A school can outlive its founders
American Academy Larnaca was founded in 1908. Its history crosses generations, wars, changes in the city and changes in what families expect from education. The most interesting part of that history, to me, is not only its age. It is the decision made in 1973 to place the school and its facilities in the hands of the American Academy Alumni Foundation.
Since then, the Academy has operated as a non-profit organisation with charitable status, governed mainly by its own graduates. This is an unusual form of ownership. There is no distant shareholder waiting for a return and no family preparing the next heir. The people entrusted with the school are people who once sat in its classrooms.
The arrangement is simple to describe and harder to carry: former students are responsible for the school used by current students. We inherit its buildings, traditions, reputation and unfinished work. Our school memories matter, but the job is not to recreate them.
Ownership means doing the work
I returned to the Academy through its alumni community and now serve as secretary of its Board of Directors. As a student, the school felt permanent. Timetables appeared, teachers arrived, classrooms opened and somebody else made the whole system work. On the board, I can see the decisions behind it.
A school has to make choices about educational standards, pastoral care, people, scholarships, buildings, technology and money. Every decision touches a student eventually, even when the board paper looks administrative. A delayed repair changes a classroom. A recruitment decision changes hundreds of interactions. A budget is not a spreadsheet detached from education; it is a statement about what the institution can protect and what it hopes to build.
Alumni ownership does not make those decisions easier. It makes them harder to hand to somebody else. We cannot complain like customers and wait for an owner to fix the problem. We are the owners.
A board is not a second head teacher
Company experience can be useful in school governance, but it can also create false confidence. A school is not a startup. Children are not users to be optimised, teachers are not units of production and education cannot be reduced to one conversion metric. Some of the most important outcomes take years to become visible.
The board appoints and supports the school's leadership, asks difficult questions, looks after the institution's future and then respects the boundary between governance and daily teaching.
That boundary matters. A board that avoids difficult decisions is not governing. A board that tries to run every classroom is not governing either.
Tradition should be a foundation, not a veto
Alumni naturally remember the version of a school that formed them. That affection is valuable, but nostalgia is a poor operating model. The next generation does not owe us a recreation of our school years. It needs an education equal to its own circumstances.
The Academy's motto is “To Grow and To Serve.” I read that as permission to keep what still works and change what does not. The next generation does not owe alumni a reconstruction of our school years.
Technology makes the tension obvious. The school should not chase every new tool, but it cannot pretend that AI, access to information and changing work have no effect on learning. Students still need to reason, create, cooperate and exercise judgement, whatever tools are in front of them.
Giving back is mostly maintenance
People often describe giving back as a donation made after success. Money matters, particularly for scholarships and facilities, but an alumni-owned school asks for more kinds of contribution: time, professional knowledge, introductions, scrutiny and a willingness to do work that will never carry your name.
An alumni network can do more than organise reunions. Graduates can open a first door, explain a profession, mentor a student, support a teacher's idea or help the school avoid a mistake they have seen elsewhere.
I do not serve because I think the Academy is perfect. I serve because some things need care, some need repair, and alumni ownership gives us no distant owner to blame.
Public record
These sources confirm the public facts. The rest is my recollection, written in 2026.