She abruptly resigned as head of elite Miami private school. The school’s not saying why
In an abrupt move, Ransom Everglades School, the elite Coconut Grove school, announced last week that its longtime head of school would step down effective immediately and take a yearlong sabbatical, according to an email sent by the Ransom Board of Trustees.
The school, which has about 1,100 students between the middle school and upper school, did not disclose why Penny Townsend left her post so quickly after nearly a decade. Typically, heads of schools announce their departure months in advance, allowing the school to conduct a search over several months, even up to a year.
She will eventually return to serve as a special advisor to the board of trustees’ chair, said the May 25 email from Jeffrey J. Hicks, the current board chair, and Jonathan Fitzpatrick, the incoming chair.
Townsend didn’t respond to a request for comment and her Ransom email no longer worked.
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“Over the course of her time at RE, Penny graduated more than 1,200 students, and she steps away leaving the school in immensely better shape than she found it,” read the board’s email.
“We wish Penny well as she takes a well-deserved pause. We are extremely grateful for her selfless dedication and unwavering commitment to Ransom Everglades.”
The school named Rachel Rodriguez, who was head of the middle school until she left at the end of the 2021 school year, as interim head of school while the board searches for a permanent head.
Rodriguez, who had been with Ransom for 16 years before leaving, will work on “day-to-day operations” with associate head of school John King Jr., who has worked at Ransom for 23 years, the email said.
Some in the Ransom community were surprised that King, who has a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University and is a popular history and social sciences teacher at the upper school, was not named to replace Townsend.
The Herald requested interviews with Townsend, Rodriguez, King, Hicks, Fitzpatrick and the board’s incoming vice chair, Dr. Elana Oberstein-Harris, but Ransom’s director of communications, Amy Shipley, declined all interviews and directed the Herald to the board’s email.
It’s unclear how long the search for a new head of school will take, what it will entail and who will be involved in it.
In her own emailed message to the Ransom community, Townsend said she recently found herself “reassessing” her life and her family’s lives.
“I look forward to splitting time between Coconut Grove and Bailey Island, Maine, and to serving as a special advisor to the chair of the board of trustees in the future,” she wrote.
Townsend was paid a salary of $493,453, according to 2019 tax forms publicly available and reviewed by the Herald. She also made $82,036 from other compensation, according to the tax filings. It’s unknown if she will be paid for her future advisory role.
By comparison, Miami-Dade County Public Schools Superintendent Jose Dotres, who oversees the fourth-largest school district in the United States with about 345,000 students, makes $363,461 annually.
Ransom, founded in 1903, goes from the sixth to the 12th grades. It has two campuses in Coconut Grove, the middle school at 2045 S. Bayshore Dr. and the upper school at 3575 Main Hwy. It charged $43,420 for tuition in the 2021-22 academic year, according to its website.
The tax forms indicated Rodriguez earned a salary of $175,605 plus an additional compensation of $29,706. For his part, King earned $184,625 and a supplementary compensation of $27,021.
Before she joined Ransom in the summer of 2013, Townsend worked as the head of school at the Pennington School in New Jersey, near Princeton. She also held key positions at the Taft School in Watertown, Conn., according to Herald archives.
Townsend graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1979 with a bachelor’s in history, specializing in Latin American studies, and earned her master’s at Middlebury College in Vermont in Spanish language and literature.
This story was originally published June 4, 2022 at 7:00 AM with the headline "She abruptly resigned as head of elite Miami private school. The school’s not saying why."
