At Rye High, It’s the Principal – Two of Them

Two new assistant principles have been added at Rye High School. In the wake of Tuesday’s school board meeting and the prior meeting on March 23rd, Ms. Christina Cannon and Dr. William Meyer were announced as the new additions. Cannon and Meyer fill the vacancies created when Suzanne Kelly Short became Rye High Principal and Dr. Robert Zegarelli departed to become a Principal in Pearl River.

The District received over 130 applicants for the positions, and nine highly qualified candidates were interviewed by the search committee.

Christina Cannon

Cannon is currently in her second year as an Assistant Principal at Lakeland High School in the Lakeland Central School District. Before working at Lakeland, she spent 15 years in various roles in the New York City public school system, focusing largely on instruction and teaching practices.

Most recently, she was the Assistant Principal at the Academy for Software Engineering, a small school in Manhattan specializing in computer science. Prior to that, she worked as the Director of School Renewal and as a Teacher Development and Evaluation Coach for a group of four public schools. She also spent three years as Assistant Principal at the Bronx Design and Construction Academy, a career and technical education high school. She began her teaching career as a social studies teacher at the Bayard Rustin Educational Complex in Manhattan.

Ms. Cannon has a B.A. from Bucknell University, an M.A. in Secondary Education from New York University, and an M.A. in Educational Leadership and Supervision from the University of Pennsylvania.

She begins in July.

Dr. William Meyer

Dr. Meyer originally joined the District in June of 2021 as the District’s Secondary Instructional Staff Developer. In his work in both the Middle and High School, he demonstrated outstanding leadership skills and instructional knowledge.

Before coming to Rye, Dr. Meyer worked as a social studies teacher at Bronxville Public High School for 11 years, teaching Global History, World History, U.S. History, and AP U.S. History. Beginning in 2018, he was the school’s Coordinator of K-12 Service Learning, and in 2020-21 served as the Co-Director of the Justice Speaking Series and Fellowship which brought together students from Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville High School, Mt. Vernon, and Yonkers schools in a speaking fellowship experience. He previously taught history at Scarsdale Public High School and at NEST+m (New Explorations into Science, Technology and Math school) in Manhattan where he also served as Dean of Students and History Department Chair. He began his career as a teaching assistant in a third-grade classroom in his home state of Michigan.

Dr. Meyer has a B.A. from Dartmouth College, an M.A. in Administration, Policy, and Planning from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, an M.Ed. in Social Studies Teaching from Pace University Graduate School of Education, and a Ph.D. in Administration, Leadership, and Technology from New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education where his dissertation explored how to more fully engage the inner lives of students. Dr. Meyer has written several children’s books from middle-grade adventures (The Secret of the Scarab Beetle) to guided meditations for elementary-aged children (Big Breath: A Guided Meditation for Kids and Healing Breath: A Guided Meditation through Nature for Kids).