School board appoints new principal at LBHS

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The Long Beach Board of Education appointed William Stroud as principal of Long Beach High School at the April 8 meeting. His appointment is effective July 15.

A nationally recognized educator with nearly three decades of experience in education, MStroud has a wealth of experiences that have taken him to schools around the world as an instructional leader and trainer. He currently serves as the assistant director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. The CPRE is a major initiative among some of the nation’s top research institutions to improve student learning through educational reform. Through his work at the CPRE, he was also responsible for the design of a new public elementary school as a demonstration site for Teachers College, which opened in Harlem in 2011.

He recently worked on projects with the Gates Foundation to improve access to college readiness programs for underserved students in three school districts: Palm Beach, Nashville and Annapolis. In addition to working with schools in the United States, he has been working on school improvement and instructional leadership projects in Jordan, Mexico, Palestine, Poland, Thailand, Brazil and Turkey. Prior to his tenure at Teachers College, Stroud was a network leader and executive director for school quality for the New York City Department of Education, where he was responsible for the development of the school report cards used to evaluate the city’s 1,400 schools.

Stroud was the founding principal of two New York City public schools: the Urban Peace Academy in East Harlem, where he served from 1993 to 2000; and the Baccalaureate School for Global Education in Queens, where he served from 2002 to 2007. The Baccalaureate School for Global Education was designed to be the signature high school for Queens. It utilized the IB Middle Years and Diploma programs. The school was ranked by U.S. News & World Report as the No. 1 high school in New York State and No. 21 in the nation.

In addition, Stroud served as supervising principal for the Eight Plus Academies for students who were not prepared for entrance into high school. He has worked as a literacy consultant and classroom teacher in New York City, and has taught classes in history and science. He is multilingual and has traveled extensively throughout the world. Stroud has also worked in youth leadership training and coached varsity basketball and Little League baseball.

The previous LBHS principal, Dr. Gaurav Passi, left the post at the end of last school year to take over as principal at Bayport-Blue Point High School.