Alex Creech, Durham Academy’s New Sustainability Director, Leads with Empathy
By Dylan Howlett
8-minute read
The girl sat at the back of her high school English classroom, sardined behind 30 other students in a ninth grade-only building that emanated sweat and teenage angst. She could be forgiven for trying to remain inconspicuous. That very same classroom had seen a fight break out between two students one morning at 7:10. Some students were experiencing homelessness. Discipline challenges weren’t scarce at what was then North Carolina’s second-largest school, and the girl knew it well. She spent most of her time in her other classes sitting in the rear, thumbing through her phone, choosing to disengage from directions and lessons and assignments. Most of her teachers had accepted these choices as a reality of her oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), a diagnosis that clung to her like predestination. That is, until she stepped foot in ninth grade English, and right into the Shakespearean instruction of Alex Creech, and learned that most of the assumptions about who she was, and wasn’t, amounted to much ado about nothing.
Much Ado About Nothing, fittingly, was the play into which Creech and her South Mecklenburg High School students delved one day as an assistant principal visited to conduct a routine teaching observation. The assistant principal stole sideways glances at the girl in the back who, without any reminders, rose to her feet with her classmates to adopt roles and read from the text, a bundle of laughter and participation and safety. The assistant principal was gobsmacked. She approached Creech after class. What are you doing? This student has had issues with every single one of her teachers. Creech shrugged. Much Ado About Nothing was her favorite. She had twice appeared in a production of the play: once, in high school, as Hero, the epitome of sweetness and innocence, and again, in a community theatre production, as Beatrice, Hero’s wisecracking, bright and slightly acidic counterpart.
Creech would spend all but a few of her 15 years in education teaching high school. She loved that her students tried so very hard to be adults, and she loved talking to them as they tried to figure out their own stories through the lens of Shakespeare or nonfiction texts in the Advanced Placement Language course. “She’s so approachable, and she doesn't really want learning or skills or intelligence to be something that has a barrier or a fog around it,” said Amy Cheek, an upper school English and French teacher who worked with Creech for five years at Bradford Preparatory School in Charlotte. “She likes to demystify things for people so they can go, ‘Oh, I can do that.’”
“You’re getting somebody,” Cheek said later of Creech, “who’s motivated by a globalized empathy.”
That’s a preferable characteristic for Durham Academy’s new sustainability director, a position that Creech began in July after succeeding Tina Anderson Bessias ’78, a longtime Upper School English teacher and DA’s first-ever sustainability coordinator. Creech is also a theatre education major by way of a three-stoplight hometown in Western North Carolina who once rehabilitated a serious back injury by taking up aerial acrobatics and who sews her own dresses in a tiny rebellion against the fast-fashion industry — all because she’s animated, in no small part, by the same forces that compelled her to make her former ninth grade English class a hospitable place for a misunderstood girl.
“I’m just a naturally empathetic person,” Creech said.
The town of Taylorsville — roughly equidistant between Greensboro and Asheville — is nestled in the foothills of the Bushy Mountains. It boasts, as Creech says, more pigs than people: Its population hovered around 1,500 residents during her childhood in the 1990s. Her dad, Wade, was an accountant, and her mom, Shelia, was an oncology and hematology nurse. While they worked, Creech played outside with neighborhood kids. By day, they built forts and made mystical witches’ brews out of dirt and water from a nearby creek; by night, they contested games of flashlight tag and caught fireflies. Creech’s grandma, Faye, would take her fishing in a friend’s pond. “I always had a life where nature was part of your everyday life,” Creech said. “It wasn’t separated. It wasn’t something you went to. It was just something that you were in all the time.”
When she wasn’t outdoors or in school, Creech was likely in dance class: ballet, tap, jazz. But she soon gravitated toward theatre: the magic of the stage, the brightness of the lights, the joy of production for performers and audiences alike. The first play she saw as a child was a Charlotte-based production of the musical Oliver! She was assigned Juliet’s monologue in her sixth grade drama class, which spawned her lifelong affection for Shakespeare. It wasn’t long before Creech dreamed of performing on Broadway. “It’s this safe way of getting attention as a kid,” she said. “And then I just enjoyed the work.”
She would become a theatre education major at East Carolina University — the first role for which Creech read was from the musical Chicago — but not before a nettle of practicality tugged at her. During her senior year of high school, she had taken a teaching cadet class and subsequently applied for a North Carolina Teaching Fellows scholarship, which offered four years of college tuition assistance in exchange for four years of post-graduate teaching service. She won the scholarship. “That cemented, ‘Well, that’s what I’m going to do,’” Creech said. “And then I just really enjoyed it. I liked working with kids.”
The fellowship took her to Pender High School, where she taught theatre for two years before moving closer to her family and teaching middle grades English and science for two years at Charlotte Secondary School, where she would meet her husband, Patrick, then a civics teacher and, since 2025, the planning director for Alexander County. (Its county seat is, of course, Taylorsville.) Creech left in 2015 for South Mecklenburg. It was around this time that Creech met Cheek, her future colleague, through community theatre. Cheek had seen Creech perform in They Fight, a humorous tribute to every physical skirmish in Shakespearean canon, and was awed by her comedic timing. They would eventually perform together in a community theatre production called Saint Joan, in which Cheek played Joan of Arc and Creech played the king of France.
