Allan Gately Gehant’s time at Cambridge Rindge & Latin School has been marked by rapid change and a wide range of different positions. On Oct. 9, he became Cambridge Rindge & Latin School’s interim principal. He was assistant principal to Damon Smith, now interim chief operating officer, for only two years.
“My first role at CRLS was as the boys rowing coach 24 years ago,” Gehant said. After one year, he became a math teacher, then a dean of students and dean of curriculum and program for science until becoming assistant and then interim principal.
Gehant was always drawn to education and mathematics: In eighth grade, when his school struggled to find a teacher, Gehant ended up helping a lot. His parents joked that he practically taught the whole class.
“I come from a family of educators,” Gehant said. “My mother was an English teacher. My father’s mother taught in Chicago Public Schools. My mother’s sister was a speech pathologist, so we definitely have teaching in our family history.”
After middle school, Gehant tutored in high school, then majored in math and education in college. Teaching came naturally to him; after all, it was in his blood.
Administration, however, was new. When Gehant started teaching at CRLS, he was assigned a mentor, Elizabeth Curry, who told him during one of their first meetings, “You’re going to get a master’s, and it’s going to be in administration.” Curry explained that she’d seen many strong teachers decide they wanted to enter a more administrative role late in their careers, when it was more difficult: They were raising families, they’d been out of school for years and it just wasn’t an option anymore.“Do it early,” Curry told Gehant. “I don’t care if you never become an administrator, but I want you to have the option.” She was one of the first people Gehant called when he got news of his recent promotion.
While Gehant has changes he’s looking to make at CRLS, he believes that listening to student and teacher demands is most important. New initiatives should be based on community needs, rather than administrative whims.
“It’s important for us not to just jump into new things all the time,” Gehant said. “I love to dive into spreadsheets and look at the data and let that inform where I think the work should go.”
As dean of students, Gehant looked through students’ exit data every year, checking seniors’ intended college majors and changing CRLS curriculum to keep up with demand.
One year, “it popped off the page to me that we had a whole ton of criminal justice majors, and we didn’t really have a criminal justice program,” Gehant said. “I had to work hard to find a science teacher willing to teach forensics.”
Gehant also finds it important to connect with students and staff, and as assistant principal has often found wandering the halls and greeting students at the front door, Gehant prizes in-person conversations above emails or digital communication.
“I can’t imagine doing the job in a different way,” he said. Being a part of the community, even if it just meant popping into clubs, is important to him. “Seeing students who were so happy about being at the student paper, being in a room and working on Rubik’s Cubes, playing Dungeons & Dragons,” he added, “was a great bookend to every assistant principal day.”
The feature image attached to this article – a different version of the image above – has a gray background that was added to via digital retouching process. Only the gray background to the far left and right was added; the portrait of Allan Gehant is real and untouched.
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