Thomas Askey isn’t your standard-issue assistant principal. Look through the button-ups and ballcaps, and you’ll find a man much like the students he leads: empathetic, independent, and not sure what he wants to be when he grows up.

First a professional chef, then a history teacher, and now a school administrator, Askey has changed directions many times, especially in his 14 years at the Baltimore School for the Arts (BSA). 

Since becoming assistant principal of academics in 2014 after teaching history at BSA for three years, he’s organized numerous international field trips and led a marked improvement in the school’s academics.

But, there’s a reason you see him everywhere — in classes, in lunch, in the halls — every single day. It’s essential to his job as overseer of our success. I managed to catch him between his laps around the school: here’s an edited version of our conversation.

You’re an elusive character within our school, and I think many students don’t know about the unique initiatives that you started. It says in your BSA bio that you planned a field trip to Ghana in 2017, and you traveled to Russia on behalf of BSA in 2014. How did you come to partake in these international trips?

So Russia, we had decided we were gonna do a series of year-long focal points for the school. It started with the one behind you [Askey points to the poster for BSA’s 2013 Appalachian Spring Festival] which is about understanding ethnic identity in 1940s America. 

We were the first high school that got the rights to perform a Martha Graham ballet. So that springboarded to the next year, which was Russia. Obviously, the political context of the world was very different then, in terms of what the relationship was like between the United States and Russia. 

So, I applied for the Mark Joseph Professional Development Grant to go to Russia, to look at ballets, to look at musical performances, to look at some theatre and a bunch of visual art museums. I went there for a couple weeks by myself, between Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and then brought it all back.

We did Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Balanchine’s Serenade. There was some Shostakovich stuff that went on for the music department, and then I did a whole thing on Russian identity. Once we did that, I was like, you know what? We need to start taking kids abroad.

A later iteration was a full-year thing called Africa Now. We decided to pull together 16 kids to go to West Africa, to help them experience that. And then in 2019, we did one that was specific to the Latino community in Baltimore: I took a group of students with Ms. Tolentino and the now-retired Spanish teacher Sr. Tabegna to Puerto Rico for a week.

I’ve always felt like taking kids abroad is a really powerful experience. It broadens people’s perspectives, gives them an opportunity to see communities that kinda look like theirs, but aren’t in the same place. 

I’m trying to get it kicked back up, but it’s really hard. I know that the acting program does theirs. It’s just tricky, and for me, it needs to connect to something that we’re doing here.

Initiatives like those are not something that I think most assistant principals do. How does that affect your position within the school’s administration, just in the relationship between the arts and the academics, because planning something like that must require a lot of correlation between those two sides?

Oh, it does. I mean, I don’t think that if you were to articulate the archetype of what a high school assistant principal looks like, that most people would come up with me as that person. That’s why being here is good because I can be myself and not have to worry about conforming to some archetype that a) I surely don’t care about, or b) is probably mythological to begin with.

One of the biggest challenges in my job is to coordinate what is the artistic experience and the academic experience, and that doesn’t necessarily have a day to day manifestation. You have to balance the competing narrative of what is a pre-professional arts program with the reality that it’s also a full time academic program.

And for many students it’s hard: juggling those two things – how to excel at your artistic piece and the academic piece – is a tough balance for some. One of my roles is to sort of navigate that. 

So we’ve got a music field trip coming up on Thursday [referring to the vocalist trip to Morgan State in November of 2024], and we’re worried about some of the kids going on the music field trip because we don’t want to take them out of academic classes. But I also don’t want them to miss the experience of the field trip because that’s part of the BSA experience. 

Navigating the particular situations that come up for something like that is part of what I do.

My job is to support the operation of the school, which includes making sure that kids are getting everything that they need. I’m just managing the pieces on the chessboard, keeping my ear around. You will see me roaming in classes. 

What I’m really doing is just watching what’s going on, seeing who’s here, seeing who’s not here. Maybe I’m really worried about a kid whose attendance has dropped, so I’m just gonna pop into their class and see if they’re there. 

If they’re not there, I’ll just sort of monitor and see what’s going on. So much of what I’m doing is watching, just seeing what’s happening, reading the pulse of things.

You’re talking a lot about your career, and I want to pivot to your first job, which every single staff member I have talked to about this interview has said, “You need to ask him about his old job as a resort chef!” Going from cooking at vacation spots to teaching in public schools, that’s quite the shift. How did that happen?

I went to culinary school out of high school because I wasn’t ready to go to college. I love cooking, I always cooked at home when I was a kid. Then my junior year of high school, I decided that I wanted to move out of my parents’ house for the summer and go cook somewhere at a resort, live in a dorm, that kind of stuff. 

