You may know Mr. Rhodes as the friendly face that greets you in the morning at the end of the elevator line, or the man that roams the halls taking videos on a selfie stick. But, like many members of the Millennium High School staff, there’s much more to know.
We are seated in Mr. Rhodes office located on the 13th floor. He’s wearing a “No sleep till Brooklyn” shirt, on theme for spirit week’s day one: Pajama Day. Little did I know that the questions I had prepared from stalking his LinkedIn would result in a lengthy 40 minute interview, and more significantly, a conversation about the vast range of activities, jobs and other “things” that Mr. Rhodes has done throughout his life.
Speaking about his experience in high school, he explains how he felt as though he had a great education, but didn’t feel like he belonged in his school which was very competitive and a large school. He mentions wanting more community.
Suddenly Mr. McEvoy interrupts, coming into Mr. Rhodes’ office. Talking about a previous conversation he had with me, where I referred to his relationship with Mr. Rhodes as friends, to which he had interjected, stating “We are mortal enemies.” And then he leaves.
Moving back on track with the interview and talking more about his high school experience, Mr. Rhodes says that in between 10th and 11th grade he was accepted to an exchange program, where he lived in Brazil for a summer. He “appreciated it for what it was and realized that there is so much more out in the world and was really excited to explore it.”
He shares how he had a student from the Netherlands come live with him during his senior year as a foreign exchange student. “I was very involved with foreign exchange every year, my highschool had at least 2 students come as foreign exchange students for 6 months to a year.”
Beyond that he shares how he would hang out with his friends, mentioning how he would work out regularly as a teen.
“I had a lot of jobs,” he shares, listing off babysitting, car washing, lawn mowing, shoveling snow, working in a chinese restaurant as a busboy, as a fry cook and server, even re-tarring driveways for a summer. “I wanted money to go out, either with my friends or if I was dating somebody like to a movie.”
Mr. Rhodes shares how when he was applying for college he was looking for a small liberal arts college, expressing interest in Sarah Lawrence and Reed. He ultimately picked Sarah Lawerence, saying how he valued their emphasis on writing because he wanted to become a better writer. He says that he was “pretty sure” that he would end up with his major in Social science going into college. But he also took a lot of different courses including a film course and a course about the Bible and the literary aspects of it. “One of the best science classes I took was social aspects of biology,” he recounts. “We studied sort of bees and other animals and how they communicate, how they’re organized. It was really an amazing class.”
When talking about his transition from living in Ohio to New York, Mr. Rhodes expresses that he was “eager to explore.” He tells me about how he would get together with friends and go into the east village or go see a performance or go to a dive bar near Columbia University that some friend would know about.
“One of the jobs I had in college was to drive the vans, like if there was a group going into the city I would drive that van [from Sarah Lawrence].” He says and tells me how it almost forced him to navigate the city. When asked about his favorite place in the city during his college years, he says that it was St. Marks. “You could go to a lot of different places around there, there was a lot of cheap food. I love music, there were like three record/CD stores. You could get stuff bootleg like at the time, things that weren’t streaming were Prince’s The Black album. I remember going down there and hunting and finding it and being so excited.”
During my research before the interview, I had found out that Mr. Rhodes had been a member of Sarah Lawrence’s rowing crew. “My brother got into rowing and he still competes, I only did it for a year. It was the first year and someone mentioned it to me and I thought Well that sounds interesting. My friends and I would get up at 5:30 to practice… We competed and did reasonably well.”
At this point I mention my, admittedly limited, experience with rowing, summed up with using the urg at my gym and reading Lessons in Chemistry, a book Mr. Rhodes then says he read as well. After geeking out about the book and how touching the story is, we move into talking about student government.
He tells me about how he was falling behind in his classes during that time because of how he balanced student government as the treasurer and was on the rowing team. Mr. Rhodes oversees the senior officers for Millennium with Ms. Wan Reid. He says that coming into this role felt very natural due to his experience with the role in college. Explaining more about the role, he says “it is a lot about budgeting… what gets the most value, what brings people the most joy and sense of community.”
