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Leroy D. Nunery II ’77, president of Edison Charter Schools, was taught respect for education from his earliest days.
His mother, Thelma Nunery, taught in the Jersey City schools. And though his father, Leroy D. Nunery, didn’t go to college, he held an enduring belief that education was the key to success. In the Nunery household in Englewood, N.J., education was sacrosanct.
“It was never a question of whether I would go to college,” Nunery said, “only where.”
Citing the quality of professors like Bob Weiner, Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Professor of History, and Richard Sharpless, professor emeritus of history, Nunery chose Lafayette over Princeton.
“Bob Weiner, my main advisor, shaped the way I think,” Nunery says. “He taught me not just to look at an event, but to ask why it came about.”
Though by a circuitous route, Nunery’s career has wound around again to education.
At 50, after a business career that included stints at the National Basketball Association and the University of Pennsylvania, he finds himself on the cutting edge of a new chapter in American education. As president of Edison Schools’ charter school division he oversees 25 for-profit schools around the country.
Founded in 1992, Edison Schools partners with school districts and charter boards to raise student achievement and educational outcomes through research based school curriculum and extended learning programs. It serves about 285,000 students in 19 states, the District of Columbia and the Untied Kingdom.
Because it is a private, for-profit venture in a realm traditionally considered public, Edison and other companies have sparked controversy in educational circles. Nunery, conscious of the politically charged arena in which he operates, defends Edison’s mission.
“We’re squarely in the bull’s eye of educational reform,” he says. “We are part of the future.”
With No Child Left Behind, the federal school reform initiative, up for reauthorization in 2007, Nunery sees Edison poised to gain public approval.
“When you look at what voters are paying for in education and America’s position in the global economy,” he says, “there has got to be an alternative to the traditional public school.”
After earning a degree in history at Lafayette, Nunery got an MBA from the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis. He also holds a doctorate in higher education management from Penn. His career included a position as managing director of Global Corporate Investment Bank and senior client manager for BankAmerica Securities LLC.
At the NBA, he was vice president for business development and human relations, and played a key role in extending the association’s brand and planning NBA University. Prior to his current position, he was Penn’s vice president for business services, overseeing 600 employees and a $200 million budget.
He served on the board of Pitney Bowes Inc. and is currently chairman of the board of the West Philadelphia Partnership, a cultural and economic development group.
Nunery lives in Philadelphia and commutes to his office in New York City. His spouse, Gina, is a pension consultant with TIAA CREF. They have two daughters.
Nunery was a Lafayette trustee from 1989-98. The Leroy D. Nunery ’77 Intellectual Citizenship Award is given annually at the College’s multicultural awards and diversity recognition reception to a student whose scholarship advances knowledge on important social, political, or economic issues in a multicultural community and who demonstrates outstanding perseverance, concern, and perspective in pursuing research interests. Recipients of the award also develop and implement programs that benefit others and positively influence their stay at Lafayette.
Having a prestigious award bearing his name, Nunery says, pushes him to maintain the values for which it stands.
“It’s important that colleges find as many ways as possible to get and keep students and alumni connected,” said Nunery, who hosted a Lafayette intern this summer. “We need an informal and casual interchange.”
In positions like president of the Black MBA Association, Nunery has sought to expand educational opportunities of minorities. Particularly for students of color, he says, there’s a challenge to keep them engaged in advanced education pursuits once they graduate.
At Lafayette, Nunery says, largely due to the advocacy of Curlee Raven Holton, professor of art and director of the College’s Experimental Printmaking Institute, and Gladstone (Fluney) Hutchinson, associate professor of economics and business and former dean of studies, there has been an improvement in the level of minority dialog and access with alumni compared to when he was a student 30 years ago.
“When you go to a school that’s not in a major city, students of color are, by definition, in the minority,” he says. “You have to work very hard to create a social environment that’s supportive and fulfilling.”
Nunery looks at his college days with a certain amount of nostalgia. Things were somewhat less complicated then, he says: today’s student faces intense competition to get into a good college like Lafayette. And colleges are in an “arms race” to find and keep the best students, fearing they will drop in the ratings and be abandoned by success-oriented students and parents. In the process, Nunery worries, the rich social tradition of the college years will be lost.
He looks back fondly on memories of playing rugby and intramural sports, studying karate and working at the college radio station.
“I tried to do as much as I could.” he says.