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Lisa Friscia is currently the Chief People Officer at Democracy Prep Public Schools. She is responsible for ensuring that DPPS is able to attract, develop and retain high quality talent in schools and the CMO. Through her career, she has been a teacher and a founding principal of Democracy Prep’s first high school, where Regents pass rates consistently outranked the districts and city and 100% of seniors were accepted into college. She began her work in education as a NYC Teaching Fellow, teaching middle school history in Ozone Park, Queens.
She is a proud Amherst graduate, where she earned her B.A. in American Studies and Economics. She also holds an M. Ed in Social Studies Education from Queens University and an M. Ed. in Educational Leadership from Teachers College. She serves as Board Chair of Forte Prep, another tuition-free public charter school in Queens, and on the Associate Board of Gilda’s Club NYC.
Lisa Friscia, the focus of June 2019’s alumni SPA-light, serves the Democracy Prep network as their Chief People Officer. Her role entails overseeing talent development and the network’s recruitment team. Lisa’s approach to her role is based on retention - hiring educators who will then be with the network for a long time. To do that, attracting, hiring, training, and evaluating talent need to be aligned processes. To do so, she collaborates as often as possible with school leaders and hiring managers to ensure that leaders have the tools that they need to hire, coach and retain talent. This collaboration is key, as she believes that school leaders know their school community’s learning context best. Lisa believes that it is the responsibility of administrators in roles such as hers to ensure that leaders have the thought partnership tools they need in order to make the best decisions for their school, staff, and students.
When I asked Lisa to reflect on which aspects of SPA most heavily influenced her thinking about leadership training, she responded that the program’s focus on decision making helped immensely. She believes that those in roles such as hers should be using time and space in an effort to help leaders make better decisions in order to ensure equity, and she also noted that that mindset definitely influenced her approach to creating Democracy Prep’s Leader U program.
Consequently, she believes in striking balance between having rigorous processes in place to challenge biases, but also giving autonomy to leaders to make the decisions that they believe are right for them. She added that developing and maintaining a consistent vision and common language in your network or district helps, but she also firmly believes that different leaders can arrive at the same destination using different methods. Lisa tied that belief back to her experiences meeting a variety of classmates at SPA who had differing opinions about educational models such as traditional public and charter, but held forth the same commitment to achieving educational equity. She believes that being exposed to such a wide variety of ideas in her 20s allowed her to open her mind to and be more creative in thinking about the many different ways to do this work. She reiterated that we all hold different pieces to the puzzle, we just need to be more humble in putting them together.
Lisa’s parting words for current and incoming student: SPA trains you to be the best version of yourself. Don’t be afraid to try new things. Don’t get so stuck in five or ten year plans that you forget that the world evolves. Be curious and be open consistently. Take the time to meet and share with others, and to find thought partners who can help you redefine yourself as an educator as you grow throughout your career.
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