alumni profilEs

lEnny bautista ’09

Reshaping School Discipline

In recent years, school discipline has taken a turn away from punitive justice and toward restorative justice—and Lenny Bautista ’09 fully supports the shift. He explains the difference this way: “It’s less about what you did and more about who you hurt.”

Bautista has been on the front lines of the evolution in discipline, as lower school dean of students at Boston Collegiate Charter School in Dorchester. Now in his fourth year in the position, Bautista is in charge of school culture and discipline. “I oversee running assemblies and any cultural events that go on,” he says. “And, of course, I’m in charge of suspensions and detentions.” The school’s newly instituted code of conduct, he says, is “more about communication and community building, and hopefully that will lead to fewer suspensions.”

Under the new approach, he says, “We’ll meet with whoever you impacted and try to repair the damage that was done.” Traditionalists might resist, but Bautista says, “I’m all for it. This way we get to the root of the problem, instead of just sending a disruptive kid to detention.”

Bautista enjoys the varied tasks each day brings and the distinctly diverse culture of the school, whose mission is to see that every graduate is accepted to college. “We are unique in Boston because we are almost 50 percent white and 50 percent Black and Latino. Kids come here from all over Boston, with many different cultures and views. It allows us to speak about things that others might not experience until a later age.”

Bautista’s experiences at Rivers may have paved the way for those conversations. When he arrived at Rivers, as a ninth grader, he underwent a bit of a “culture shock,” he says. He had attended Nativity Prep, in Jamaica Plain, which serves low-income Boston families; one of his teachers was a Rivers graduate who took him on a tour of the school when he was pondering his high school options. “The only time I had been around that many white people was when we played private schools in basketball,” says Bautista, who is Dominican. “But everyone was very welcoming.”

As his choices narrowed to Rivers and a Catholic school, Bautista had a lunchtime meeting with his coaches and teachers, who made their preference clear. “They said, ‘There’s no way we’re letting you go anywhere but Rivers.’ So I shrugged and said, ‘I guess I’m going to Rivers.’”

The choice proved fortunate— after an adjustment period. “The first couple of weeks, I remember coming home and telling my mom, ‘I don’t think this is for me.’ She said give it a year. And after a year, I fell in love with Rivers and said this is where I have to be.”

After Rivers, at Trinity College, Bautista thought he might major in economics. “After one econ class,” he recounts, “I knew it wasn’t for me.” Instead, he found his way into social services; a stint working with the children of incarcerated women was especially powerful. He left college thinking he’d become a social worker and began a master’s degree in the field, but the fit wasn’t quite right. Bautista took a job at a Somerville school, working with special-needs students, and that’s when it clicked: Education felt like the right setting and, after he’d held a few different positions at different schools, school culture and discipline felt like the right lens. He earned a master’s degree in educational leadership and policy studies at Boston University and joined Boston Collegiate Charter School in 2017.

This year, of course, looks very different from other school years. As of mid-October, Bautista said there was no set date for an in-person return. Typically, he’ll work at camps and academic programs over the summer months, but with those programs on hiatus over the past summer, he says, “This is the longest I’ve gone without having students. It’s a long period of time, and the reason I chose this career is that I like having a student-facing role.”

It may be delayed, but Bautista is eagerly awaiting the day he can return to the work he loves: supporting students by uncovering the root causes of behavior issues. “We’re finding out if they’re having a bad day, or just need something like a pencil. Sometimes kids will act out just because they don’t want to ask for a pencil,” he says. “Instead of detention, the conversation starts with ‘What do you need? How can I help you?’” — JD

marissa (mosKowitZ) goldstEin ’03 a Pandemic Pivot

Over the past several months, untold numbers of masks designed to stem the spread of illness have been manufactured and sold. More than two million of them were made by Marissa Goldstein’s startup, Rafi Nova.

Goldstein didn’t set out to be a mask-maker—who did?—but her long history of entrepreneurship and creative risk-taking allowed her to pivot quickly when the pandemic broke. She and her husband, Adam, had launched Rafi Nova in February 2020 as a line of bags and accessories made from upcycled traditional textiles produced by women in Vietnam. A month later, the U.S. was in shutdown mode, and, says Goldstein, “No one was buying a $230 travel backpack.”

She needed to regroup, and quickly. But to understand what happened next, it’s important to know some background. Goldstein says she has “always had the travel bug.” She took a gap year in Israel after high school, along with her then boyfriend, now husband; later, the couple spent six months traveling the world before Goldstein started grad school.

That’s a lot of miles, to be sure, but Goldstein’s taste for travel opened the door to a much more extreme adventure: Pre-pandemic, the Goldsteins spent half their time in the U.S. and half in Vietnam, with their four children under the age of 5.

Parents in the reading audience will be forgiven for gasping in shock. But the intrepid Goldstein has been traveling with her two sets of twins nearly since day one, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. “We brought our first set of twins to Vietnam the day after their first birthday, and they’d traveled to 20 countries

Goldstein with her family in Vietnam.

before they were potty trained,” she says.

Goldstein and her husband first visited Vietnam on the aforementioned world-wide jaunt. They fell in love with the country (“Not as touristy as Thailand, but not as undeveloped as Myanmar”) and its potential as a hub for manufacturing. “It was ripe for innovation. The middle class was rising, and there was a strong, committed workforce. We loved it from a business standpoint, but we also loved the culture, the people, the weather, the food,” says Goldstein.

