Gabriel Gonzalez — Communications Associate
Gabriel Gonzalez, the new communications associate at LWHS, considers himself the “gatekeeper of information that goes through Lick virtually.”
He is working on creating a positive image for the school that highlights the progress, values and students at Lick through forms of media such as photos and videos.
Originally from Bakersfield, California, Gonzalez grew up with an appreciation for his community. He always felt as though he could count on the support of the people in his hometown.
An avid swimmer, Gonzalez embraced the opportunities of having a body of water nearby, especially since he didn’t have access to many pools or beaches growing up. Over the summer, he returned home to Bakersfield and built a swimming pool in his parents’ backyard.
Gonzalez also enjoys playing tennis, learning about streetwear fashion and playing video games.
As a recent college graduate, Gonzalez is happy to talk to students about his experiences with college. He loves the emphasis that the Lick community places on helping students figure out their passions and he hopes that he can help students as well.
Gonzalez dreams of one day opening a trade school or starting a company to help people learn about film, photography and editing in his hometown. Gonzalez wants to provide resources to “emphasize learning about media and the virtual realm” so that members of the Bakersfield community have opportunities to work in these fields.
Dee Johnson — Adult Equity Dean
For Dee Johnson, the new Dean of Adult Equity and Inclusion, coming to LWHS is an opportunity to “reimagine what education looks like.”
“I’ve always wanted to live and work in a space where I feel challenged, where I can be transformed and stretched,” Johnson said. “I think Lick is a place where I can do that.”
Johnson previously served as the Director of Equity and Inclusion at French American International School and has also worked at Women’s Campaign International, the United Nations Development Program and as a gender & education consultant at UNESCO.
She currently sits on the Transgender Member Advisory Council at Kaiser Permanente and on the board of Malikah, an organization that trains women “in self-defense, healing justice, organizing and financial literacy,” according to its website.
Johnson grew up in Jamaica and describes herself as the island’s first openly transgender activist. “There were no adults in my life, not my parents or family members, not my teachers, who were equipped to help me process my own identity,” she said, “and so, long story short, I had to leave the Caribbean when I was 16.”
Johnson, who speaks eight languages, graduated from Middlebury College in 2012 and decided to devote her career to dismantling “systems of toxic harm.”
“How do I divest from toxic practices or systems of harm that force people to be combative rather than collaborative?” she said. “That is my life’s work.”
In her free time, Johnson loves to play tennis and dance kathak, a form of Indian dance she’s been practicing since she was about five years old.
She is also interested in vertical gardening and urban farming, and volunteers with Alemany Farm to bring fresh produce to areas that lack reliable access to healthy food. “I think it’s radical for people of color to be able to choose what we put in our bodies,” she said.
At LWHS, Johnson is looking forward to developing relationships with both her colleagues and with students. “I’m hopeful,” she said of this school year. “I feel a lot of synergy with the facstaff and with the administration, and I’m excited for the opportunity to connect more with students.”
Even when she was at French American, she said she was always impressed by “the level of thoughtfulness and the intentional energy” that LWHS students bring to conversations.
One of Johnson’s goals this year is to explore how LWHS can make sure that all stakeholders—teachers, students, the greater school community—are represented equitably in decisions that affect them.
“As an educator,” she said, “I think one of the most important things is a practice of love for the people that you come in contact with.”
Laurie Kerrigan — Science Teacher
Laurie Kerrigan, a new LWHS physics teacher, is a third-generation San Franciscan who taught at Mercy High School before joining the Lick community. She loves the vibrant community of San Francisco and enjoys going to beaches across the city.
Kerrigan attended Mercy herself, where she made many life-long friends and was known for being a good chemistry student. She thought she might want to be a doctor, but after attending UC Davis, Kerrigan found a love for teaching.
When she’s not teaching, Kerrigan can be found in the outdoors hiking, skiing and kayaking. She cares deeply about the environment and wants to make sure that her community is “taking the steps we need to make sure the environment is healthy for generations to come.”
Kerrigan has advice for her students who want to slow climate change: “every little bit helps, so the sooner you start doing those little steps, the longer we have to figure out those larger things to make the environment more healthy,” she said.
Kerrigan has three sons: an engineer, an airline pilot, and a student at UCLA, as well as a dog named Hunter. She is currently reading Richard Powers’ The Overstory and enjoys watching Grace and Franky and Orange Is the New Black.
Grace Leslie-Waksman — History Teacher
Dr. Grace Leslie-Waksman, a new history teacher, grew up in Philadelphia and has lived in the Bay Area on and off since 2002. Leslie-Waksman was drawn to Lick because of the school’s “commitment to diversity and equity” and its belief in taking action to face injustice.
Leslie-Waksman joins the LWHS community after having taught at Drew School. Before that, she was an assistant professor at Auburn University in Alabama.
