The composition of a career: Middle School Principal Pete Lutkoski reflects on 21 years at ASL

Over more than two decades at ASL, Pete Lutkoski P ’35 (ASL 2003-present) has done it all: starting out as a middle and high school music teacher at age 26, he went on to become a department head, middle school assistant principal and, in 2015, principal. In his final semester on the job, we sit down with Pete to hear about his path from Oberlin Conservatory to One Waverley Place—and a little bit about what’s coming next.

“When you rehearse a piece of music with a group, you’re making decisions collectively, and leading with your own individual voice to make decisions about how things can be and should be. You use, as the guide for that, the score—what the composer has written down,” says middle school principal and lifelong musician Pete Lutkoski P ’35 (ASL 2003-present). “You don’t have a list of directions as a school principal; you don’t have a score. But if there’s a really strong, clearly defined mission, that can function as your score.” 

For the past 10 years, Pete has served as the intrepid leader of the Middle School in his role as principal, using ASL’s mission and core values as the score. Prior to his decade as principal, Pete spent four years as assistant principal—and before that, he was a teacher and leader within the middle and high school performing arts departments.

Growing up, Pete never lived anywhere longer than five years. His father was a member of the US Foreign Service, which sent the family around the world in two-, three- and sometimes four-year stints. A product of international schools, Pete always knew that he wanted to teach in one after college—it was the setting where he felt most at home. He studied music education and saxophone performance at Oberlin, and assumed that he would need a few years of stateside teaching experience under his belt before returning to international schools as a teacher. “But I was quite fortunate to get a full-time teaching position at the American School of The Hague when I first graduated.”

After four years in The Hague, a high school and middle school band teacher position opened up at ASL, and Pete landed the job. He taught high school jazz and concert band, middle school band, guitar, and soon, music theory too. “I was 26 when I got here; I didn’t have long-term plans,” he recalls. “But it was a great place to teach music, and a great place to work.”

In his third year at ASL, Pete became the performing arts department head—and eventually he started getting “itchy feet,” as his London years ticked onwards, gradually exceeding the amount of time he’d ever lived in a single place. He wanted to explore something new, but didn’t know of many international schools with the large-scale ensemble infrastructure that he so valued in ASL’s music program.

If he wasn’t going to leave ASL, Pete decided, he would set his sights on a school leadership position within it. “Shortly after having set that goal for myself, the assistant principal job in the middle school became available, so I applied for it. That was my pathway in.”

Pete doesn’t remember his actual first day at ASL, but he does remember his first all-staff meeting in the School Center—it was “kind of embarrassing,” as he remembers. “Each division head was coming up to introduce new faculty members to their division, and I worked for both the middle school and the high school, and didn’t know which one I was assigned to. So when the middle school faculty were announced, they were all announced, and then I had to be called down specially to be introduced.” 

Once he got to know his coworkers, Pete felt at ease. “I had very strong connections with my colleagues, I felt supported by them, and the students were great to work with. I have very positive feelings about those early days,” he recalls.

And while he taught across the two divisions for eight years, middle school—that first official division of his, as luck had it—secured a special place in Pete’s heart.

“The wonderful thing about middle school is that you’ve got such a wide developmental range within one division. The difference between a student when they’re starting middle school and when they leave is just so dramatic,” he says. “I also think it’s a time before there starts to be the same kinds of external requirements for students as they prepare for their next steps, which gives middle schoolers a sense of freedom and flexibility to go in lots of different directions.” 

Also, Pete adds, “It’s kind of a fun age. Their sense of humor is really quirky, they’re willing to be open and frank with the adults that they work with, they enjoy being in their learning groups, and the social dynamics are enjoyable for them… It’s just a fun environment.”

In 2011, Pete left full-time classroom teaching and joined the middle school administration. In the years since, he has substitute-taught the odd class, and covered teachers’ longer-term absences for weeks at a time—and he still spends some of each summer working with music groups. But for the past 14 years, Pete has focused largely on overseeing the Middle School.

“It’s a close team, so there’s a great deal of overlap,” Pete says of the two roles he has held within the administration: assistant principal and, four years later, principal. “In general, the way I have experienced the difference is that the assistant principal has more focus on day-to-day operations and logistics for the school year. For the principal, there’s the task of articulating the goals for the division and how the division will work together to make progress and develop over time.”

