Head of School Search

Our Next Head of School

The board of trustees and the search committee are thrilled to announce that Todd Ballaban will be Charlotte Prep’s next head of school, effective July 2025. “Todd is well-prepared to be the next head of school at Charlotte Prep, where he will advance the work initiated under Chris Marblo to ensure Charlotte Preparatory School is recognized as providing the best PreK-8 education in the region,” shared Board Chair Robert Frost.

Mr. Ballaban joins us from Charlotte Latin School, where he has led the middle school for eight years. During his time at Charlotte Latin, Mr. Ballaban has led significant all-school initiatives, playing a central role in the school's accreditation, schedule design process, and strategic plan. His tenure has seen a 10 percent increase in middle school enrollment, and his intentional efforts to create a positive faculty culture resulted in nearly 100 percent middle school teacher retention this past year. Mr. Ballaban has had the opportunity to observe the success that Prep graduates have at Charlotte Latin, noting, “I have long held the belief that Charlotte Prep students are among the most prepared to thrive academically and socially in top high schools throughout the Charlotte area.”

After Chris Marblo announced his plans to retire at the end of the 2024-2025 school year following a successful five-year tenure, the board of trustees established a search committee to seek Charlotte Prep’s next leader. Working closely with search partners from Carney, Sandoe & Associates, the search committee surveyed community stakeholders and crafted the position criteria. They worked tirelessly reviewing resumes and interviewing candidates, culminating in extended on-campus interviews for three finalists. Mr. Ballaban impressed at every stage of this process and was the unanimous choice of the search committee, subsequently affirmed by the board of trustees.

A native of Thousand Oaks, CA, Mr. Ballaban attended boarding school at Berkshire School in Western Massachusetts, where he experienced the power of peer and adult relationships in an independent school community. He graduated cum laude with a B.A. in Law and History from Amherst College, where he also played intercollegiate ice hockey and golf. He earned his M.A. in Educational Leadership from California Lutheran University. Mr. Ballaban is also a graduate of NAIS' Aspiring Heads Fellowship Program.

Prior to arriving at Charlotte Latin, Mr. Ballaban held the roles of assistant head of upper school and academic dean at La Jolla Country Day School in San Diego, CA. Mr. Ballaban spent his formative teaching years at Brentwood School in Los Angeles, where he taught English and history. While there, he also launched a debate team that later captured two national championships.

Mr. Ballaban has a deep appreciation for what makes our school unique. “Upon meeting the search committee and later so many members of the Charlotte Prep community, it was immediately clear that Prep prioritizes people, community, and academic excellence,” he reflected. “There was a palpable sense of joy radiating from every person I met, from the students to the parents to the teachers.”

Mr. Ballaban's wife, Amy, teaches fourth grade at Charlotte Latin School and oversees the service learning program in the lower school. In his spare time, Mr. Ballaban enjoys cooking, hiking, international travel, pickleball, and golf.

We are deeply grateful to the members of our search committee and board of trustees, our search consultants, and the countless parents, faculty, staff, and students who contributed to the success of our search. With Mr. Ballaban’s vision and leadership, we are confident that Charlotte Prep’s future is brighter than ever.

Please join us in welcoming Todd Ballaban to the Charlotte Prep family. We look forward to this exciting next chapter!

Sincerely,

JeNai Redwood & Jeff Mitchell, Search Committee Co-Chairs

Search Process

Carney, Sandoe & Associates conducted community listening sessions
CS&A consultants engaged prospective candidates
Semifinalists and finalists interviewed with the search committee
Appointee named
Incoming head of school transition meetings
New head of school begins summer of 2025

Charlotte Preparatory School retained Carney, Sandoe & Associates (CS&A), an internationally recognized education search and recruitment, consulting, and coaching firm, to partner with us in the search for our next Head of School. CS&A brings deep knowledge of independent schools from more than 45 years of experience guiding schools through their searches for exceptional heads of school, senior administrators, and faculty. Carney Sandoe is known for its highly personalized approach to understanding the particular strengths, needs, and cultures of schools and then supporting them through the identification, recruitment, and hiring of excellent leaders whose skills and experiences align with the school’s needs. We are excited to work with Peter Barrett and Marsha Little as our consultants.

