For the past nine years under Gary Krahn’s leadership, La Jolla Country Day School has expressed a core value of treating everyone with dignity.

Reflecting on his time at Country Day following his retirement last month as head of school, Krahn said he is proud of establishing that campus culture, along with new school programs intended to foster it.

“Gary Krahn had a singular focus on dignity,” according to a statement from the school about his retirement. “He challenged us with the task we all have before us now: to inspire greatness for a better world. Through relentless servant leadership, he helped others meet their fullest potential. For that, we say thank you.”

The private school for children ages 3 through 12th grade launched new programming for students, including the Center for Excellence in Design and Innovation, the Center for Excellence in Citizenship and a media literacy program.

“We had success in developing these programs that prepare our students for the future of our world,” Krahn said. “The experiment there was [formalizing] the design and innovation program, which is intended to get kids involved in developing an awareness as to what problems need to be solved.

“When I arrived, we had a maker space, but we needed something that helped the students determine what should be made and whether it would make a difference in the world.”

Krahn said a $15 million fundraising effort is underway to expand the design and innovation program — which currently is available only to about 160 students — so it can be available to all of the roughly 1,100 students.

To complement the design and innovation programming, Krahn established the Center for Excellence in Citizenship and the media literacy program.

“We wanted the students to understand the world they live in and how to curate information they are given so they know what problems there are to solve,” he said. “I think that was a big success at the school. It changed how we thought about things. But none of it would have happened without our faculty.”

He said the faculty and other staff led with the philosophy that “the nation is divided, but only on the surface.” Students were encouraged to look at things from a bigger perspective when working with someone with whom they disagree, he said.

“We all want our kids to be successful, so we would talk about the divides in the world as being only an inch deep,” Krahn said. “We all want to leave the world better than we found it, and we focused on that.”

La Jolla Country Day ranks among the top 20 percent of private schools in California in size of the student body and the number of Advanced Placement courses, sports and extracurricular activities offered, according to Private School Review.

But Krahn’s time at the school, where he took the helm July 1, 2015, had its share of controversy.

In November 2020, Krahn asked a student to remove and stop wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat because it was “offensive to our community,” he said at the time.

Make America Great Again was Donald Trump’s slogan for his successful campaign for president in 2016 and has continued to be used by him and his supporters as he runs for president this year.

“The First Amendment is very important to me. … [The student] has every right to wear that hat,” Krahn said at the time. But, he said, “that hat has a symbol of racism and hatred. We can argue about whether that’s true or not, but … in our community, there’s a belief that that’s what that hat represents.”

The student “graciously took off his hat,” Krahn said.

Talking to the student about the hat “was not a political decision,” Krahn said. “It was a decision about dignity.

“I wanted the student to know that his decision was going to have an impact on people.”

Reflecting on that incident this week, Krahn said: “There are bumps in the road, and some can rip your heart out. But every experience is a learning opportunity, and that’s what our school is all about.”

In February 2023, shortly after Martin Luther King III spoke at La Jolla Country Day about gratitude and racism, the school’s food provider, Sage Dining Services, offered a lunch designed to present a “Taste of the African Diaspora.”

A person who signed an email “a concerned and hurt student” said the menu included “stereotypical African dishes” such as collard greens, fried chicken tenders and watermelon — items that long have been associated with racial stereotypes.

Tiffany Truong, director of marketing and communications for the school, said at the time that the event “was one of the highly lauded lunches by our community in honor of Black History Month.” She said members of the school administration with whom she had consulted hadn’t heard any complaints about the menu.

And in October 2020, former La Jolla Country Day teacher Jonathan Sammartino was placed on three years’ probation after he admitted to having sex with a teenage girl who had been his student. According to court documents, the acts occurred between April and September 2016 and started when Sammartino was 33 and the girl was 17.

After nine years at La Jolla Country Day and nine years as the head of a school in Texas, Krahn said he is ready to retire and explore more hands-on work.

“I still have some gas in the engine,” he said. “If I could do it again, I would have retired earlier because it gives me some freedom. I want to have the freedom to do what I find to be most important on that day or that week. I’m excited to do new things.”

Among them, he said, is an apprenticeship to become an electrician.

“I could do some plumbing and woodwork, but I stayed away from electricity because it can kill you,” he said. “But I want to work with my hands and solve physical problems.”

Krahn’s successor, Jeff Terwin, officially started as the new head of school July 1 and will be featured in a future issue of the La Jolla Light. ♦