School Leadership
HIS Leadership Structure
HIS operates under a shared leadership model in which three individuals work in close collaboration to meet the school’s leadership needs: Tomoko Kusamoto (Founder and Board Chair), Lynne Kenney (Co-Principal), and Chris Balme (Co-Principal).
Kusamoto and Kenney are based in Hakuba, providing daily on-site leadership and support for students and staff. Balme, based in San Francisco, California, contributes through multiple daily virtual meetings and ongoing online collaboration, as well as in-person visits to Hakuba every two to four months.
Together, these three leaders have built a strong partnership grounded in trust and daily communication. Their diverse backgrounds in education, entrepreneurship, and community building allow them to approach school leadership from multiple perspectives. This collaboration ensures that HIS benefits from thoughtful decision-making and a balance of both global and local insight.
Tomoko Kusamoto, Founder
Lynne Kenney, Co-Principal
Christopher Balme, Co-Principal
August 2025
Dear HIS Community,
Our school is like a busy construction site, sometimes literally, and always figuratively. Students are hard at work building projects while all of us, adults and students alike, work to build a school together. In part, this is because we are a young school and with much growing still to do. But to a greater extent, this is our spirit as a community. We’re a place of building, tinkering, questioning, and forever improving.
We value the spirit of beginner’s mind, when we are open to learning and resilient to struggle, much more than we value perfection.
In this fourth year, we are piloting a term exchange program with the Whitfield School in the United States; adding grade 11, we’ll expand in student and faculty numbers; and courses in areas like data analytics, economics, and industrial design will launch.
Alongside all this change and evolution, some things will stay the same. Our guiding question as a school is and remains: What kind of education enables people and planet to flourish? Our value of student-led learning remains key, exemplified through our Town Hall, where students can change how the school works. Our love of project-based learning remains, for the chance it gives to gain deeper understanding through a mix of abstract and applied, individual and collaborative work. And our continual adventures in the outdoors remain, with four weeks of outdoor expeditions throughout the year, in addition to many smaller outings to study the school forest or enjoy the chance to ski, hike, or bike throughout our beautiful area.
As we look ahead, we do so with gratitude—for the students who fill our campus with energy and imagination, for the families who place their trust in us, and for the wider community that helps us bring this shared vision to life.
Thank you for being part of this journey. We look forward to another year of learning, growing, and building together.
Warmly,
Tomoko Kusamoto, HIS Founder
Lynne Kenney, Co-Principal
Chris Balme, Co-Principal
