STA News

Meet the New Faculty & Staff for 2023-2024

Dear St. Albans School Family:

As the 2023-24 academic year is rapidly approaching, we are thrilled to introduce you to the newest members of our St. Albans faculty and staff. We also are excited to announce current faculty and staff members who will be moving into new roles within the school:


   Following a successful season as a varsity baseball coach at St. Albans, Mr. Jack Besser is joining our faculty in a full-time capacity as communications content developer. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Mr. Besser comes to St. Albans from St. Peter School on Capitol Hill, where he taught third grade. Prior to moving into education, he served as digital press secretary for Congresswoman Cori Bush and managed her digital presence on her campaign.
 
Ms. Tera Brostoff joins St. Albans as the Lower School librarian, following three years in the same role at the Bullis School. At Bullis, Ms. Brostoff managed library curriculum for 170 kindergarten through fifth-grade students, developing and implementing campaigns to promote literacy skills, independent reading, and digital citizenship. A summa cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Ms. Brostoff earned her J.D. from Georgetown University and served as a senior legal editor for Bloomberg BNA before earning her M.S.L.I.S. from the Catholic University of America in 2021.
   

   
Mr. Brennan Lafeber is joining St. Albans as development associate and assistant golf coach. Following his graduation from Saint John’s University in Minnesota, Mr. Lafeber worked as their assistant director of annual giving. Most recently, he served as the annual giving manager at Totino-Grace High School, where he directed annual fund solicitations. He also spent a year with the Benedictine Volunteer Corps, working in a Benedictine monastery in Tororo, Uganda.
   

   
Forms C, B, & A art teacher Ms. Jen Lombardo comes to St. Albans from the National Presbyterian School, where she taught Grades 1 and 4, in addition to coaching girls’ lacrosse and soccer. Ms. Lombardo, whose works have been showcased in exhibitions across the country, brings her signature vibrant, colorful approach to artwork to the classroom. A graduate of Rutgers University with an M.A. in elementary education from American University, Ms. Lombardo has a vast background in art education, retail, and management. She will also be coaching at St. Albans.
   

   
Returning to St. Albans is Mr. Kyle Money, a former Penn Fellow who taught English here from 2019-21. Mr. Money will be returning to the English Department as an Upper School English teacher, a member of the Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Team, and as a coach. In the years between his stints at St. Albans, Mr. Money taught English at Georgetown Day School, where he was awarded a summer funding grant to redesign their seventh and eighth grade English curriculum. He also served as a Middle School dean, coordinating efforts to improve students’ study-skill development and grow student affinity groups, identity-based clubs, and cultural showcases. He received a B.S. from Vanderbilt University and an M.S.Ed. from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.
   

   
Dr. Patrick Moneyang comes to St. Albans as a Lower and Upper School French teacher. Holding his Ph.D. in romance languages from the University of Oregon, Dr. Moneyang brings more than a decade of collegiate and secondary school teaching experience to St. Albans. With a rich background in research focused on popular culture in Africa and its diasporas, he received two graduate research awards from the University of Oregon. He taught French most recently at Pacific Lutheran University and St. Paul’s School for Girls in Baltimore.
   

   
Mr. Todd Peyton joined St. Albans during the 2022-23 school year as our application and data administrator. A graduate of Texas Tech University with an M.B.A. from the University of Phoenix, Mr. Peyton has fifteen years of experience in education, including nearly a decade of classroom teaching—for which he earned Teacher of the Year recognition twice. Having most recently served as database manager at the Lexington School, he is well-versed in Blackbaud products which host both our external website and MySTA. He’s already been a valuable asset to the team, and we look forward to introducing him to more of the community this year.
   
Upper School mathematics teacher Mr. Dustin Pierce joins St. Albans following two years in the same position at the Flint Hill School, where he was lead teacher for linear algebra, multivariable calculus, and honors geometry. In addition to being a teacher, Mr. Pierce has expansive experience as a data scientist, including earning a M.S. in data science from American University. He also holds an M.S. in mathematics from the University of Tennessee and his B.S. from King University in Tennessee. A USA Track and Field certified coach, Mr. Pierce will join our coaching staff, following two years at the helm of the track and field program at Flint Hill.
 

   
The school’s forty-second writer-in-residence, Ms. Julia Pike, comes to St. Albans following a year teaching English at Stanbridge Academy in San Mateo, Calif. A summa cum laude graduate of Amherst College, where she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, Ms. Pike holds her master of fine arts degree from Boston University, where she focused primarily on fiction-writing. Her work has been recognized and awarded more than a dozen times, and she was most recently named the St. Botolph Emerging Artist Award for Literature. Her work, ranging from short stories, to poetry, to creative nonfiction essays, has been published seven times across the world, including most-recently in the international fiction-focused Joyland Magazine.
 

