Curriculum

Teachers and Staff

pictured L to R: Joanne Hoffman, Sally Baker, Laura Coleman, Matt Dunkel, Mervan Osborne, Cindy Laba, Marsha Feinberg, and Lora Farkas

Cindy Laba, Founder and Head of School
claba@beaconacademy.org
For the past 20 years Cindy Laba has devoted her professional life to the education and development of young people. She started by doing prevention work with middle and high school age students from the D Street Public Housing Development and the Boys & Girls Club in South Boston. Upon completing a Masters Degree in Social Work, she worked with emotionally disturbed adolescents who lived at Harbor Schools in Newburyport. Cindy spent most of her career at City Year, one of America’s leading national service programs, where she developed and implemented enterprise-wide recruitment, fundraising, and intranet systems. When she was named a Vice President, she turned her focus to development and producing major national events both in the US and South Africa. In 2004–2005 she served as Vice President of City on a Hill Charter School in Boston and is now Founder and Head of School of Beacon Academy.

Marsha Feinberg, Founding Chair Emerita, Board of Trustees; Director of Strategic Planning & Development
mfeinberg@beaconacademy.org
Marsha Feinberg is a social entrepreneur and consultant who has been active in urban youth programs for over 25 years. Marsha has played a major role in helping launch many leading non-profits by providing strategic planning, fundraising and community building expertise. She founded and directed the JFK Library Corps in 1983, was the Founding Chair of the Board of Citizen Schools in 1998 and served for 10 years in that role, growing Citizen Schools from a Boston based program to a national network of after school programs. Marsha worked at City Year during its early years and five years ago helped launch the Clinton Democracy Fellows Program in South Africa. A graduate of Columbia Business School, Marsha serves as a member of a number of non-profit boards of trustees, including the New England Board of Directors of Facing History and Ourselves.

Sally Baker, Director of Alumni and Community Service Learning
sbaker@beaconacademy.org
Sally Baker is a graduate of Smith College, with an Ed.M. from Tufts University. After teaching middle school English and social studies in Newton, she worked at The Park School in Brookline. Over the course of 25 years at Park, she was deeply involved in the development of community service learning. In addition to her administrative roles as Assistant Head, she also coached girls’ basketball and served as a seventh grade advisor. Her interests also include gardening, swimming, quilting, and participating in local politics.

Laura Coleman, Director of Volunteers & Co-Curricular Program
lcoleman@beaconacademy.org
Laura has served as the Director of Volunteers & the Co-Curricular Program at Beacon Academy since shortly after its founding five years ago. Laura recruits and manages what now is close to 100 volunteers for various support roles (tutoring, mentoring, extracurricular activities) and directs the Beacon Academy Parents’ Association which comprises more than 100 parents and meets on a monthly basis. Prior to Beacon, Laura worked as a Research Associate in the marketing and service management departments at Harvard Business School, where she conducted primary research and wrote cases. Laura spent 12 years as a marketing and retailing executive with Clairol, Macy’s New York and May Department Stores. Laura earned her BA in international studies from Barnard College and an MBA from Columbia Business School in marketing and international business. Laura serves on the Winsor School Corporation and the Leadership Council of Horizons for Homeless Children, and volunteers on The Winsor School’s Annual Fund.

Matt Dunkel, Math Teacher and Dean of Students
mdunkel@beaconacademy.org
Before coming to Beacon Academy, Matt Dunkel taught at both independent and charter schools. He began teaching at the Arbor School of Arts & Sciences, a progressive K-8 independent school in Portland, Oregon, where he eventually chaired the Math Department. Upon moving to Massachusetts, Matt taught Math at Prospect Hill Academy (P.H.A.), a charter school in Somerville. At P.H.A., Matt was able to significantly raise students’ state test scores. But he also saw that his charter school students were not benefiting from the same types of intellectual, creative, and personal growth opportunities that their private school peers enjoyed. At Beacon, Matt is thrilled to do rich, holistic work with students who deeply need and deserve an education of the highest quality. He earned his B.A. from Yale University and his Masters in Education from Lesley University and the Teacher Training Course at Shady Hill School. Before entering education, Matt worked in policy, both for the federal government and for the state government in his home state of Kentucky.

Lora Farkas, Director of Coaching/Placement Associate
lfarkas@beaconacademy.org
Lora launched and serves as the Director of the Beacon Academy Coaches Program — an innovative project connecting parents who have children in independent schools with the students and families of Beacon Academy. The goal of the program is to provide support to the Beacon families and to help them navigate the secondary schools application process. Lora also serves as Co-chair of Parent Annual Giving and the Host Family program at the Winsor School. She is a past Treasurer and Chair of the Finance Committee and the Strategic Planning Committee of the Shady Hill School Board of Overseers. Formerly, Lora was a Commercial Lender specializing in Project Finance. She is a graduate of Wellesley College.

Joanne Hoffman, Director of Studies
jhoffman@beaconacademy.org
Joanne Hoffman was head of the Moses Brown School in Providence, RI, having been an administrator and a teacher at Concord Academy, Concord, MA, and at the Ethel Walker School and Kingswood-Oxford School in Connecticut.

Ms. Hoffman and a colleague, Patty Hager, completed the five-year Beacon Academy evaluation last year. The evaluation provided the school community with important insights into how our students are doing in secondary schools. During the spring term, she led a Research class with the students and brought in Axis of Hope, a non-profit that leads workshops in conflict resolution. Ms. Hoffman earned her Bachelor’s in English from Marymount College and her Master’s in English from Trinity College.

Mervan Osborne, Associate Head of School
mosborne@beaconacademy.org
Mervan Osborne, Director of Admissions and Secondary School Placement, comes to Beacon Academy after spending eleven years at The Buckingham Browne and Nichols School, where he taught English and Drama, coached several sports and served as an admissions officer. During his first 3 years at BB&N, Mervan also served as resident director of A Better Chance House in Winchester, MA. Prior to coming to BB&N, he spent two years as a member of the inaugural 1990 Teach for America corps in Compton, CA. Mervan has a passion for education, and for filmmaking. For the past three summers, he has taught filmmaking at the Shady Hill School, at the Steppingstone Foundation and the Creative Arts at Park program. Mervan was born in London and moved to New York City when he was eleven years old. After several years of public schools in the Bronx and in Lower Manhattan, he received a scholarship to attend St. George’s School in Newport, RI. He earned his B.A. at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and his M.F.A. at Boston University.

Anne-Marie Yu-Phelps, English teacher
ayuphelps@beaconacademy.org
Anne-Marie Yu-Phelps is a strong believer in the value of education, especially for those trying to break out of a cycle of poverty into which they may have been born. She comes to Beacon Academy from João Pessoa, a small city in northeastern Brazil, where she worked for the past three years in a holistic health and education center. Before working in Brazil, Anne-Marie taught for ten years at Newton Country Day School. In addition to these experiences, Anne-Marie has taught English in a school for orphaned and abandoned children in Honduras, as well as worked with and taught English to refugees in Hong Kong and El Paso, Texas. Anne-Marie graduated with honors in English and Spanish from Amherst College and earned her Master’s Degree in Education from Harvard with a focus on teaching and curriculum for secondary school English. She lives in Cambridge with her husband Jonathan, Vice Principal of Nativity Preparatory School, and her daughters Madeleine and Grace.