Launched in 2005, WellesleyWeston Magazine is a quarterly publication tailored to Wellesley and Weston residents and edited to enrich the experience of living in two of Massachusetts' most desirable communities.
Issue link: https://wellesleywestonmagazine.epubxp.com/i/210435
Wellesley Superintendent of Schools Dr. David Lussier over the past 15 years, David Lussier has made stops in nearly every school district in the S T E V E M A A S writer Commonwealth, spent a year in the White House, crisscrossed the United States, and peered over the B R I A N S M I T H photographer Afghan border. For the last year, Lussier, 44, has been based in a first-floor office in a nondescript building on the grounds of the Wellesley Middle School. And, as Wellesley's Superintendent of Schools, he says he is right where he wants to be. In 1999, as a 29-year-old social studies teacher at Andover High School, Lussier was selected Massachusetts Teacher of the Year. Nothing has been the same since. After spending a year coaching teachers and consulting with professors from Nantucket to the Berkshires, Lussier went from teaching history to watching it being made. As one of 15 White House fellows appointed by President Bill Clinton for 2000-2001, he served as associate director of domestic policy. But the program also exposed him to other functions of government, such as foreign policy. That's why he was on a trip that took him to India and Pakistan, where his group traveled to the Afghan border just months before 9/11. Unlike most Americans, he didn't need a crash course in the dangers of Al Qaeda. He had already heard about the threat posed by Osama bin Laden from top US security officials. Lussier's term overlapped the first year of the Bush administration. On the day of the inaugural, he went bad for a Dracut boy whose father worked in distribution for the Lowell Sun and whose mother waitressed at a Chinese restaurant. From the White House he went to work for an educational nonprofit in nearby Arlington, Virginia. In his five years in the Washington area, he often stood out as the only teacher in the room. Rather than fueling ambitions to become part of the power elite, the heady atmosphere of the nation's capital left him eager to 53 w i n t e r 2 0 1 3 / 2 0 1 4 | We l l e s l e y We s t o n M a g a z i n e to Andrews Air Force base to see off Clinton and that night attended one of the balls in honor of Bush. Not