Board of Trustees
Meet Your Trustees
2020-21 Trustees:
Kirby Chin
Kirby Chin is a partner at the law firm of Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP. He has nearly 25 years of experience in commercial finance and banking, and primarily represents financial institutions, investment funds and companies in structuring and negotiating loan transactions. Kirby is a life-long New Yorker and obtained both his undergraduate and law school degrees from New York University. Kirby serves on the Committee on Trustees and is the chair of the Audit Committee. He and his wife, Yvonne, have two children at Grace.
Yoo Jin Kim
Yoo Jin Kim is a partner and co-founder of Lee Equity Partners, a private equity firm with $2.5 billion under management and focused on majority control buyout investments in business services, healthcare services and financial services. Previously, Yoo Jin was a principal at Bain Capital, and a strategy consultant at Corporate Decisions, Inc. Yoo Jin currently serves on the board of directors of several companies; his past non-profit board experience includes Project Sunshine and advisory board to the Dartmouth College Fund Committee. Yoo Jin received an A.B. from Dartmouth College and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He serves on the Finance and Development Committees, and he and his wife, Nan Teele, have two children at Grace.
Naomi Nwosu-Stewart
Dr. Naomi Nwosu-Stewart has over 20 years of experience in education, ranging from a NYC DOE classroom teacher to a higher education administrator. She currently serves as the director of enrollment management services and an adjunct of secondary math & science education at the City University of New York. Naomi has conducted extensive research on teacher preparation, in collaboration with the Carroll & Milton Petrie Foundation, CUNY and the NYC Partnership for Teacher Excellence. Naomi served on the First Presbyterian Nursery School Board from 2016–2019. She earned her Ph.D. in Urban Education with a Specialization in Science, Math and Technology from the CUNY Graduate Center; an M.A. in Biology Education from New York University; a MS.ED in Educational Administration & Supervision from CUNY Baruch College and a M.PHIL in Urban Education from the CUNY Graduate Center. Naomi has served on the Education Committee since 2017 and is also a member of the Committee on Trustees. She and her husband, Phillip Stewart, have two children at Grace.
Camille Orme
Camille Orme is a partner of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, where her practice focuses on financial institutions law and regulation. At the law firm, she is Senior Advisor to the Women’s Initiative Committee, having served as the committee’s co-chair for over a decade, and is an Associate Development Partner for the Financial Services Group. She has been recognized for her work in Chambers USA in Financial Services Regulation: Banking Compliance and was awarded the Best in Financial Regulation award at Euromoney Legal Media Group’s Americas Women in Business Law Awards in 2016 and 2018. She has been a faculty member of the Banking Law Fundamentals programs at the University of California’s Berkeley Center for Law, Business and the Economy and the Boston University School of Law. Camille has been resident in Sullivan & Cromwell’s New York office since graduating from the University of Chicago Law School in 2000. Camille has served on Grace Church School’s Finance Committee since 2015. She has two daughters at Grace.
Jason Slibeck
Vestry Trustee
Jason Slibeck and his wife, Sara Queen, are the proud parents of two Grace alumni, Bennett ’17 and Emma ’20. The Slibeck family continues to be actively involved with the Grace community. As a parent, Jason volunteered for many years on the Technology Committee and helped launch Grace’s championship FIRST Lego League robotics team. Currently, Jason is a member of the Vestry at Grace Church, regularly volunteers in many parish roles, and chairs the Outreach Committee, which partners with Habitat for Humanity, Hope for Our Neighbors in Need, Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison, the GO Project and other service organizations. After serving in the Persian Gulf and in other overseas deployments as an officer in the United States Navy, Jason built a successful career leading entrepreneurial ventures in the public, private and non-profit sectors from a pioneering Internet Service Provider to a service mission umbrella organization in Times Square and world leading ventures in biometrics and cybersecurity. He is a graduate of MIT, with a Bachelor of Science in Political Science and a Master of Engineering in Logistics Focused on Systems Engineering and Electronic Commerce. Jason enjoys spending time outdoors, has hiked over 2,000+ miles of the Appalachian Trail, and is launching his latest start-up, Sly Fox Farm, an organic farm in Vermont. At Grace, Jason serves on the Joint Committee and the Long Range Planning Committee.
Valerie Toscano
Valerie Toscano has over twenty years of financial services product, marketing and technology experience. Her expertise is in project management, process improvement and change management, having led multimillion dollar, cross-functional projects. After her corporate career, Valerie started consulting for small businesses and start-ups, helping them scale processes and execute project programs that support rapid growth. An active member of the GCS parent community, Valerie has chaired the Scholarship Benefit Auction, May Fair and Book Fair. She is an enthusiastic volunteer for PA events and is currently serving her final year as the Parents’ Association Treasurer. She serves on the Finance and Long Range Planning Committees. A lifelong New Yorker, Valerie is an avid tennis player, home chef and traveler. She lives in Greenwich Village with her husband, Michael, and son, who is a student at Grace.
