Joseph Bernadel

Chief Operations Officer & Co-Founder of TLHS

       Joseph Bernadel was born in Haiti, where he completed his primary and secondary schooling at the Institution St. Louis de Gonzague. He emigrated to the United States in 1975 and soon joined the United States Army. He retired as a Major from the US Military in 1997 after 22 years of worldwide sensitive military assignments, which included positions as Attache Militaire in Haiti and Mozambique.

     He is fluent in five languages: Creole, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Major Bernadel is the co-founder of Toussaint L'Ouverture High School for Arts & Social Justice in Delray Beach, Florida, a charter high school that opened in August 2001, serving Palm Beach County students of diverse backgrounds. He is the first person of Haitian ancestry to have opened a public school in the United States.

In October 2002, the school launched Haiti Museum of Arts & Culture. The Museum honors the culture of the Haitian Diaspora and will serve as a repository of the oral traditions of the Haitian people in Delray Beach and surrounding communities. Mr. Bernadel serves as the the Chairman of the the Delray Beach Housing Authority and is the Chair of the Joseph Laurore Foundation. Mr. Bernadel was appointed by Govenor Bush to the Board of the Community Hospital Educational Counsel, a statewide organization and served on the State of Florida Materials Selection Committee for the Department of Education.

       He is a national trainer for the Anti-Defamation League of Palm Beach County, Florida, and the winner of the Toussaint L'Ouverture Distinguished Service Award in 2007. He was instrumental in having May declared Haitian Heritage Month as proclaimed by the Delray Beach City Council.

       Joe Bernadel holds the Bachelor of Science in Administration from the University of Hawaii and has completed his graduate studies at the University of Florida in Latin American and Caribbean Affairs. His current professional priorities are to build institutions honoring the presence and contributions of people of color in South Florida and to enhance their welfare through education, political advocacy, and economic opportunities.

 Dr. Diane Allerdyce

Chief Academic Officer & Co-Founder of

           As the Co-Founder of Toussaint L'Ouverture High School for Arts & Social Justice in Delray Beach, Florida, Diane Allerdyce, Ph.D., is an activist deeply involved in community outreach and education reform. She taught and held administration positions at Lynn University, full time from 1985 until founding the charter school in 2001, and part time through 2008, when she began teaching part-time in the Humanities & Culture track of the Cohort Ph.D. Program in Interdisciplinary Studies with emphasis on Social Justice at Union Institute & University. She is currently a half-time core faculty member of the Cohort PhD Program there.

Diane holds the Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida. Her M.A. and B.A. in English are from Florida Atlantic University. She is the author of a scholarly book, Anaïs Nin and the Remaking of Self: Gender, Modernism and Narrative Identity (University of Northern Illinois, 1998), and a chapbook, Whatever It Is I was Giving Up, which won the 2007 Red Wheel Barrow Prize by Pudding House. She has published articles, essays, book reviews, and poems in local, national, and international journals and has been a featured poet on the Unitarian Universalist Poets Cooperative web page. Diane is currently working on a second scholarly book (a collection of essays on women writers whose focus is social justice) and a second poetry collection, The Haiti Years: Poems 2008-2012. She has completed a feature-length screenplay, Hurricane Dreams, a love story set in Haiti after the earthquake of 2010.

Dr. Allerdyce is trained as a poetry therapy facilitator by, and is the past-President and a current long-time Board Member of, the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT). Diane received the NAPT Distinguished Service Award in 2007 and the NAPT Outstanding Achievement Award in 2009. She is the Keynote Speaker for the NAPT conference in Chicago, April 26-29, 2012.

Diane is a National Trainer for the Classroom of Difference Program of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). She is also a member of the Board of Directors for the Haitian League and a consultant for ReThinkHaiti's Education Task Force. She is actively involved in education reform efforts for Haiti.