   
Manish Rajbhandari joined us in May as lead accountant, responsible for managing accounts payable and processing invoice payments; accounting for all development and endowment activity; reconciling all subledgers, and accounting for construction in progress/fixed assets and bank reconciliations. Manish has more than fourteen years of experience in accounting and payroll in the health care industry and other profit and non-profit organizations. He earned his M.B.A. with a concentration in accounting from Maharishi University of Management in Iowa and a master’s degree in finance from Tribhuvan University, Nepal. For many of us, Manish is not a new face as he formerly worked as a payroll professional at the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation.
   

   
A familiar face for many students, Ms. María Roche joins St. Albans as the Upper School administrative assistant, following more than two years of serving as a classroom and exam proctor at the school. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Ms. Roche brings more than two decades of program management and operations experience to St. Albans. She received her B.A. in communications with class honors from the University of Michigan. For a decade, she worked as a technical director and post-production editor for Univision and Galavision in Miami, Fla., where she produced live national news and sports shows and directed live news briefs.
   

   
Mr. Jeffrey R. Sunderland ’99 returns to his alma mater to teach Form II math. A lawyer by training, Mr. Sunderland earned his J.D. from the University of Virginia and owned and operated restaurants across the D.C. region before transitioning to education in 2022, receiving his teaching license while teaching math, geometry, probability, and statistics at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Va. A collegiate swimmer at Amherst College, where he received his B.A., and a three-sport athlete at St. Albans, Mr. Sunderland will also assist with swimming and other coaching duties.
   

   
Mr. James Washington will teach Form I English, following stints with Partners in Learning LLC, where he administered individualized learning plans for fifth through tenth graders, the Maret School, where he taught humanities for three years, and St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H, where he was a resident teaching fellow in the humanities, served as an academic advisor, and designed and taught a new course in Black Music, Religion, and American Society. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, Mr. Washington received his B.A. from Haverford College. Mr. Washington brings a deep background in community organizing, activism, and racial justice advocacy both in and out of the classroom, with a focus on issues such as mass incarceration and voter registration. He will also be coaching in the Lower School.
   

   
Ms. Jan Wager joins St. Albans as the executive assistant to the headmaster. She comes to the school with more than fifteen years of experience as a C-Suite level executive assistant, most recently with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Litigation Center in D.C. Holding a J.D. from Northern Kentucky University and a B.A. in journalism from the University of Kentucky, Ms. Wager most recently was the special assistant to the executive vice president and chief counsel at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Litigation Center. She is a licensed notary public in both the District of Columbia and Virginia.
   

   
Ms. Jeanette Whitman-Lee began her professional career as an educator, serving for eleven years as an elementary and middle school classroom teacher in the parochial school system in Connecticut. She has spent the last twenty-two years in human resources in nonprofit and professional associations. She received her B.A. in English from Eastern Connecticut State University and her M.B.A. from Quantic School of Business and Technology in D.C. She has served on numerous boards and is currently serving as head of government affairs for the Anne Arundel County Chapter of the Society for Human Resource Management.
   

TRANSITIONS

As some of you may have heard, Brandon Straub, our director of choral music and chair of the coordinate Music Department since 2016, has been named associate director of music at St. Paul’s Choir School and Parish in Cambridge, Mass. As we begin a search for his successor, we are delighted that Scott Wood, our current director of instrumental music, has agreed to step in as interim chair of the Music Department. An accomplished musician, Mr. Wood is also music director and conductor of the Arlington Philharmonic and director of the Amadeus Orchestra and the George Washington University Orchestra. He sits on the board of the International Conductors Guild. We thank Mr. Straub for his devotion to our students and their pursuit of music—especially during the vast challenges created by covid—and Mr. Wood for stepping in next year.

Please join us in extending a warm welcome to these members of the St. Albans school team.

Sincerely,

Jason Robinson
Headmaster
Sherry Rusher
Dean of Faculty
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Located in Washington D.C., St. Albans School is a private, all boys day and boarding school. For more than a century, St. Albans has offered a distinctive educational experience for young men in grades 4 through 12. While our students reach exceptional academic goals and exhibit first-rate athletic and artistic achievements, as an Episcopal school we place equal emphasis upon moral and spiritual education.