Meet Your Trustees
2019-20 Trustees:
Donna Garban
Donna Garban is the owner of Little City Books in Hoboken, which opened in 2015. She currently serves on the Hoboken Special Improvement District Steering Committee. Donna worked as a Municipal Bond Specialist for 25 years, most recently at Green Coast Capital Partners and Goldman Sachs. She also consulted for Mercy Corps and JP Morgan in social investment and municipal bonds, respectively. Donna served on the Investment Committee of Cornelia Connolly School on the Lower East Side. She became a trustee of The Jubilee Center (an afterschool program for families in public housing) in 2007 and served as chair in 2009–2010. In 2014–2015, Donna was an Encore Fellow at Green City Force in Williamsburg as Head of Business Development, helping young adults in public housing work in the green economy. She was active on the Stevens Cooperative School Board for 10 years and was Treasurer from 2014–18. Donna has a B.S. from the University of Virginia. She serves on Grace’s Finance and Institutional Culture Committees and is the mother of a current senior and two alumnae.
Kenji Yoshino
Kenji Yoshino, Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at the NYU School of Law and the Director of the Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, is a graduate of Harvard (A.B. summa cum laude), Oxford (M.S. as a Rhodes Scholar) and Yale (J.D.). He specializes in constitutional law, antidiscrimination law and law and literature. He is the author of three books: “Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights”; “A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare’s Plays Teach Us About Justice” and “Speak Now: Marriage Equality on Trial.” Kenji has been published in major academic journals, including the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. In 2011, Kenji was elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers, serving as president in the 2016–17 academic year. He also serves on the board of the Brennan Center for Justice and on the External Advisory Panel for Diversity and Inclusion for the World Bank Group. He has won numerous awards for his teaching and scholarship, including the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award in 2016 and an honorary degree from Pomona College in 2018. Kenji serves on the Institutional Culture Committee. He and his husband, Ron Stoneham, have two children at Grace.
GCS LONG RANGE PLAN: A PROGRESS REPORT
Lee Chamberlin, Past Chair, Long Range Planning Committee
The Program goal of the Plan was thrust into the spotlight as the academic year’s trajectory took a sudden, dizzying swerve. The School showed remarkable flexibility in moving quickly to deliver program elements in new and age appropriate ways in each of the four divisions, never losing sight of the Program aim of “promot[ing] excellence in mind, body, heart and spirit across the school community, divisions and academic disciplines.” Anticipating closure, the School responded by ending classes a day early for spring break to provide faculty training and Zoom practice sessions in preparation for smooth, all-remote teaching April 1. The faculty did an amazing job of adapting to remote teaching and learning, with the consensus that students reached all of the fundamental goals of the School’s program, even though unable to enjoy the nuance and depth that they would have experienced with in-person instruction. This was true at all levels, but the younger the student, the less effective the remote learning environment.
The Program goal also includes specific focus on integrating and strengthening the School’s STEAM curricula and reviewing the scope and sequence of language instruction at all levels. During the 2018–19 year, departmental self-studies by the Foreign Languages and Math Departments were conducted. Both reports offered recommendations, some of which were implemented in full or in part in 2019–20. With regard to language instruction, work progressed in a number of areas, including focus on offering beginning languages to new Middle School (MS) students during flex time; efforts to emphasize benefits of staying with one language at key transition points; consideration to offering Mandarin in MS, should there be sufficient interest; and consideration to expanding Latin curricular resources for those who wish to pursue classics in college. Efforts took place with the Dean of Equity and Inclusion to propose specific professional development for the language department to undertake. Work in connection with math instruction focused on increasing math support for students and teachers. This took the form of adding a member of the Math Department to the Math Science Center leadership, to train consultants and match them with students, and assigning a math specialist to the Middle School Learning Center to provide individual support in class and out.
Under the second Goal of the Plan—concerning the School’s Episcopal identity and its commitment to Diversity and Inclusion—a significant accomplishment was the creation of a new standing committee of the Board known as the Institutional Culture Committee (ICC) to focus on diversity and inclusion. The ICC will seek to ensure that the core values that make the Grace Church School community unique will receive commensurate attention and commitment from the Board and the School. The ICC will mirror the Education Committee and comprise a broad cross-section of the Grace community. The ICC will develop structures to guide the Board and School towards ever increasing active ethical consciousness to be certain that Grace students have the ability to excel in a diverse world and are empowered to promote diversity, equity and belonging.
The results of the Spring 2019 Community Survey continued to provide a useful measure of progress under the Vertical Integration goals of the Plan. This was the first community survey conducted by the School, and as anticipated, there were unexpected results, both positive and negative. Of particular note for the Committee and the Vertical Integration monitoring subgroup was the perception that many people believe that there are two different schools at 86 Fourth Avenue and 46 Cooper Square, rather than a single, integrated school located on two campuses. The Committee is engaged in considering ways in which those at the respective campuses can better understand how their perceived differences are in fact age appropriate expressions of the same overarching mission.
The School learned that the start of its anticipated NYSAIS 10-year accreditation review would be postponed for a year until the fall of 2021. This shift occurred as a result of NYSAIS member school closures, which prevented NYSAIS from completing on-going accreditation reviews. While the expectation had been that the School would embark upon its next long range plan in the summer of 2021, in light of the change in the timing of the NYSAIS review, the planning process for the next long range plan may begin one year earlier.
The full 2015–2022 Long Range Plan is available on our website at www.gcschool.org/lrp, including annual progress reports.