About

I'm Yoni. For the last thirteen years I've led independent schools, as a head, an interim head, and at times from the board side too. Before that I came up through counseling and student support. I've been in it long enough to know how hard the job is, and long enough to respect the people who've been doing it far longer than I have.

I've spent my whole career in this world, since 2001, coming at it from a lot of different angles. I started as a special-needs aide and running a middle-school afterschool program, earned a master's in counseling from Boston University, and worked as a school counselor at a boarding school in California. From there I moved into leadership in Minnesota, as a middle school counselor and director, then interim head, then head of school for eight years, and since then I've served as interim and head at Waldorf schools on both coasts, most recently at the Brooklyn Waldorf School, where I also served on the board.

I've navigated crises, hard conversations with families, board transitions and board conflict, union relationships, legal matters, and DEIJ, and the delicate work of understanding a school's culture and helping it grow. I've been part of major fundraising and development, including building an endowment, and I've helped schools reverse enrollment decline and build lasting growth. None of it unique to me, it's the work, and every head knows it.

Here's what I kept noticing. Whenever I reached out to another head, there was almost always an instant understanding, and a real willingness to help. The generosity was there. There are good things out there already, associations, conferences, listservs, but connection tends to be a byproduct of those, not the point, and it often stops at your region or your kind of school. I kept wishing for something whose whole purpose was this: heads and schools finding each other across all of it, on purpose, not just the ones down the road.

Not commiseration, not "you're good at that, I'm good at this", something generative. One conversation, and suddenly there's an idea, or an approach, or a piece of work that wouldn't exist otherwise. The connection is just the spark.

That's the idea behind The Common Field. All schools, and the people who lead them, are working toward the same hard, essential thing: the education and wellbeing of children, the strengthening of communities, a steadier future. In that sense we aren't thousands of separate schools. We're part of one field. I want to make it easier for everyone in it to find one another, and then see what grows from there.