Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by Edmund Lee

Sarah Collins Bayne takes over this year as the new head of school at Hillbrook.

Sarah Collins Bayne begins as Hillbrook head of school

By Michelle Alaimo

This will be a year of change for Hillbrook School, the private school in Los Gatos. In addition to construction and doubled-up classes, the school welcomes a new head of school. Sarah Collins Bayne replaces Robert "Robin" Clements, who left Hillbrook in June of 1997 after 21 years to go back to school.

Bayne began July 1 after being selected in a year-long nationwide search, said Ann Morrissey, coordinator for the search committee.

"It's an irony that we got someone from California," Hillbrook board president Janna Smith Lang said. She added that Bayne was hired in October of last year because the board believed Bayne was consistent with the school's philosophy of a traditional education.

Lang also noted that Bayne was very compatible with Hillbrook's teachers.

Bayne has been involved in education her entire life. "I'm one of those people who had thought I would never do anything else other than be a teacher." Bayne said. As the daughter of a college professor and a head of school, Bayne's life centered around education.

She said it is just a coincidence that she is a head of a school, much as her mother was.

Bayne, a Sarah Lawrence College graduate, said that Hillbrook's beauty is one of the reasons she took the job. "It is very far from my roots and in a campus very much like where I grew up," Bayne said.

She was also ready for a change. Since 1993, Bayne has served as the upper-school headmistress at the all-girl Katherine Delmar Burke School in San Francisco.

"I'm glad to be in a coed environment," she said. "It feels more natural." She added that at an all-girls school, the girls tended to be harder on each other. But at coed schools, she noticed the girls aren't so hard on each other because the boys serve as their distraction.

The mother of two boys, age 16 and 19, and the wife of an Episcopal priest, Bayne said that choosing to come to Hillbrook was made a simpler decision because her family did not have to move. The former history teacher now joins the ranks of many other Bay Area working stiffs by commuting an hour each day from San Francisco.

Bayne, who still owns a home on the East Coast, has done her share of moving. She has taught at the Town School and Fieldston School in New York, the Orchard Country Day School in Indiana and at Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Mass., where she was also director of studies. Bayne served a year as upper-school head and academic dean at the Fessenden School in Massachusetts before moving to San Francisco in 1993.

Bayne has also been active in local, state and national independent school organizations, including serving as a member of the California Association of Independent Schools Evaluation Committee.

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