Meet Board Member Joshua Weintraub, School Leader at Lighthouse Community Public Schools

Born and raised in the Bay Area, Josh has over 25 years of working/learning as an educator, mostly in public charter schools. Since helping found Lighthouse Community Charter High School in 2005, one of The Field Semester partner schools, Josh has spent the last 18 years at Lighthouse Community Public Schools, which now operates Lighthouse and Lodestar, both K-12 schools in East Oakland. 

What excites you most about The Field Semester? 

As a longtime educator at one of The Field Semester’s inaugural partner schools, Lighthouse Community Charter School in Oakland, there is so much about the Field Semester that excites me. Although climate change disproportionately impacts people of color and those with more limited income/resources, environmentalism often feels inaccessible to students from traditionally marginalized communities. The Field Semester gives students of all backgrounds a tangible entry point into thinking deeply and starting to take action around environmental issues that the future of our planet hinges on. Additionally, in bringing together a diverse group of students to learn, live, and problem-solve together, The Field Semester also helps engender human connection between young people who might otherwise rarely interact in meaningful ways. Most schools simply replicate the status quo; the Field Semester seeks to transform and transcend schooling as most of us know it. 

Tell us about the greatest thing you’ve learned while working on The Field Semester?

In my short time working with The Field Semester’s other board members, I’ve learned that educators and community members from various backgrounds and different types of schools are all energized to re-imagine education as we know it. Much of my work as a school leader is about making an inherently flawed system work slightly better for as many students as possible. The Field Semester is about creating a different system, something that we can hold up as a model and as an inspiration.

While still in development, what impacts has The Field Semester already had on you? What insights have you gleaned from being a key part of this project thus far?

Place matters. In our increasingly globalized world, it is easy to forget that we are deeply influenced by where we live - the cadence of the seasons, the kinds of people we interact with on a daily basis, the history and culture of our region. The Bay Area is a particularly special place that few students really study or learn about in most schools. I can’t wait to see how engaging in place-based experiential education at the Field Semester shifts the perspectives, identities, and actions of young people in our community.