Renaissance Man Takes The Reins At CDS

By Ralph Nicholson

When Country Day School went looking for a new Director for their campus in Brasilito, Guanacaste, they unwittingly found a real renaissance man.

On paper, 47-year-old Jeff Haun was a teacher with more than 20 years’ experience, most recently as the Director of a small school in Vilnius, Lithuania.

In reality, Mr Haun is a school director, a teacher, a traveler, a baseball player, a painter and a cook, and this week he took over the reins of the eight-year-old, Guanacaste campus.

“What’s really important to me is building a community within the school, making teachers feel they are being supported, making parents feel like they are being listened to,” Mr Haun said of his new job this week.

“I like having a very positive atmosphere at school,” he added. “I like having the feeling that the kids like the school, the teachers seem happy, and the parents as well.”

The Hauns (his wife Sarah has also taken a position at CDS, as first-grade teacher) first came to Costa Rica as newlyweds and backpackers, honeymooning in the country for a month back in 1999.

Then the traveling began in earnest, first to Morocco in 2001 where the pair taught at a small school in Ifrane, a mountain town between Fez and Meknes, for four years. From there they swapped the Atlas Mountains for the northern climes of Lithuania, where for at least four months of the year they counted no more than six hours daylight.

In some respects Mr Haun was born to teach, he just didn’t realize it until his sophomore year.

He was in college on a baseball scholarship, helping out in his little brother’s third grade class, when the teacher pointed out his obvious skill. It was then he declared his major.

What followed was 15 years of special education, teaching emotionally-disturbed kids.

“It is a tough job if you don’t like it, but for some reason it was my niche, and it was never that difficult,” says Mr Haun.

“There were hard times and I saw people that tried to teach it but found it difficult and didn’t last very long. I don’t know, maybe it is just a personality quirk, where I just enjoyed it. I work well with those kinds of kids. I miss it a lot.”

It’s during those years he took up painting and cooking.

“I love to paint. I don’t sit and paint a picture of the house or the trees; I’m definitely more into the abstract.

“For the last 12 or 13 years it’s been important for me to get my studio place, some place that I can get messy. Art was something I really got into when I was teaching special education — I found it was a great release.

“And my hour in the kitchen when I got home. If I had room mates they all knew to leave me alone, I needed that quiet time at the end of the day.”

Country Day School, or CDS as it is more popularly known, boasts 130 students this year, including seven boarding students, taught by 22 teachers.

Three years ago it was granted official accreditation from the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools, considered one of most progressive of the six regional accrediting organizations in the US.

The re-accreditation process, which comes around every five years, is one reason Jeff Haun has his job. He went through the process in Lithuania, guiding the school through accreditation.

“They want to see that you are still doing what you said you could,” he says. “Because when you get accredited nobody gets the perfect gold star in every area, so there may be some ideas and things to work on.

“We will be setting goals and looking at what they call the self-study where you evaluate every aspect of your program, transportation, safety issues, etc...”

And since CDS is both a US college-preparatory school, as well as a business, Mr Haun will be trying to grow the business. While school leaders accept they can’t necessarily affect day-school enrolments, they do believe they can improve the boarding program, effectively bringing in more business.

This year the dormitory staff is all new, including the supervisor who worked with the new Director in Morocco.

In fact, Mr Haun says he has been given the freedom to move CDS in whatever direction, whatever personality the school needs to take on, as long as it keeps within the Country Day School philosophy.

“In some ways, yes, I am a traditionalist a little bit, just in my approach to things like basic skills,” he says. “But I also believe we need to take full advantage of this area, in any way that we can, getting out, incorporating the culture, include the landscape and the environment in what we do.

“They can go together, there is nothing that says you can’t have traditional learning; with the outdoors experience,” he adds.

“There is no doubt that experiential learning is deeper than traditional learning, but we are not going to be the rote learning, you go to the local schools that just don’t have the funding and they have to do that.

“Schools all over the world have that, but every time students from those types of schools walk through the doors of a school like this, it is like nothing they have ever seen.

“It’s not just teacher attitude and people wanting to get to know you as a person not just as a student, it’s not just the freedom to express yourself. We really believe in the philosophy that if you question, you are learning. You just don’t take your teacher as the ultimate authority; if you question them, you question them, and it is up to the teacher to prove it.

“You ask questions and you learn for yourself, it is trying to teach other cultures about that, that aren’t used to it, that we teach kids how to learn, how to find the information for themselves.

“They [the students] should go away from the American experience in education, knowing how to learn what ever it is they want to learn, or to find the information, and be excited about it. In any subject.”

Mr Haun says a good teacher knows to guide a student through the learning process, and is there to support them.

“The more a teacher lectures, the less learning is going on in that classroom.”