By Jessica Barzilay, Allison Hamburger and Saj Sri-Kumar

Four faculty and staff members will not be returning to Harvard-Westlake in the fall, Head of School Jeanne Huybrechts said.

Upper School Dean Tamar Adegbile will be on maternity leave from October through the end of first semester. Her students will join other dean groups for the time she is away.

“I’m really excited for Ms. Adegbile, and Ms. Bird was my Choices and Challenges teacher, so I already know her,” said Christina Yang ’12, who will be in Mike Bird’s dean group while Adegbile is on leave.

Middle school English, French and Debate teacher Claire Pasternack is leaving to complete a one-year masters’ program at Stanford University’s School of Education. The upcoming months hold more than just the beginning of graduate school for Pasternack, who will marry her boyfriend of nearly seven years this August. She will also join her fiancé, Brian Goldsmith ’00 at Stanford. He has just completed his first year at Stanford Law School. Pasternack said she is sad to leave Harvard-Westlake, her community for the past four years.

“Harvard-Westlake will always be my first job, my first experience teaching and the place where I figured out what I want to do in life,” she said.

Middle school science teacher Hillary Ethe ’00 will not be returning from maternity leave next year. Ethe and her husband, middle school English teacher Jordan Ethe, recently welcomed a son Cassius, who will be four months old on Friday.

Ethe plans to spend more time bonding with and getting to know her son. She has started Mommy and Me yoga classes and has seen movies with other new mothers and their children. She plans on pursuing activities, such as music classes and story time at the local library in the months to come.

Ethe said that her decision to leave Harvard-Westlake was both easy and hard to make.

“It was easy in that I knew I wanted to spend this next year with my son,” Ethe said. “It was simultaneously very difficult because I love my work – the energy that teaching middle school science affords is unmatchable and the camaraderie I have with my colleagues makes coming to work each day a joy for me.”

Ethe said that she hopes to return to teaching middle school science at Harvard-Westlake in the future should a position become available.

Ethe’s colleague Colby Genrich, a middle school science teacher, will also not return next year.

Genrich said he plans to attend medical school next year.

“It’s a change of career, obviously, for me and I am extremely excited about the opportunity,” Genrich said.

After 11 years of working in Computer Services, Nar Santiago is moving to Boulder, Colo. to “explore some other ventures,” he said.