Buffalo State School of Education Dean Wendy Paterson recently received the distinguished Cooperative Leadership Award from the National School Development Council (NSDC).
Robert Christmann, a lecturer in Buffalo State’s post-graduate educational leadership program, nominated Paterson for the award.
“I was always impressed by Wendy as a professional and a person,” said Christmann, who is past president of both the NSDC Board of Directors and the New York State Council of Superintendents. He also served on the Governing Board of the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), the national superintendent’s organization.
Throughout the country, NSDC has some 25 member institutions. Each one combines a college or university with an educational service organization. All of the members strive to improve educators’ skills and knowledge and offer everything from publications and research assistance to professional development activities. Every year the NSDC honors “one who has worked in a leadership capacity on a task of importance within the study council movement.”
Christmann said Paterson, with her dedication to the School of Education in general and specifically to the educational leadership program, met the award criteria perfectly.
“She’s so dynamic and progressive,” he said. “She wants to do everything she can to make the educational leadership program more successful than it even is.”
Following a 46-year career in education, including 22 years as a superintendent with two school districts, Christmann recently returned to Buffalo State, the college from which he earned his master’s in education in 1978. Along with teaching courses in the post-graduate program that trains teachers to become superintendents and principals, Christmann is working with Paterson to improve it.
This effort has included partnering with Erie 1 BOCES to work with a cohort of teachers nominated by superintendents for leadership roles and offering one-on-one mentoring to teachers while they go through the educational leadership certificate program.
“I’ve observed Wendy is many meetings,” Christmann said. “When she meets with a group of teachers, she wows them. There is no one in the education field I have more respect for.”
About Wendy Paterson
In 2012, Buffalo State hired Paterson to become dean of the School of Education. Prior to this, Paterson served as dean of St. John Fisher College’s Ralph C. Wilson Jr. School of Education beginning in 2009. A two-time graduate of Buffalo State in 1975 and 1976, Paterson was a literacy specialist in the Kenmore-Tonawanda School District and the coordinator of developmental skills and services to students with disabilities at Trocaire College before returning to her alma mater where she worked for 21 years as a developmental and educational technology specialist, faculty member, and department chair before accepting the deanship at St. John Fisher.