In his decade-long tenure as principal, Pete has brought about quite a bit of goal articulation—and achievement. 

“Something that’s been a great development for the Middle School—and it’s more the result of subtle, behind-the-scenes tweaks as opposed to a ‘grand visioning’—is the extent to which teamwork and collaboration are central to the ethos of the division,” Pete notes. “Over time, we’ve been able to update our master schedule so that in just about all cases where there’s more than one teacher of a subject, they teach at the same time, so that their planning periods are aligned and they can work together to plan for the learning experiences of kids.” Likewise, in Pete’s time as principal, he’s proud of increased alignment in the way students receive feedback on their progress—not only from teacher to teacher, but also across disciplines, and in keeping with learning outcomes that Pete says the School has adopted from outside organizations. 

The middle school advisory program, now in its fourth year, “positions social-emotional learning at the center of the middle school student experience,” Pete says, and represents yet another goal that he and his division worked hard to design and implement over the course of several years.

This school year—Pete’s last at ASL after 21 trips around the sun as an Eagle!—he has overseen one last, relatively dramatic change in the Middle School: in concert with Lower School Principal Sacha McVean (ASL 2017-present), Pete and his team have instituted a brand-new technology policy in the two divisions. It’s colloquially known as “the phone ban.”

“We wanted families to have the decision-making power to delay the time that students would get their first phone, so we put this rule in place,” Pete explains. The rule, which took effect last August despite some initial misgivings among students and parents, prevents lower and middle school students from bringing internet-enabled smartphones and smartwatches to school ever since. “We’ve seen a notable change in student culture during the school day, and also a huge decline in cases where students were using social media communication inappropriately, in ways that are hurtful to others,” Pete says. “So that has been great.”

It was also around a year ago that Pete and his family began to talk about what their next adventure might look like. Now a UK citizen with a British and American family, Pete has loved living in London, with its endless cultural offerings and natural, peaceful places sprinkled generously amidst urban sprawl. He isn’t convinced that this is the last time he’ll live here. But for now, he and his family—his wife, and their daughter, who is nearing the end of Grade 2 at ASL—are looking forward to a change of scenery.

Always ready for a new challenge, Pete sought out leadership roles at K-8 schools, many more of which are found in the US than on the international school circuit, and soon came across St. Thomas School, on the east side of Seattle, Washington. Early on, Pete remembers, “St. Thomas really stood out to me. It seemed to be an exciting place to work; very dynamic and innovative.” 

When he assumes the head of school role at St. Thomas School this summer, Pete will be taking on a post previously held by only four others over the school’s 74-year history. “The outgoing head, Kurt Wheeler, has been there for 20 years. It’s been a long, stable tenure of leadership that I’ll be moving into,” Pete says, explaining that for most of his future colleagues, he will be the first new head of school they have seen at St. Thomas.

When he was hired as middle school assistant principal in 2011, Pete recalls fondly, “I was very fortunate to work with a principal who was very supportive of mentoring new school leaders. Her name was Cathy Funk, and she had come to ASL after having been a middle school principal for something like 25 years at a different school. She knew the job very well. She was new to ASL, but also had worked with lots of people who were developing in their careers.” 

On his years on Waverley Place, Pete adds, “I’ve always felt very grateful to everyone I work with: I've been able to embark on important learning experiences in the context of this organization, and at each step, I think the strength of ASL as an institution has allowed me to learn in the best possible way.”

In Washington, Pete will work with three principals: one for early childhood education, an elementary school principal, and a middle school principal. Asked about the wisdom he hopes to carry from his current role into his new one, Pete—very much embodying the lifelong learner of ASL’s own “score,” or mission statement—talks, first and foremost, about learning.

“I am of the mindset that the most important thing I can do in any new setting, as in this new position, is to learn as much as I can; to get to know the individuals who make up the community,” says Pete. “I’ve had such full and wonderful experiences here at ASL in different positions. I’ve learned a great deal, and it’s been a wonderful setting to discover about so many different facets of how schools work; how kids learn; how people work together. I can hold on to those lessons as lenses that I use when looking at my new challenges.”