By 2020, Creech and Patrick had both joined Cheek at Bradford Prep, where Creech became chair of the English department. Her lunch table at Bradford faculty and staff meetings, Cheek said, was always the funniest and liveliest of any available seating option. In Creech’s role as department chair, she expanded accessibility to AP English courses to any student who wanted to take them. And the voracious reader could hold her own in a conversation about any current event, or pressing social issue, or a work of fiction or nonfiction, because her curiosity knew few bounds. “She’s a very active citizen,” Cheek says. “She’s aware of what’s happening in her immediate world and where she lives. And she understands what difference she can make.”
That instinct nudged Creech toward sustainability. She loved teaching. But she realized, after 15 years, that it was time for a change. And a challenge. “I feel like 60% of my life is fueled by stubbornness,” Creech said with a laugh. “I’m trying to grow as a person, and I’m going to step outside of my comfort zone. I’m not going to do it in English. I’m going to do it in science and math, because I’m not one type of person. And so I went for it.”
In 2024, she enrolled in a master’s program for sustainability studies at Harvard Extension School, which requires admits to take two foundational courses for admittance. One of those was a research class culminating in a 20-page paper, which Creech wrote about potential climate migration in North Carolina. There was also a quantitative statistics class, which offered a crash course in statistics and R programming. She also wanted practical experience. In the summer of 2025, Creech served as a sustainability intern with Moseley Architects — a firm that has offices across the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast — and created a massive database that scored the safety of different building materials. She toured Moseley’s jobsite at Clemson University’s new forestry building, a product of mass timber-framed construction — which binds pieces of lumber together to form large structural elements like beams, columns and panels as an environmentally sustainable alternative to steel and concrete.
In the fall of 2025, while perusing job listings during a lunch break, Creech stumbled upon a sustainability director position from an independent school in Durham. She was intrigued but cautious. I bet they want someone now, Creech thought. But the position started the following July, and the description included a preference for those who had worked in schools and had tangible sustainability-related experiences. Creech was floored. She had never seen such a role at an educational institution that wasn’t a college or university. Creech talked it over with Patrick, who encouraged her to apply. It couldn’t hurt, he said.
Creech visited DA on Dec. 17 for her formal interview. She was struck by the kindness of the faculty and staff with whom she met — none wanted to trip her up with their questions, and all wanted her to succeed. Upper Schoolers on the student-led Sustainability Committee were enthusiastic, bright and excited. It was the challenge and the community she had sought. So, too, was Creech the candidate and leader the search committee had sought.
“Now I’m the dog that caught the car,” said Creech, laughing.
It didn’t take her long to catch the proverbial car.
In August, Creech became a DA parent: Her son, Donovan, enrolled in the Lower School as a fourth grader. With the help of Upper School Spanish teacher Constanza de Radcliffe, she reimagined Senior Challenge: Local, which tasked participating students with exploring sustainable food systems through farm work and seasonal menu cooking. She convened the Sustainability Leadership Team — comprising faculty coordinators from all four divisions, DA parents, a staff member and an Upper Schooler — for its first meeting of the school year. And she has provided glimpses of the trivia infatuation she shares with Patrick — who appeared on the Feb. 26 episode of Jeopardy! — with “Creech Facts,” a semi-recurring series of oddities and truisms that she has artfully written on sticky notes and slapped onto a window of the Upper School Learning Commons. (A single strand of spaghetti is known as a “spaghetto”; a banana plant is not a plant but, in fact, the world’s largest herb; humans can smell rain better than sharks can smell blood.)
Her first two months at DA have been nothing less than joyful, and for good reason. Creech said she remains blown away by the school’s commitment to sustainability — which carries the endorsement of the board of trustees and a four-year action plan that steadily marches toward its completion in June 2028 — and the promise of more. “With this job, it is so easy to become doom and gloom, so easy to come from a place of judgment, or for people to feel like I’m coming from a place of judgment,” Creech said. “My biggest thing that I really want to establish when I’m talking with people is that I have zero judgment. Everybody is doing the best they can. Everybody is trying really, really hard. I want to bring joy into it. I don’t want to bring fear and catastrophizing, because I’ve never ruled by fear.
“I’m just ready to hit the ground running.”
Her goal in her first year, she said, is to listen. A lot. It’s what an empathizer does. And it’s what Creech did one autumn several years ago, when she, Cheek and several of their friends went apple picking. Cheek had been struggling. She found out earlier in the week that one of her former students had been struck by a vehicle and was in critical condition at a local hospital. As they were picking apples, she received a phone call beneath a shady row of trees: The student, she learned, had passed away.
Cheek started to cry. Her other friends stood in silence, unsure what to do. Not Creech. She guided Cheek to a seated position on the ground of the orchard. She sat in front of Cheek and gently reminded her to breathe. Cheek began to feel calm. She began to feel rooted.
It was all because of her Shakespeare-obsessed friend sitting with her amid the fallen apples and leaves, extending the same empathy she bestows upon her former English students, her fellow thespians, her planet — with little ado, and with much love.
“Certainly, Alex is one of the smartest and funniest people I know,” Cheek said, “but that day solidified for me who she is as an extremely powerful nurturer, who carries with her the warmth of sunlight and the wisdom and strength of very old trees.”