Talking about his post-undergrad experience, Mr. Rhodes explains that when he graduated he didn’t know what he wanted to do, so he decided to teach for a while. He explains that during that time there was a recession and that there weren’t that many jobs available, but he kept networking. He says that he ended up spending his savings that summer. “My roommate from freshman year said, Hey, there’s a carpenter apprentice opening, why don’t you come try out for it.”
He was living with 2 roommates and working for a carpenter while also working at a cemetery for a month. His next career step happened when he was offered a math teacher position after getting a call from a previous networking friend of a friend. It was for students who were kicked out of other high schools. “I was interviewed on a Thursday and they said can you start Monday? And I was really scared… I was 22 years old and I was teaching math to 19, 20, 21 year olds who had been kicked out of other high schools.” He ended up taking the position while continuing working as a carpenter on weekends. Since he didn’t major in math, he explains that he was on an alternative education program that doesn’t exist anymore. He told me about how he took different math courses at different colleges including City College, Fordham and Sarah Lawrence . After that program was disbanded, the school was moved into a previous hospital wing. “It felt like [a hospital wing]… and it smelt like it,” he recalls.
After that, Mr. Rhodes tells me about his experience teaching at School of the Future, where he taught English and History and surprisingly, a year of health. He fondly looks back on how he was given resources from the sister of one of his best friends from high school, who was a community health person. “I just had the best time teaching health.”
Mr. Rhodes was the Assistant Principal of School of the Future as well. He tells me about when he first applied and then got… rejected? But then how the person who was hired ended up quitting after 3 weeks, and he got the job. “I beat out a hundred other candidates, I was the best person,” He jokes. “No, no they gave it to someone else, and then they left.”
Mr. Rhodes was the founding principal of Millennium High School. “It was just, right place, right time,” he says, “I was in my office one day and the superintendent called Hey, so we want to start more new schools, one of our partner organizations has gotten a grant to do so. Do you wanna write an application for a new school? And I tried to be very coy about it, like, Oh can I have the weekend to think about it? And he says sure. I hung up the phone and thought, Wow, I’m never getting that phone call again. That’s a once in a lifetime call. I knew I was gonna say yes, but I didn’t wanna appear too eager,” he retells while laughing. He put together a team of his friends who would go on to help him work on forming Millennium, “We worked on writing the proposal for about 6 months. It was like a 40 or 50 page proposal… Friday, September 7th, 2001, We signed and the kind-of magic happened. We put it in lower Manhattan because we thought there’s nothing downtown and it’s a growing area.”
Tuesday, September 11th the World Trade Tower was struck. He recalls being told by the deputy superintendent that “either one of two things are going to happen, either it’s never gonna be lower Manhattan or lower Manhattan is going to rebuild and this is gonna really happen.”
A few weeks later there was a huge amount of money raised for the school and Mr. Rhodes along with others were able to hire a private contractor and design the space that we are sitting in now. “We probably looked at 40 or 50 different spaces, and we thought about if it could work as a school, and also which places would rent to a school.”
When we switch over to talking about when Mr. Rhodes left Millennium in 2012, he cites what helped him make that decision. “I started thinking maybe there’s something else I wanna try. It could be good for me or for the school. When I read organizational studies that said that people peak, like, after 10 or 15 years into the jobs, then they don’t make measurable contributions to the job. So I thought it might be healthy for the school to have someone new.” He mentions how he thought about this job change for a year before applying to a job. After meeting someone he met through networking, a skill that it seems he has honed over the years, he was offered a job at Horace Greeley High School. This process of getting the job was not easy though, he says that he went through extensive committee screenings. “It was new but also very different.” He mentions that working at that school was a huge learning experience.
