Who is our principal?

     Do you know who your principal is?

     At the very beginning of my freshman year I asked myself who our principal was. I was scared that our principal was going to be someone who didn’t care about what happened to the students as well as the thoughts of others about our school. Not until I got to interview her, I didn’t expect her to let me interview, not even expected her to answer. Immediately after I sent her an email she replied and made time for me. I was very happy and this is how it went.

You said you just got here that this is your first year at Arvada, right. Okay, what is one thing you liked about Arvada when you first got here?
 I really liked the students and the staff. I think, the kids here are wonderful. You guys are welcoming, you’re kind,  you’re very willing to share your thinking and express yourselves. And I, I love that. And, um, I think the staff also was really welcoming to me. Um, sometimes when a new leader comes in, people aren’t always willing to give that person a fair shot. Yeah. Um, but I think you’ve the students and the staff both were really welcoming to me and very supportive.
Okay. Um, like within here, your experience at Arvada, what is something that kind of brought your attention with what we would do? Like what we do here?
Um, I think some of the things I love here that we engage in restorative practices. I don’t know if you know what that is, but that’s like with Mr. Taylor and Ms. Diana and the work we do to have conversations about kids, about the why, like, why are we wanting you to go to class on time? And why are we wanting you to put your cell phones away in class? And so even though I think there were challenges for, and I’m gonna use cell phones is a great example. Cell phones were out all the time. Right.
And they were preventing learning just like, they’re a distraction to all of us. Like I get on my cell phone and I check out I’m not going to engage in learning or the meeting that I’m in or whatever. And so I talked to you guys and the whole staff talked to you guys about the why, like, why are we asking to put cell phones away?
And you guys were like, yeah, that’s fine. We’ll do it. We’ll put our cell phones away. Um, and I think that was hard because we all love our phones. But I think when we all look at the why of things together and your purpose of being at school is to learn. And so we need to put those away so we can learn vast. Majority of students were like, no problem. Sounds good. We’ll do that. And I really that’s one of the things I really like and appreciate. So I really liked that practice of talking through with the students, the why, rather than just saying, this is the policy and you’re doing this because it’s explaining the way,.
Um, as like the principal, what is something you think we can, us, as students we can do to make Arvada a better place for us.
I think the number one thing you guys can do is really advocate for our school, explain that it is a good school and kind of fight back against that stereotype or reputation that, that it’s not because it actually really is. And, um, I think, you know, challenging that, like, if you hear somebody say something like, oh, our baddest ghetto school, no, no, it’s not. It’s a good school. My teachers are good teachers and I’m getting a good education. And if you guys can really embody that in all of your actions, um, be good citizens when you go out to McDonald’s and when you go to Starbucks, say, please, and thank you and just model awesome behavior.
That’s what I need from you guys.