to succeed in college. Most of all, he feels indebted to Stan Waterman, who was his assistant coach, and then his head coach, on the basketball team. Stan, he says, taught him how to be a leader on the court, and provided a great example of how to be man off the court.
Kenny, we are all proud of the man that you have grown into and of your achievements in academics, on the court, and in your career.
Peter M. Fleischut ’96
No one can accuse Peter Fleischut of avoiding difficult issues, for he is tackling on one of the most pressing, controversial and seemingly intractable problems in health care today: How to provide high-quality care while containing escalating costs.
Peter is taking an unorthodox approach to the issue by working with the people on the front lines of providing medical care instead of approaching it from the top down. Peter has written articles, made presentations, and lectured at academic institutions about his work, and medical professionals and even government decision makers across the country are beginning to take notice.
A graduate of the Honors Program at the University of Delaware, Peter not only has an MD from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia but also has taken numerous courses in the Medical Science Program at MCP Hahnemann University, the Business Institute at Villanova University, and the Wharton Program for Working Professionals at the University of Pennsylvania’s highly regarded business school.
Juggling all those courses—sometimes simultaneously—was probably good preparation for Peter’s career. He is not only a practicing anesthesiologist with a specialty in liver transplantation but also an assistant professor in the Department of Anesthesiology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical College and the Deputy Quality and Patient Safety Officer for New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where he led the upgrade of the hospital’s Medical Event Reporting System.
Peter says he knew very early in life that he wanted to be a medical doctor, and in college he realized that he wanted to combine his interests in business and medicine to improve health care in this country. “There’s a widespread perception that higher cost care is better quality care, and that’s not necessarily true,” he says.
Peter began his hands-on approach to addressing quality of care while still a resident at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. He along with two other residents designed and implemented a program whereby residents, nurses, physician’s assistants, pharmacy staff and lower-level administrators collaborated to create workable, day-to-day policies and procedures for improving patient safety. Peter is just now completing a three-year evaluation of the improvements in compliance and attitudes as a result of that project, but he points to one early indicator in which compliance among hospital staff improved from 40% to 90% after the policies and procedures for checking on medications were revised.
In addition to his work on hospital policies and procedures, Peter has an interest in electronic medical records and their ability to improve quality of care. The field of anesthesiology has always been at the forefront of patient safety, and Peter uses his knowledge and experiences in that area for his research and writings on how to improve patient safety in general.
When you learn about all that Peter has accomplished, it is gratifying to hear from him that—of all that he has done and experienced in his life—his time at Sanford has been the most influential. Peter came to us as a 6th grader when his family moved to Delaware from York, Pennsylvania. As kids often do, he dreaded the move, but he says that at Sanford he found welcoming arms from students and faculty alike, and he thrived because of the close friendships with peers and the personal attention he received from every teacher in every class.
At Sanford, he says, he was taught that he could achieve anything he wanted in life if he worked at it.
Peter, what can we say? It seems you have proven your teachers right. You have already achieved so much, and you are leading the way in a crucial area of medicine—improving quality of health care.
Mike Stadnisky ’01
He is just 10 years out of Sanford, but Mike Stadnisky is already making a name for himself in the challenging and fast-evolving fields of genetics and microbiology, with awards, publications and even a patent in the works.
After successfully defending his PhD at the University of Virginia in December, he began working as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the same university. His research focuses on the very early immune response to infection, research that he hopes could lead to a biological treatment that would reprogram the immune system to recognize and eradicate solid tumors.
Mike credits his education at Sanford, and particularly the science education he received inside and outside the classroom, with putting him on the path to his career. His mentors at Sanford included Andre Dagenais, who advised the extracurricular club Project Beyond that sparked Mike’s passion for science. Mike particularly remembers the annual Mousetrap Engineering Competition at Widener University. The goal was to construct a mousetrap-powered device such as boat or car. For weeks before the competition, the students worked on perfecting their device, designing and redesigning based on past failures, an experience that Mike says prepared him well for lab research.