Mr. Rhodes ended up leaving Horace Greeley in 2018. “The short version is: There were a series of crises in the district, and there was not going to be a lot of career growth for me there.” He is referring to how a former drama teacher was charged in 2015 for sexually abusing students at the school. (https://www.lohud.com/story/news/education/2018/06/22/horace-greeley-principal-latest-resign-chappaqua/725382002/)
Mr. Rhodes then founded Next Level Educational Consulting, as an educational consulting business. “There was some work helping design schools, there was some consulting work with individual’s students… It was just to help people figure out what they wanted to do.”
After COVID began, Mr. Rhodes says that he saw that Millennium was hiring a new assistant principal. I asked him to elaborate more on the relationship that Mr. McEvoy describes as “mortal enemies.”
“I would say that Mr. McEvoy and I are Yin and Yang. Two opposites that make a whole. I think that is important for two reasons: most really hard problems are really complex and require different points of view,” he explains. “I worked with brain scans about neurological preferences while working with Next Level… you take a survey questionnaire and it shows you, like, what your thinking preferences are… If you compare the brain profiles of Mr. McEvoy and I, they’re almost exactly opposite. Like literally Yin and Yang.”
“We met in the founding of Millennium, he was one of the last teachers hired.” This is new information to me, but honestly does it come as a shock that he was a history teacher? Thinking of his famous one liners, even during the interview how he told me, “You’ll hear from my lawyer.”
Mr. Rhodes continues, “He was a Peace Corps fellow, we were looking for smart -” (maybe they should rethink that whole enemies title) “- liberal arts grads… I met him at a Peace Corps hiring event… We were on the subway back, I remember he said It was so nice to meet you. Whatever you need, I’ll do it,” Rhodes chuckles, “I don’t think he knew what he was getting into.”
We move onto talking more about his current personal life. I had heard that he has recently become an empty-nester, with the last of his three children going to Brown University. After further research I have learned that this daughter is actually friends with my cousin, who also goes to Brown.
I ask him how it feels to be an empty nester, and he responds, after a pause, “I miss them. It’s funny, like they make me crazy like, towels on the floor of the bathroom, but now I walk in and the bathroom floors clear, like why are the towels not here? That’s so sad,” he looks thoughtful as he responds. “I miss seeing the little day-to-day things.”
Ms. Wan mentioned to me that Mr. Rhodes has a love for music. She undersold this passion hugely. “I have a love for female-lead punk bands. I’m really into pop music, my son says I have the musical taste of an 18 year old woman, which is true. I went to the All Things Go music festival with my daughter, had a great time. Saw Somia, Maise Peters, Ethel Cain, Soccer Mommy, I was going to see Chappell Roan, but she canceled. Yeah so I think I really like female pop singers and bands. I like classic rock… I’ve always been into it, I think over the last 10 years or so I’ve spent more time appreciating live music.”
“I was at a Bikini Kill show about two weeks ago and I was standing there and I look over and I see a couple of Millennium students,” at this we are both laughing. “I was like should I say hello? But I was like no, but Monday morning they came in the elevators and said, like You know someone looked a lot like you at the Bikini Kill show, and I was like, That’s so funny because someone looked a lot like you there, off to my right.”
When asked if he has any personal musical expertise, his response was simple: “I sing terribly and off-key. In middle school I played saxophone for a few years, but that’s it.”
This interview was incredibly insightful to me, when talking to Mr. Rhodes I had previously mentioned that I feel like students don’t really connect with teachers or see them as existing human beings outside of school. I have had the unique experience of having a parent as a teacher, which gives me insight into everything outside of the classroom. But even if this had not been the case, this conversation showed how Mr. Rhodes is so many things beyond an assistant principal, his life has been a web of exploration, which to me at least, has been hugely inspirational.
When asked for his overall top piece of advice, he says “Keep trying things, and you’ll find things that you’d never thought you would like, even find stuff you don’t like. Take chances.” Very on-brand.