Outside of teaching, Leslie-Waksman enjoys working in her vegetable garden at home in Oakland and going to the beach. Right now, though, “I’ve got three tiny children, so they are my main outside-of-school activity.”
As a high school student, Leslie-Waksman “played basketball badly, and field hockey slightly better.” She also participated in Model UN. Before pursuing history, she thought she might become a medical doctor or lawyer.
So far, interactions with Lick students have been good online, except for the occasional interruption from her own kids entering the room. High schoolers, Leslie-Waksman says, have a few sometimes confusing habits, including weird social media platforms: “I don’t understand TikTok!”
In her free time, Leslie-Waksman loves to read. Her favorite books are Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver and Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas Sugrue. She is currently watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Crown and Schitt’s Creek.
Paul McCullough — Science Teacher
Bay Area native Paul McCullough is joining the Lick community as a physics teacher. He likes the Bay Area because of its diverse culture and geography. The proximity to beaches, forests and the city gives him access to his favorite activities without having to go more than a few miles. He also enjoys trying new foods and is especially excited to discover new ramen restaurants in San Francisco.
When he was in college, McCullough had a part-time job working at a preschool on campus. He began to consider a career in education, and with a passion for physics, he decided to become a physics teacher. He taught at a couple of high schools around the Bay Area before coming to Lick. McCullough hopes that he can help his students cultivate an appreciation for the subject.
McCullough greatly admires physicist Richard Feynman because he had a “cool outlook on the world.” McCullough recommends that people try reading Feynman’s books.
This year, McCullough is focused on the growth opportunities that he has and is looking forward to learning what it is like to teach at a new school. He is also excited to learn about new online tools and to use them in his classes.
Growing up, McCullough played ice hockey and dreamed of one day becoming a professional. He spent the summer creating a hockey shooting area in his backyard to keep up his skills. McCullough also enjoys music and playing the guitar, and even records tracks every once in a while.
Paula McLaughlin — French Teacher
Paula McLaughlin is joining Lick-Wilmerding’s world languages department this year as the school’s sole French teacher.
McLaughlin taught French at Mercy High School for the last 20 years and received a Master of Arts in French literature from Middlebury College in 2019. She grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from UCLA.
In 1997, McLaughlin traveled with the Peace Corps to Morocco, where she spent two years teaching English and doing community development work. In addition to French and English, McLaughlin speaks some Moroccan Arabic and Spanish, which she spent part of this summer brushing up on.
It didn’t take long for McLaughlin to feel at home at LWHS. “It’s really fun to be in a new environment, and one that’s just so dynamic and welcoming,” she said after only two days of classes. “I love the students and the community. I actually didn’t know I would ever love another school as much as I loved Mercy.”
Now, she’s excited to develop more personal relationships with each of her students, even while classes are conducted entirely online. Teaching, McLaughlin said, is a two-way street, and she’s confident she will learn as much from her students as they will from her.
Outside of the classroom and off the computer, McLaughlin loves literature—both French and English—and spending time with her nieces and nephews. She also enjoys watching British television dramas.
She considers herself “kind of a loner,” but said she also values the time she spends with friends. “I can just escape into reading for hours by myself,” she said, “but I love people too.”
Marley Pierce — History Teacher
Marley Pierce, a new U.S History teacher, is excited to be returning to the Lick community after having worked in the Center for Civic Engagement and as a Web Editor several years ago.
Pierce is a Denver native who ended up in the Bay Area after college when she participated in Teach for America, an organization that recruits college students to teach in underserved schools after graduation.
She majored in ethnic studies during college and saw a parallel to education: “In ethnic studies, you learn about so many of the injustices throughout our country’s history…we need to know better to do better, and education is such a direct tie to that,” she said.
During her time away from Lick, Pierce focused on outdoor education and nonprofit work. She spent a summer in Yosemite with a program that promotes people of color in the outdoors and worked as an environmental educator at Naturebridge in the Marin Headlands. She later worked with the Western States Center, a nonprofit that strives for “inclusive democracy”. She feels that, “in many ways, the adaptability that you need to harness as an outdoor educator, just given working in the elements, is really applicable to the pandemic” and hopes to apply the skills she has from outdoor education to teaching history.
She also spent five months on the Pacific Crest Trail, a well-known hiking route that runs from Mexico to Canada, with her partner. They were inspired to hike the PCT by their roommates at Naturebride and decided “why not do it.” Her favorite part of the trail was the Sierra section, especially around Tahoe, and she hopes to be able to hike the sections that were blocked by fires during their trip in the future.
Pierce is living in Portland right now but plans to teach at Lick through the end of the school year. She’s excited about what the semester will bring and hopes to make history feel relevant to her students. She feels that “it’s a very specific moment in time to be teaching U.S history and Lick is a very special community to be teaching it in.”