Read Position Description

Community Updates

June 4, 2024 - Community Survey Results & Position Description for Head of School

Dear Charlotte Prep Community,

As we head into the summer, we are pleased to offer an update on Charlotte Prep’s search for our next head of school.

In May, our consultants from Carney, Sandoe & Associates, Marsha Little and Peter Barrett, spent two very full days on campus, meeting with more than 70 community members. Conversations occurred in individual meetings with administrators and small-group meetings with middle school students, current parents, and faculty. They also met with the head of school search committee and with members of the board of trustees. We appreciate the time, care, and enthusiasm with which so many of you shared your affection for Charlotte Prep and your hopes for the school’s next chapter.

The head of school position description owes much to your participation in Peter and Marsha’s visit to Charlotte Prep and in the corresponding online community survey. Over the coming weeks, Marsha and Peter will share this document extensively with potential candidates, inviting them into further conversation about what makes Charlotte Prep so special.

Given the importance to the overall process of the findings from the community survey and Marsha and Peter’s campus visit, as well as our gratitude for your participation in both opportunities, we wanted to report back to you with some takeaways.

In all, 155 members of the Charlotte Prep community responded to the survey, including 101 who identified their primary association as a parent of a current student and 43 who identified their primary association as a member of the faculty, staff, and administration. (As you know, there is considerable overlap among the various constituencies, which also include trustees, parents of former students, and alumni.)

While the survey results and site-visit conversations reveal a high level of consistency across constituencies as to what they value about Charlotte Prep, what the work ahead looks like, and what qualifications and qualities the next Head of School should have to thrive here, they also reflect the varying perspectives that help make Charlotte Prep the vibrant learning community it is.

If you would like to know more about the survey results, please review our consultants' survey summary.

Over the summer, we will move into recruitment mode as we and our consulting partners look for the best new leader for Charlotte Prep. We look forward to sharing another update early in the new school year and wish you the very best as you head into what we hope will be a joyful and restorative summer.

With gratitude for your partnership,

Sincerely,

JeNai Redwood & Jeff Mitchell, Search Committee Co-Chairs

May 7, 2024 - Community Survey & Search Committee Members

Dear Charlotte Prep Community,

We are pleased to share this update as we move more deeply into launching our head of school search. We are delighted to announce the members of the head of school search committee, plans for our consultants’ site visit, and the opening of an online community survey seeking your input on the search.

In our letter on April 19, we mentioned the formation of a search committee. The committee members are listed at the end of this letter, and we are grateful for their service in the search process.

We have engaged Carney, Sandoe & Associates, an internationally recognized search and recruitment, consulting, and coaching firm, to partner with us in our head of school search. Senior consultants Marsha Little and Peter Barrett will be on campus this week (Thursday, May 9, and Friday, May 10) to engage with our community about what makes Charlotte Prep unique and to identify our leadership needs as we write our next chapter. A mix of individual and small-group meetings with members of the faculty, staff, and administration; parents; trustees; and students will enable Marsha and Peter to understand more deeply the opportunities and challenges that await the next head of school and the qualities and characteristics our community thinks are essential for that individual to be most effective.

In conjunction with our consultants’ site visit, we invite your participation in an online community survey that explores many of those same topics. Whether or not you meet with Marsha and Peter this week, we encourage you to complete the survey. The survey will close at midnight on Monday, May 13.

We are excited to begin the search in earnest and hope that you will take these opportunities to share your thoughts about the future of Charlotte Prep. As we do so, we want to reiterate our deep gratitude for Chris Marblo’s exceptional service since 2020.