So I ended up working out in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for the summer of 1996. I worked at this hotel restaurant right outside Grand Teton National Park, and I said, “I’m gonna go to culinary school.”

So I went to culinary school, loved it, did work for a private club in Florida called John’s Island Club. It was so much fun cooking. I went out to California for a while, worked for Four Seasons in Santa Barbara, went to Pennsylvania, helped a buddy open a restaurant. I was just touring around.

I was down in Florida working at a place called the Don CeSar in St. Petersburg Beach, and they offered 23-year-old me a high-level management position, not necessarily a direct cooking job. 

It paid a lot of money, but I said to myself, “If I do this job, I’m never gonna go back to college.” And I had a little bit of an existential angst about not having gone to college. Both my parents had advanced degrees. I didn’t come from a family that was necessarily a “trade school family,” so there were a lot of academic expectations that I had never really met.

Expectations you never met by going to trade school?

Yeah, and my parents were fine people, but I couldn’t shake the less-than feeling that I had, that I should really go back to school and get a four-year degree. So I said no to the job, I applied to Penn State where I already had dual enrollment credits, since I grew up in the same town. 

Penn State took me in, and I knew that I wanted to teach. I wasn’t sure how I was gonna go about doing it, but I knew I wanted to teach. So I got a history degree because that seemed the most obvious thing to do, I cooked the whole time I had a history degree, to get myself paid through. Then I got a job as a teacher here–

This was your first school?

No, in Baltimore City. I came to Baltimore City in 2006 and taught at Chinquapin Middle School, which is now shut down, and then I taught at Patterson High School. I’ve been at BSA since 2010.

I was still cooking on the weekends, even while teaching, because I liked it. I don’t do it professionally anymore. I’ll do it for friends. I bake a lot of stuff to bring here. So it’s an enduring passion of mine. And when I taught classes here, we always had these huge potlucks. For world history, it was always based on what unit we were studying.

You’re talking a lot about pre-COVID: potlucks pre-COVID, trips pre-COVID. You’re talking about it almost as if it’s the “golden age”.

Oh, man. I don’t know if it was a golden age, but I hear you.

Just looking into BSA’s history, it seems like this school was a really unique location pre-COVID, and that after COVID, there was a shift.

Ultimately BSA’s mission is the same. What we have seen in my 15 years here is a marked shift in the type of student who comes to BSA, and in what they expect from this institution.

When I first got here, we followed a sort of conservatory model. There was one Honors US History section, one Honors World section. There was no AP. The kids and the families had a particular vision of BSA: the needle pushed further toward art and less towards academics.

I think over time that needle has shifted back to the middle, and now there’s a real push for academic excellence here, in a way that there may not have been before.

The families have demanded a different level of academic interface, in terms of willingness to send their kid here for the artistic piece. We used to say, “If you want that level of class, then you should go to Poly or City. My schedule is limited in what I can offer you here.” That hasn’t gone away, but people want the best of both now. So we have had to adapt.

That’s why you have so many more dual enrollment offerings. That’s why you have so many AP offerings online. We would have parents who would say, “I really want my daughter to go to BSA, but she’s gonna start in algebra 2 in 9th grade. She loves math, but she also loves music, and I want her at your school.” 

So we’ve had to reorient how we think about students and what their different academic trajectories are because we want them here. If you wanna be here, I’d like to find a way for you to be here within reason.

There used to be one Honors US History section, and I picked the kids based on what I knew to be their potential or how they had done in other classes. And everyone else was like, “Whatever, I’ll go into the standard level section.” But now you have people saying, “I wanna know exactly why I’m in the class, what the grade threshold is.”

So you’re saying the desire for academic achievement has just shot up?

The desire for a school that produces as quality academic programming as artistic programming has shot up, yeah.

I want to circle back to you to close this out. I have some rapid fire questions about yourself.

Alright.

What cliques and clubs were you part of in high school?

I played some sports, but mostly I hung out with the skateboarder boys.

What three books best define your character and personal tastes?

Oh, that’s not a quick question… Rule of the Bone really got me through my twenties. Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee’s book is one that stands out. I Know This Much Is True, Wally Lamb’s book about two schizophrenic brothers.

Imagine the film department creates a big budget movie about BSA: who is playing you? 

Zach Galifianakis.

Finally, what makes teaching worth it?

Working with teenagers. I like working with kids, I really do. I’m coaching 4th and 5th grade basketball starting tomorrow. I find it incredibly rewarding to watch young folks grow up and the twists and turns that come with it.

This is an edited version of a conversation from November 18th, 2024.

To contact this writer, email Muse Newspaper at musebsa@bsfa.org.

Featured photo by Ruth-Amelie Kumodzi for The Muse.