Goldstein says she’s always been a creative risk-taker with an interest in business. “Rivers gave me the tools to explore entrepreneurial endeavors,” she says. But after post-college stints in the PR and insurance industries, Goldstein decided that she needed a more thorough grounding in business basics. She earned an MBA at Babson College, gaining the confidence and contacts she’d need.

It was toward the end of her time at Babson that she convinced her husband, who was in manufacturing, to start their first business, Timroon. “The idea was to help diversify manufacturing, to go beyond China,” says Goldstein. Timroon connects American companies with Vietnamese manufacturers; the Goldsteins built a network of suppliers in Vietnam and embarked on a lifestyle that brought them to Vietnam for half the year.

The work was satisfying, and living in Vietnam was a “fairytale existence,” she says, but Goldstein had another goal in mind. “We wanted to start our own brand,” she says, and thus was born Rafi Nova. Six months’ hard work went into designing, manufacturing, and marketing the line, and when the coronavirus upended their plans, Goldstein was deeply disappointed. The family had moved back to the U.S. as the virus hit Asia, and after a couple weeks holed up at home, she says, “We needed to figure out something. We said, ‘Let’s put our resources to good use.’ In Vietnam, we were used to wearing masks, and we knew what a good mask consisted of. We had great relationships with manufacturers in Vietnam. So a lightbulb went off: Let’s make masks.”

The venture was an immediate success, racking up $25,000 in sales in its first 24 hours. Goldstein has donated more than 50,000 masks to schools and nonprofits and has hired 25 people. Over the summer, she opened a storefront in Needham.

“Take calculated risks—that’s my motto,” says Goldstein, and she credits Rivers with some of her willingness to do that. “Rivers was a really nurturing environment that gave me confidence in a lot of areas.”

That confidence has continued to inform her life, her work, and, perhaps most important, her attitude. “Every challenge is an opportunity,” she says. “You can’t stop innovating and moving forward.” — JD

John stimpson ’88

The art of Persuasion

No one is more surprised about where John Stimpson ’88 ended up than Stimpson himself. “If you had asked me, back in college, whether I’d ever go to business school, I would have laughed,” says Stimpson, who serves as a director of business development for Aetos Capital, which manages portfolios of hedge funds for institutional investors.

After all, he’d given business the old college try—in college. “I went to Villanova as a business major, but I ditched the program after the first semester. I hated it. So I switched to liberal arts and found my calling.” Stimpson had his eye on something far loftier than business: “I wanted to be part of something much larger than myself, to be involved in issues that affect lots of people.” The obvious answer for the political science major? Politics.

Stimpson’s next-door neighbor, in his hometown of Wellesley, was campaign treasurer for then state representative Robert Marsh. That helped Stimpson land an internship in Marsh’s office at the State House during the summer after his junior year in college, and he was immediately smitten with the world of politics. Upon graduation, he drove down to Washington, hoping to land a position. “This was pre-Internet,” notes Stimpson. “I just sent out resumes and didn’t have a lot of success.” By that time, though, Marsh had gone to work for then secretary of transportation Andrew Card, under President George H.W. Bush, and he connected Stimpson with a White House internship program in the president’s speechwriting office. The unpaid position, says Stimpson, was a dream come true—but a shortlived one. He started in August of 1992, but after Bill Clinton became president, Stimpson was out of a job.

Discouraged, he headed back to Massachusetts—an unlikely destination, perhaps, for someone aspiring to work in Republican political circles. But it eventually led to what Stimpson calls “the best job I’ve ever had.” A stint as a legislative analyst in the Republican Leader’s Office of the Massachusetts House of Representatives opened the door to becoming an aide to Governor Bill Weld. Even now, Stimpson marvels at his good fortune: “I went from being a starving intern, bartending at night to make ends meet, to—13 months later— working for the governor.”

And what a governor he was. Weld was a leading light among a now nearly extinct breed: moderate Republicans. Stimpson says, “I spent four years attached to Weld’s hip. Everywhere he went, I went. I think I spent more time with him than his family did.” Stimpson laments the loss of moderate voices in both parties and the concomitant rise in partisanship. He says, “Weld was the model for working across party lines. He didn’t care who got the credit. I learned so much from him. He came in during the state’s fiscal crisis and really did a remarkable job; it was a turnaround effort suitable for a case study in business school.”

Soon, he’d find out about such case studies firsthand. After four years with the governor, he made an abrupt pivot and enrolled at Columbia Business School. Business made sense to him as a place to continue pursuing an impactful life. “I was ready to do something entirely different and thought business school would help bridge the transition.” And the material that had seemed so dull when he was in college suddenly came alive. “Timing had everything to do with it,” he acknowledges.

Stimpson keeps a hand in politics by writing op-ed pieces. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, political websites The Hill and The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. Rivers, he says, is where he honed his writing skills, particularly in classes taught by the legendary Jack Jarzavek. Stimpson, whose father, Robert, graduated from Rivers in ’51, struggled a bit after arriving in eighth grade. “I was last in my class,” he recalls. His mother had passed away not long before, and, he says, “I was going through a difficult time.” But he returned for ninth grade ready to turn things around. “Rivers never gave up on me,” he says. “I got the ‘Improvement in Scholarship’ prize that year, which meant the world to me.” And he stays connected and close to friends he made at Rivers.

As for his current career, in sales, Stimpson says it simply represents a logical progression from politics. “There is no better breeding ground for success in sales than politics,” he says. “Trying to persuade and convince—that’s what politics is all about.” —JD