Benjamin Lee is now leading the Verde Valley School after former Head of School Paul Amadio relocated to the Pennfield School in Portsmouth, R.I.
Amadio was at the school’s helm for nearly eight years.
Lee has moved to the Verde Valley for the job, along with his wife Lixue Lin, one dog and three cats. His love for animals goes back to his youthful experiences growing up on a small farm in the suburbs of Buffalo, N.Y., where he spent his time riding horses and was involved in 4-H showing livestock and poultry.
“My brother and I would pack up the animals every summer, and go show the sheep and the chickens [at the Erie County Fair],” Lee said. “The prize money you get from showing your animals, my brother and I would cash out immediately and head to the arcade and play Space Invaders, Night Driver and Centipede.“
After graduating from the Nichols School in Buffalo, Lee took a year off before enrolling in college as an English major and traveled to Scotland. He said it was life-changing to explore another culture while looking at the United States from the outside, an experience he would repeat over the next couple of decades while teaching in China and Japan.
“Scotland changed me because it’s arguably very culturally close to North America,” Lee said. “Certainly closer than China or Japan. But there were such distinct opinions and such different perspectives that in itself was eye-opening for me.”
Following Scotland, Lee earned a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in East Asian studies, both from Yale University, followed by a doctorate in education from Seton Hall University. He later worked as an English teacher in China and Japan and at schools in Louisiana, Florida, Washington and finally in China, where he served as principal of the Shanghai American School in Pudong beginning in 2016.
Lee sees his role as a school administrator as being a small force for good to help people get past their differences and feels that he is uniquely qualified for that role due to the time he has spent abroad.
“There is a dynamism and entrepreneurial spirit in [that] communist country that is astonishing,” Lee said, after sharing anecdotes of Chinese citizens setting up makeshift food distribution businesses through social media during the height of COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. Lee and his wife also made a new friend through WeChat while ordering milk deliveries.
His great-grandfather Yan Phou Lee was part of a small group of 120 young Chinese boys who were sent to the United States during the declining years of the Qing Dynasty with the idea that they would eventually return to their homeland. Yan Phou Lee published his memories of life on both sides of the Pacific in his 1887 memoir “When I Was a Boy in China.”
“I had to learn all my lessons by rote; commit them to memory for recitation the day following,” Yan Phou Lee wrote about his education in China. “All studying must be done aloud. The louder you speak, or shriek, the more credit you get as a student. It is the only way by which Chinese teachers make sure that their pupils are not thinking of something else, or are not playing under the desks.”
The scale of education in China is among the most significant changes that have taken place in China since the elder Lee’s time, when only a fraction of the boys would go to school. Today, schooling is mandatory for all Chinese children through eighth grade, Lee said.
“Even with the one-child policy from 1980 to 2016, classrooms in Chinese public schools tend to have 30 to 60 kids in them,” Lee said. “Practically, it’s not really an option to have students reciting at high volume these days. So, contemporary Chinese classrooms tend only to have one audible voice: That of the teacher who lectures to a sea of silent faces.”
A desire for new challenges brought Lee back to the U.S. He said that he saw his fingerprints everywhere with what he accomplished at the Shanghai American School.
“My biggest priorities for this first year is getting to know the school and being known by the community, the alumni, the student body and our day students, because we have 40 day students now and we’ll have more next year,” Lee said. “The school is at a point where we’ve grown up, we’re 75 years old. Yet we’re still like a startup. It’s time we focus on a direction. That’s something we’ll be working on in our strategic planning process, which will start in September.”
VVS’ strategic planning process will incorporate the three vacant buildings that once made up Camp Soaring Eagle into its plans following approval from the Yavapai County Board of Supervisors in April. The new plan will aim to increase classroom and meeting space and expand outdoor recreational opportunities on the property.
The focus over the summer will be on meeting more basic needs, such as reroofing Brady Hall, which hasn’t had any significant upgrades since it was completed in the early 1960s. A major fundraising focus during VVS’ alumni reunion in the middle of June was raising $60,000 for Brady Hall repairs, which should be underway at the start of July. In addition, the hall will undergo a $30,000 reflooring project.
“Paul [Amadio] will leave behind very big shoes to fill. We are confident Ben will meet that challenge. With his breadth of talent and experience, creativity and forward thinking, Ben will take VVS to new heights,” VVS said in a press release.