If you have questions for the search committee, please contact us at [email protected].

Sincerely,

JeNai Redwood & Jeff Mitchell, Search Committee Co-Chairs

Head of School Search Committee Members

JeNai Redwood, Trustee & Committee Co-Chair
Jeff Mitchell, Trustee & Committee Co-Chair
Sandy Midlam, Trustee
David Reisner, Trustee
Seher Khanna, Administrator
Maggie Harris, Lower School Teacher
Michelle Pysher, Early School Teacher
Dawn Tenev, Middle School Teacher
Sloane Mayberry, Former Trustee & Parent

April 19, 2024 - Announcement of Head of School Search Firm

Dear Charlotte Prep Community,

We are pleased to share an update regarding the head of school search and the process we will follow over the coming months to ensure we have the most successful search possible.

Charlotte Prep has retained Carney, Sandoe & Associates (CS&A), an internationally recognized education search and recruitment firm, to partner with us in the search for our next head of school. CS&A brings deep knowledge of independent schools from over 45 years of experience guiding schools through their searches for exceptional heads of school, senior administrators, and faculty. We are excited to work with Peter Barrett and Marsha Little as our consultants. We are confident that our partnership with CS&A will produce great results.

The board of trustees is assembling a search committee whose members will work closely with our consultants throughout this process. The search committee will screen, evaluate, and recommend candidates to the board of trustees, which will make a final decision on the successful candidate. We look forward to sharing the names of search committee members in the coming weeks.

Our aim is for the search process to be as inclusive and transparent as possible, affording our community multiple opportunities to provide input to our search team. One of the first steps in our search process is an on-campus visit with CS&A in mid-May. They will meet with a wide variety of members from our community while they are here. Central to those conversations with CS&A are strategies that will enable us to hear and learn from the many Charlotte Prep voices that will help shape the search and keep the wider community informed while protecting the confidential stages of the process.

We will send an online survey to each of you in early May to solicit your feedback regarding the leadership profile for Charlotte Prep and your perspective of the school and its future. Additionally, a dedicated email address has been created ([email protected]) where you can share any thoughts and/or questions directly with the search committee. We will also keep the community informed through periodic updates on the “Head of School Search” page of our website, which will go live in the next couple of weeks.

If you have any questions, please reach out to the committee at the email shared above.

Sincerely,

JeNai Redwood & Jeff Mitchell, Search Chairs

March 26, 2024 - Letter from our Board Chair on Chris's Retirement

Charlotte Preparatory School has undertaken an incredible journey under the strong leadership of Chris Marblo. When his tenure ends in summer of 2025, he will leave behind a thriving, focused, and respected independent school well on its way to achieving its stated goal of being recognized as providing the best PreK-8 education in Charlotte. The positive transformation our school is making under Chris’ steady hand is occurring despite the multiple crises he has had to navigate.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Chris agreed to become Charlotte Prep’s Head of School on February 8, 2020. Less than a month later, the world entered the Covid-19 crisis, an event with a reach and impact unprecedented in modern times. Chris entered this crisis as a new head of school, with no pre-existing relationships with administrative staff, teachers, or families. Through his leadership, Charlotte Prep continued full-time, on-campus learning throughout the two-year crisis. He accomplished this by building coalition, consensus, and trust, by listening to teacher concerns and addressing them (in many cases by asking the board of trustees to take specific actions), and by providing appropriate accommodations. Even in the midst of crisis, Chris began laying the foundations for our future, petitioning the board to fund a new marketing plan and additional administrative positions. Chris recognizes the importance of an expanded administrative team to providing a high-quality, broad-based, safe, and inclusive educational environment. He has established and staffed new director positions for communications, curriculum, development, security, and most recently, facilities, and has added assistant teachers, counselors, and learning support specialists. He has also championed increasing pay and improving benefits for Charlotte Prep’s talented and dedicated teachers and staff, leading to board approval of significant improvements in these areas over the past several years. The Charlotte community has taken notice of what is happening at Charlotte Preparatory School, with interest in our school at an all-time high.

