RE Log Spring 2022

SPRING 2022 Ransom Everglades LOG 9 RE Board of Trustees Chair Jeff Hicks ’84 , who followed a similar path from RE to Coral Gables High, remembers being impressed by her work ethic and drive. “She was an incredible athlete, passionate about fitness and running and cycling and marathons and all sorts of stuff like that,” he said. “She was an incredible overachiever as a junior high school student and a high school student.” After attending Princeton University, where she played three sports and broke records in track and field (to this day she is ranked 10th in the women’s 800-meter run), Easton moved to New York and started a career as a public school teacher. She loved the kids, and couldn’t help but notice their struggles with poor eating habits. “I watched them come to school with a bag of chips, and that was their breakfast,” she recalled. “A very large bag, usually orange, and the soda was also orange. So not only did they have orange fingers and orange tongues for a good part of their day – they also couldn’t walk a flight of stairs.” Experiences like these inspired her to start Wellness in the Schools, which she co-founded with celebrity chef Bill Telepan (the first of many noted culinarians who would associate with the nonprofit). The experiment at Ella Baker School was limited in scope and difficult to sustain, but it raised eyebrows among some higher-ups in NYC’s education bureaucracy. The involvement of chefs like Telepan helped – as did a forward- thinking working relationship with Stephen O’Brien, a regional director of operations who believed in the vision and helped gain support for the program’s expansion. “[There’s] a pretty deep and symbiotic relationship between WITS and the Office of Food and Nutrition Services,” explained O’Brien, now the DOE’s Director of Strategic Partnerships and Policy. “Working together over these many years, we continuously tried to keep working in partnership so that we could help elevate the whole program, not just an isolated set of schools.” Nancy Easton ’84, center, at the RE middle school