David Sasson — Creative Code and Design Instructor
The newest member of our LWHS tech arts department, David Sasson, is thrilled to be here.
A Bay Area native, Sasson visited Lick for the first time playing basketball in high school! He has now come full circle after studying and researching computer science and visualization at Brown University.
Sasson has been in the tech industry for quite some time now. “I’ve worked at a couple of start-ups, watched them grow,” Sasson recalled. His work in the tech industry gave him an interesting look into business, capitalism and how the tech industry is run not just in the United States, but around the world.
After a few years in the industry, Sasson wanted to focus on finding community, something that “wasn’t fulfilled by the business world,” Sasson said.
Sasson then taught with several arts organizations and non-profits including Gray Area, an organization in the Mission District that focuses on art, tech and community, just what Sasson was looking for. “I was teaching artists how to code and coders how to art,” he said.
Sasson believes very strongly that tech and its use are at their best when they are in service of a community.
This idea of community was part of what drew Sasson to LWHS. After being connected with Tech Arts Department Chair Andrew Kleindolph, Sasson was able to meet some of the other tech arts teachers and was struck by the “wonderful energy” they had. “No one thought that this would be the way things are,” Sasson said, reflecting on how he found out about his position and was corresponding with LWHS just at the beginning of Shelter-in-Place. “We’re all kind of riding this wave of pandemic safety together,” he concluded.
Sasson capitalizes on a rich life outside of his work as well. He has visited at least thirty counties, India, Greece and Uganda being some of the most memorable. He describes himself as a “big music guy,” having worked on both electronic music and performance art pieces. Sasson also ran a monthly local concert series for a number of years. He plays the tombak, a Persian drum, and finds it helps connect him to his personal heritage.
Sasson is excited to meet new people this year and to form a community here at LWHS, even virtually.
When asked what he felt his students should know going into his classroom he said: “Kindness is everything. Anything you do, any interaction you have with a teacher, with students, with anyone really, if it’s done from a place of kindness it makes the world a better place in some small way.”
Angela Wall — English Teacher
Dr. Angela Wall, who started teaching at LWHS during the spring semester of 2020, is excited to return to the school this year.
Last spring, Wall met some of Lick’s students and was drawn to the diversity within the school, as well as Lick’s focus on cultivating compassion.
Though she is currently an English teacher, Wall has worked as a university professor, done strategic planning for an online advertising agency, worked as the communications director at a women’s health organization and been a volunteer at San Quentin State Prison. She enjoys teaching because it makes her feel like she’s making the world a better place.
Growing up in Nottingham, a town in England, Wall couldn’t connect with the material and the rote learning style and dreaded going to school. During her exams in her senior year, Wall failed to get the grades she needed in order to be accepted into the university she wanted to attend. So, she decided to repeat that year.
Wall went on to become a first-generation college student, graduating at the top of her class in university. She moved to the United States to earn her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin.
“Overcoming failure was so liberating that it made me fearless to pursue what I wanted to pursue,” Wall said. Now, she encourages students not to fear failure.
Wall has traveled to various countries across the world and has built a family with the people she has met. She hopes to continue traveling and dreams of living in a new country where she can immerse herself in the culture and become fluent in a non-English language.
In her free time, Wall likes reading stories with strong female protagonists and is working her way through some graphic novels she has collected over the years. She also enjoys doing yoga, critiquing films, getting politically involved and expressing her creativity through improv.
Christine Wilkinson — Science Teacher
Christine Wilkinson, a new Biology and Chemistry teacher, is coming to Lick after teaching in the science department at Saint Ignatius high school in San Francisco for thirteen years. Originally from Maryland, she now calls the Bay Area home and lives with her husband and two kids.
Wilkinson has known that she wanted to be a teacher since high school, when she enjoyed working at summer camps with kids. Her high school biotech class was particularly inspiring to her. She remembers the class “being something I wanted to pass on to my own students.”
Outside of school, you’ll find Wilkinson running, practicing some yoga, or hiking with her kids. She loves to be outdoors; this summer her family visited Crater Lake and the Grand Tetons. Usually, they would be packed onto a Maryland beach near her extended family, but due to Covid-19, they had to cancel their plans
Wilkinson is excited to hopefully teach on campus this year and not cook her own lunch. “We eat a lot of chicken,” she says, “but I heard Lick serves a lot of chicken.” As a professed chicken lover, she’s excited to see what Caf lunches might bring.
Wilkinson knows that there’s so much she can learn from her students and is excited for her year with them. “Teenagers are some of the people that are most open to growth and change and learning and I am excited to get to be a part of that. For me, personally, it keeps me excited about continuing to learn and be open to change.”
Jorge Garcia — Facilities Director
Unfortunately, we have been unable to contact our new facilities director, Jorge Garcia, and an article about him may be updated in the future.