The second major crisis of Chris’ tenure — the loss of our lower school building this past summer — has only brought our community closer together. Chris once again led our tremendous administrative team and teachers to find a way to keep all our students together, full-time, and on campus. Even during this challenging period, Chris ensured that our team continued to make steady progress on our very aggressive strategic plan goals.

Great leaders build institutions that ensure the continued success of the organization after they depart. Chris’ retirement is not imminent — he has provided more than a year’s notice, and we can all be confident he will continue building greatness and preparing Charlotte Prep for continued success and growth under its next head. The board of trustees wishes to convey both gratitude to Chris for the step-change Charlotte Prep has experienced under his leadership and confidence that our school will continue its positive trajectory with the next head of school. We will begin that search immediately and will have a robust pool of strong candidates from which to choose. Strong enrollment, a strong and comprehensive administrative team, an aggressive strategic plan, an obvious positive trajectory, competitive teacher and staff salary packages, and a cohesive community make ours a very desirable headship.

The head of school is the only person who reports directly to the board of trustees, and identifying and hiring a new head is the single most important function of the board. The board will form a search committee that will include trustees and representative faculty and staff and will hire a firm that specializes in searches for independent school administrators. That company will guide the search committee through the process. The search committee will review provided resumes, questionnaires, and other data on potential candidates and select a small group for in-person interviews, and eventually select a candidate to present an offer to. This process will unfold over the next year, and you will receive periodic updates.

While we will all miss Chris when he retires at the end of next year, the board of trustees remains truly optimistic regarding the future of our school. Charlotte Preparatory School will continue to thrive as we achieve our strategic plan goals.

Sincerely,

Robert Frost

March 26, 2024 - Head of School Chris Marblo Announces Retirement

After much thought and soul searching, I have decided to retire from my position as Head of Charlotte Prep in June 2025. I first became a head of school in 1998 and have had a long and fulfilling career as a school leader, and I am happy this last chapter of it will be at Prep. June 2025 is a natural transition point for new leadership, as the new building will be finished, and most of the strategic plan will be achieved. It will be a wonderful moment for the new head to assume leadership of our school.

Prep is in excellent shape with a very strong leadership team, a hard-working and committed faculty and staff, and a dedicated and knowledgeable board of trustees. I know we will manage this transition very well, and I will do everything in my power to ensure it is a smooth and seamless one. Exciting times are in store for Charlotte Prep, and a bright future awaits the next head of school.

As I look back on my tenure at Prep, I am very proud of the work we have accomplished together:

A vibrant strategic plan that charts an exciting path for Prep.
Enrollment has grown from 320 to 425.
The new campus master plan, that articulates a multi-year vision for a fully optimized Charlotte Prep that will serve the school for decades to come.
Our new marketing plan that articulates the distinct and powerful features of our school.
A new director of curriculum position and an integrated and excellent PreK-8 program.
Significant increase in faculty and staff salaries and benefits.
Navigating the pandemic in ways that served our students and made our community even stronger.
Responding to the lower school fire in a unified, forward-thinking, and optimistic manner.
Significant increases in giving, including the largest gifts in the school’s history.
And, of course, the new building, which is proof positive that good things come from adversity.

These have all been team efforts, the likes of which will continue with a new head of school who will undoubtedly offer fresh energy and expertise to our school. Changes in leadership are opportunities for schools to reaffirm their core values and continue to evolve in thoughtful and powerful ways. I know Prep is positioned for even greater growth and development in the coming years.

I have been blessed with an extraordinary career and can look back on it with deep satisfaction. I truly appreciate the special nature of this community and the kindness I have been afforded during my tenure at Prep, and I look forward to the months ahead and the good things we will continue to accomplish together.

Warmly,

Chris