Our Faculty

Kimberly A. Medendorp – English / Language Arts, Bible
Kimberly is a National Board Certified Teacher. She is also a 2009 recipient of the Phi Delta Kappa “Outstanding Educator Award.” Kimberly has taught English Language Arts for 12 years in Los Angeles and Pasadena Unified School Districts. Kimberly graduated from Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, IL with an English major and minors in both Communication Arts & Dutch. She is also a graduate of Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, CA.

 

Randy Christopher – Social Studies
Randy has over fifteen years experience teaching, training, and working with teenagers in school settings. He has taught fourth and fifth grades in Los Angeles Unified School District. He has spent almost a decade training school personnel at private schools around the country in quality standards for academic, clinical, and residential services. Randy has graduate degrees from U.C.L.A. and Cal State University Northridge. Along with a passion for education and learning, Randy brings experience as a school counselor in elementary and high school settings, public and parochial.

 

John Fong –  Physical Sciences
Mr. Fong has been teaching regular, honors and AP chemistry at several local public school districts for the past 17 years.  Prior to teaching, Mr. Fong was involved with research and product development of personal care products for Shaklee Corp., Neutrogena, and Joico haircare.  Mr. Fong earned a Bachelors of Science degree from the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in Chemistry.  He has expressed a real love for teaching our children, the fascination of chemistry and contributing to the development of of our youth.

  

 
Elaine Enns – Restorative Justice
Elaine is teaching our cornerstone class in Restorative Justice. She is a member of Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries and holds a Masters degree in Conflict Management and Peacemaking. She has over 20 years’ professional experience working to reconcile conflict and training others to develop these skills. Elaine will be developing middle and high school age appropriate curricula and teaching our students how to interpret and respond to injustice as they experience it in their own lives and in the world around them.

 

 
 
Alexander Platonov – Math
An incurable math enthusiast, Alexander believes that strong math skills provide the mental tools to tackle all kinds of important and fun challenges in life. Alexander completed a rigorous program of higher mathematics while attaining an MS in engineering at Moscow Aviation College, a top engineering school in Moscow, Russia. After obtaining a second degree in music education, he taught for five years at the middle school level.

 

 
Ethan Tam – P.E.
Ethan Tam, our martial arts Sensei, is a professional 5th degree black belt in Harmony Aikido. He's currently Chief Instructor of the Harmony Aikido Association. He has been training with the founder of Harmony Aikido, Yu Sensei, for over 10 years. In addition, he has been exploring several different types of martial arts, involving different training and applications in internal and external martial arts.

 

Bill Poehner – Life Sciences
Bill began his college years taking courses that would give him the skills necessary for the use of transmission and scanning electron microscopes. When he later had the opportunity to go to college full time he changed his major to biochemistry. As an undergraduate student at California State University, Los Angeles, he began his development as a research scientist. He studied the effects of an assortment of molecules on the activity of a plant enzyme.

While still completing the requirements for a bachelor’s of science he began work as an analytical chemist determining levels of organic pollutants in soils and water. However, he yearned to do research and knew all along that, given the chance, he would continue his training as a research scientist. In 1990 he was accepted into a graduate program at the University of California in Riverside. He was awarded a Ph.D. in genetics in the Fall of 1998. He continued his training as a molecular geneticist at the Jules Stein Institute at UCLA, where he honed new skills and acquired a background in human genetics.

In the Spring of 2004, he began teaching introductory biology at East Los Angeles College. Since the Spring of 2005, he has been busy full time teaching biology and human anatomy at two colleges. 

 

Erin Conley – English / Middle School Science

Erin graduated from Claremont School of Theology with an interdisciplinary Master’s degree in early Christian history, women’s religious history, and religious education, and she received her A.B. from Occidental College, where she majored in English/Comparative Literary Studies and Religious Studies. Erin has a passion for working with young people both in the classroom and in the surrounding world. She grounds her educational philosophy in an interdisciplinary approach to learning. Erin believes that critical thinking and discussion in the classroom serves as an impetus for effective communication and action. She views education as a lifelong pursuit that incorporates strong academics and moral convictions with participation and involvement in the community.

  

Bob Nolty – Media Literacy
Bob Nolty is a restless soul with a Ph.D. in Physics from Caltech, a love of hearing and making country music, experience making movies small and large (including three years developing software for Avatar), and jobs teaching pre-meds and TAing a Guatemala trip for Christian psychology students. He is the school's go-to IT guy and is constantly striving to make our systems better. He is also teaching our elective, Digital Media, which involves learning to argue with the messages in commercials, songs and movies as well as learning to produce good video. He wonders if his video asthetic still applies to the YouTube generation.

  

Anne Nolty – Foreign Language
Anne, a licensed clinical psychologist, is preparing for board certification in Pediatric Clinical Neuropsychology. Having grown up in the Congo attending a Belgian high school, French, Latin, and Dutch became foundations on which to learn Spanish, German, Biblical Greek and Hebrew, and even some Mandarin and Nicaraguan sign language.  Prior to graduate school in psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, she fell in love with the classroom as she taught Math to gifted students in South Carolina, and then added Physics and French to her teaching arsenal in an American boarding school in Switzerland. International Baccalaureate experience teaching Math and Physics in a private school in Spain followed, and she then found her way to the South Island of New Zealand to teach Math. “I have a deep respect for the complexities of divine grace and human dignity in the midst of poverty and political injustice – and I love kids, teaching, languages, and cultural diversity.”  Could there be a better fit for Anne than P&JA?

  

Charletta Erb - College and Guidance Counselor
Charletta has a Masters Degree in Marriage and Family Therapy from the Family Institute of Northwestern University. She is our guidance counselor as a California MFT Intern with supervision by Richard Kidd, LMFT. She is also an associate member of Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries, a group focused on peace and justice discipleship. She has experience counseling in school settings, as well as experience providing bilingual therapy. With a background in restorative justice, conflict transformation, mediation and consulting, she joins P&JA with an eye to relationship dynamics. Whether addressing relational, emotional, or learning challenges, she relates to families and contexts as a whole system, not just seeing problems in isolation.

 

 
Joshua Muthalali – Faith Development
Joshua Muthalali is a PhD student at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA. At Fuller, he is doing a major in Systematic Theology and a minor in New Testament. Joshua recently completed a Master of Divinity program (with a concentration in Family Pastoral Care and Counseling) also at Fuller. Prior to that, he did a double major in Biblical Studies and Accounting at Lee University in Cleveland, TN. Originally from India, Joshua has also lived in Dubai and several states in the U.S. In addition to teaching, he is a youth coordinator at his church, Indian Pentecostal Church Los Angeles. In his spare time, he loves to make music and art.

 

Joe Bautista - Faith Development
Joe Bautista is a native Angeleno who moved to the Pasadena area in 2002 to pursue a Masters degree at Fuller Theological Seminary where he received a Master of Arts in Theology in 2006. He's worked in the information technology field as an embedded systems programmer, as a research assistant in the field of face recognition, and at Fuller Seminary as a database administrator where he helped upgrade, maintain, and fix their Banner ERP. After seven years of working at Fuller Seminary he quit in order to spend more time at home and in the community. Current activities include gardening, fixing broken things around the house, and preparing material for his New Testament Literature course.