The Deadline Club is pleased to announce that Brian Condon, a lifelong educator and current principal of Townsend Harris High School at Queens College, is the inaugural recipient of the Press Pass NYC / School Administrator of the Year award.
This award, presented for the first time this year, recognizes a New York City public school administrator whose leadership demonstrates unwavering commitment to student journalists, journalism educators, and student press freedom.
Condon has been an educator for over two decades. He became an English teacher at Martin Van Buren High School in 2002, where he developed a passion for literacy. In 2012, he joined the Leadership Academy to begin his transition into school administration. Afterwards, he served as interim principal at Brooklyn Academy High School and became the principal of the Bronx School for Tourism and Hospitality for over four years. In 2017, he became the principal of Townsend Harris High School at Queens College in Flushing, Queens.
As principal, he has sought to extend the school’s focus on literacy, discourse, and writing throughout all departments. Soon after joining Townsend Harris, he signed the free press charter of Townsend Harris’s student newspaper, The Classic. In addition to signing the charter, Condon has overseen and supported the expansion of the journalism program at Townsend Harris, ensuring that students now have access to a four-year sequence of journalism coursework, a summer “boot camp” for incoming freshmen, graduation honors for journalism students, and more.
Earlier this year, Condon pushed for the development of a wider version of The Classic’s free press charter to make sure it applied to all student publications. This decision helped the school win the 2025 First Amendment Press Freedom Award, an honor bestowed to just sixteen schools across the country by the Journalism Education Association, the National Scholastic Press Association, and the Quill and Scroll International Honorary Society.
Condon will be recognized alongside the year’s best in journalism at the 2025 Deadline Club Awards Dinner, May 15 at the Harvard Club of NYC. Learn more about the event and purchase tickets here.
