Faculty Profile: Dana Perkins

As any eighth grader can tell you, the high-school admissions process is one of the most stressful times in their young lives. Dana Perkins came to Burke's in the 2016-17 school year uniquely positioned to usher those students through our already strong high-school counseling program.

Her experience as a former high-school English teacher and ninth-grade dean informs Dana's work with families as she helps prepare students for the transition to high school. That background also sharpens her perspective on Bay Area high schools as well as the boarding schools around the United States and Canada that our students consider, visit, and attend. Dana herself attended Menlo School for two years and graduated from Sacred Heart Prep, and her family has deep roots in San Francisco. Her understanding of and feeling for the history of Bay Area high schools is deep, and she rarely returns from a visit to a high school without a small-world story of some kind!

“Dana's gentle manner makes her approachable, and students find comfort and a listening ear on the couch in her office,” our Upper School Director, Rebekah Wolman, shares. Dana recalls that for as long as she’s been in the classroom, her students have felt comfortable seeking her out for advice. Her deep knowledge of each eighth grader at Burke’s is something she nurtures by working closely with the eighth-grade advising team and the Upper School Counselor, as well as developing and implementing programming that helps them manage the inevitable stresses of the high-school application process.

That process — as well as Dana's relationship with each class — really begins in the seventh grade, when she works with students in their required Public Speaking class. Exploring and identifying a topic that she cares enough about to write a five-minute speech and present it at an Upper School assembly is an important rite of passage for each seventh-grade student. It’s a stepping-stone on the path toward identifying a good high-school match and self-advocating through the application process, which she encourages students to see as a journey of self-discovery and -expression. This Public Speaking class earned Dana a Davis Writing Award for the 2017-18 school year, which is an honor is given to Burke’s educators who teach language arts. This fund was established by the Davis family in the fall of 1989 to recognize and encourage the teaching of language arts at Burke's.

Dana first found her love for teaching young women while coaching rowing for a high school club in Oakland, which built on her background on rowing crew while majoring in English at UC-Berkeley. After college, she worked at a skateboarding magazine while getting a masters in Creative Writing at USF and also obtaining her single subject teaching credential. Dana landed her first teaching job in 1995 at an all-girls high school in Seattle and spent 20 years in the area. Her experience writing recommendation letters, working with the college counselor, and being part of her students’ decision-making process has translated well to Dana’s work here at Burke’s. She “particularly enjoys helping the girls with the writing they have to do for applications and writing their recommendation letters.”

In her spare time, Dana enjoys spending a lot of time with her two dogs, Ruby and Koa, gardening and growing vegetables, cooking, hiking, walking, and running. It’s also no surprise that when she’s not reading her students’ essays, her favorite genre to read is literary nonfiction — personal essays!
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