After graduating from Sanford, Mike attended Clemson University on a full academic scholarship where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree magna cum laude in biochemistry. The next fall he entered the graduate program at the University of Virginia and began his work examining the role of innate immunity in directing the T-cell response to viral infection. His research group was one of the first in the country to look at how the stage is set very early in our body’s fight against infection. This led to his current research question: How can we reprogram patients’ bad immune response that they can actually fight off viruses and cancer?
The lab he in which he now works as a postdoc is the same one in which he worked as a graduate student, though he now leads a small team of scientists developing drug discovery tools. The lab has been highly successful during Mike’s tenure, with the number of researchers doubling, the funding tripling, and the lab space increasing eight-fold. And now, they are hoping to spin off the research into a separate biotechnology company of which Mike will be the first employee and primary investigator.
Mike has the background for that work thanks to additional training that included the Virginia Biosciences Development Center Biotech Bootcamp. He has also worked as a product development intern at a Nabi Biopharmaceuticals and as a consultant evaluating start-up business plans and preclinical research and development programs at Druid BioVentures.
In addition to his early immune response work, Mike is supervising a second research study, this one a genetic study of 40 different readouts in a genetically mixed animal population. For this complicated study, Mike is developing software tools that can plot and analyze data in 40 dimensions and perform other high-end statistical analyses. Trying to make sense of the massive amounts of genetic information currently available to scientists, he explains, is like looking at a bucket of data. The challenge for biology now is to create tools to pull out the relevant bits of information and present them in an understandable way.
Mike has a passion for his work that is further fed by hearing stories from his wife, Heather, a nurse practitioner in pediatric hematology and oncology. Through her eyes he sees how early research like his eventually makes a real difference in people’s lives.
William N. Wingerd
On occasion Sanford honors non-alumni with Achievement Awards as well. This year we are pleased to recognize Bill Wingerd, who served from 1955 to 1966 as associate director of the school and Upper School principal and was also charged with nearly all functions that involved the boys. He was respected and well liked by students and faculty alike, and the Class of 1966 honored him by asking him to be their graduation speaker. Bill says that in recent years he has been deeply touched that some of his former Sanford students have reached out to contact him.
Bill earned his bachelor’s degree from Haverford College and then served in the Army Air Corps during World War II. He began his career in education as a math teacher and coach at a small public high school in Pennsylvania. He left after four years to complete graduate work at Penn State for a master’s degree in clinical psychology. When he returned to the workforce, it was in school administration. He served as Director of Guidance for three years at the Perkiomen School before coming to Sanford School.
Bill was a teacher at heart, and so he always made time to teach a math course at Sanford in addition to his administrative duties. He went out of his way to help students who were struggling. For example, when he encountered a Sanford student who tested high in intelligence but was struggling to read and write, Bill investigated and learned all about dyslexia, then a little-known and rarely diagnosed learning disability, so he could work with this student and help him to succeed.
While at Sanford Bill and his wife and three sons lived in The Haven cottage, and his three sons attended Sunny Hills, then the name for Sanford’s Lower School. They loved their lives here at Sanford and the people with whom they lived and worked.
Bill left Sanford in 1966 for the Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Connecticut. He spent 25 years there before retiring at the age of 71. His time at Choate was both varied and rewarding. He held the positions of director of students with college placement duties, then director of summer programs, and finally, in his last years, as a teacher and acting chairman of the Behavior and Ethics Department.
Bill numbers among the high points of his career the year 1969, a turbulent time in secondary and post-secondary schools, when he chaired a committee of faculty and students at Choate charged with bringing about profound transformation to the programs and policies of the school. Working with two Yale Medical School professors, in 1968 he organized a program in sex education, which was a rarity in those days. He later introduced a new course in adolescence and coauthored the book Understanding and Enjoying Adolescence.
He kept his hand in education even after retirement by serving on the school board at his new home in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and on the Franklin Learning Center for special children, where he also was chairman of the board. For 15 years he wrote essays, primarily on education topics, for the county’s leading newspaper.
Bill coached boys’ tennis for 10 years while here at Sanford, and he continued to play tennis for many years afterward—67 in all. At the age of 75 he and a partner won the State Championship in Pennsylvania in the 75 and older category.
Unfortunately, Bill was unable to attend the ceremony. We congratulate him for his accomplishments and hope to see him at next year's Homecoming celebration.