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June
20, 2005 
VOL.
43, NO. 12Oakland,
CA
Jr. high training program yields lifetime leaders
They are grown up now, but Amy Wixson, Torrence Spencer,
Heidi Wixson-Novak, and Natalie Tovani-Walchuk have a common link. They
attribute the success of their respective careers to a diocesan leadership-training
program they participated in during their middle school and high school
years in the 1980’s and ‘90’s.
In looking back, the group agrees that the program was their first major
career enhancement move, although they didn’t know it then. They
do now. They credit the program with teaching them valuable skills they
are using as a visual effects producer for a Berkeley film production
company, a high school basketball coach and retail manager, a teacher
and a principal.
Begun in 1980 by a group of diocesan educators – James Brennan,
Holy Names Sister Kathleen Callaway, and Dominican Sister Adrienne Piennette
— the student leadership training was designed to teach fledgling
seventh and eighth grade class presidents how to run student council meetings,
organize activities and work successfully with their peers. On June 10,
the program celebrated its 25th anniversary with an alumni reunion at
St. Isidore School in Danville.
Amy Wixson, one of the grads, remembers adult mentor, Kathy Gannon-Briggs,
now principal of St. Bernard School in Oakland, with respect and fondness.
“She didn’t micro-manage us. She let us see that we could
do things on our own. She gave us the rope to climb the hill. Of course,
we could have hung ourselves, but we didn’t,” noted Wixson,
who took the class for two summers before entering the seventh and eighth
grades at All Saints School in Hayward.
“Your problems are different in the seventh grade, but the core
principles of management stay the same,” said Wixson. If anyone
should know, she does. She now manages and inspires 85 to 100 artists
for Tippett, a Berkeley movie production company. Tippett hired Wixson
from an Los Angeles job two years ago to coordinate visual effects for
the movie, “Matrix 3.”
Torrence Spencer, basketball coach at Oakland’s St. Elizabeth High
School, remembers the summer of 1990 vividly. He had just been elected
class president at St. Bernard School in Oakland and was attending the
weeklong summer program at Corpus Christi School in Piedmont.
Spencer was meeting so many cool kids his own age from other Catholic
schools and learning so much good stuff, that he wouldn’t have ever
thought of skipping a session. But, in the middle of the week, he and
his friends were forced to do just that when a neighborhood fire flared
up. Classes had to be cancelled for a day or two. “It was so frustrating,”
he recalled.
Spencer said the training helped him to see what his classmates needed
and how to help them accomplish their goals. As the president of a class
of just 14 kids, Spencer learned how to move his chums from seeing him
in the role of friend to that of leader. When he went to St. Elizabeth
High School, he eventually became captain of his basketball team –
another venue where his leadership and collaborative working skills counted
significantly.
Now the coach at his alma mater, Spencer has also used his leadership
skills in his jobs in retail management.
Heidi Wixson Novak was a student leader at Moreau Catholic High School
in Hayward when the diocesan program first began. A friend recruited her
to help as a counselor. Novak values the experience of learning “to
take on something without taking over, and that skill has passed over
to regular life.”
Novak, who is Amy Wixson’s sister, moved up the leadership ladder
while attending St. Mary’s College in Moraga and in her senior year
served as social co-chair for student activities. After graduation she
went on to receive a master’s degree in counseling, “something
I never would have considered, ordinarily.”
She spent several years teaching third grade at Assumption School in San
Leandro and is now a stay-at-home mother of three. She plans to return
to the classroom when her youngest, six-month-old Atticus, starts school.
Natalie Tovani-Walchuk says the leadership training helped transform her
from a “shy, awkward kid” into a confident, outgoing adult.
The program also gave her the gift of bravery to practice leadership skills
“in a safe place. And besides, it was a lot of fun.”
Tovani-Walchuk, who participated for two summers as a student at St. David
School in Richmond, credits the program for “cementing my commitment
to Catholic education.” Today, at 28, she is principal of St. Joseph
the Worker School in Berkeley, the youngest school principal in the diocese.
Torrence
Spencer is now a high school basketball coach.
Heidi
Wixson-Novak (left) plans to return to teaching when her children are
in school. Her sister Amy manages a movie production company.
