As the first yellow school bus rolls up to the curb of Ponus Ridge STEAM Academy on a cold December morning, Damon Lewis ’95 (CLAS) eagerly stands outside the vehicle door, waiting for it to slide open and children to pour out.
“Good morning!” “Good morning!” “Good morning!” Lewis calls, each time more intentional than the last as his rich baritone voice bounces off the brick walls of the middle school. Children smile and greet “Dr. Lewis” as they run to catch up with friends before school officially opens for the day.
Lewis does this for each of the 12 buses that arrives packed with students, all while greeting drivers and teachers on their first day back from Thanksgiving break. It’s a beloved routine at Ponus Ridge in Norwalk, Connecticut — a pioneering school where by 8th grade over 90% of students are on track to graduate high school, a number that outpaced the state average by about 5 percentage points last school year, despite a third of incoming 6th graders reading below grade level.
Shortly after 8 a.m., Lewis is finally in the building. Instead of beelining to the office for a full day of meetings and paperwork, he heads for the halls. Lewis has asked the school secretaries to knock on his door whenever he spends more than 20 minutes in his office — or what he jokingly calls his storage closet.
Most of the time, with laptop in hand, he’s bouncing among classrooms and hallways, lunchroom, and recess duty. He helps one student unjam a locker, directing hallway traffic, then pauses to give some teachers feedback — what he calls “glows and grows.”
“You cannot find the pulse of your school behind closed doors,” he says. “This is the best part and how I get to know the kids.”
