In The News: High school moves forward with new leadership team

Mark Risen hopes new structure adds continuity while preserving personal feel of small schools

Mark Risen was given a difficult balancing act when he was named lead principal of Newberg High School last spring.

Based on student, staff and community feedback, Risen and the new-look NHS administration have been tasked with bringing more continuity to a high school that primarily operates as four small schools.

The rub is that Risen, along with his four assistant principals — former Blue School principal Dan Malone, athletic director Tim Burke and newcomers Alaina Santana and Janay Cook­son — must maintain the close relationships and personalized feel that has been the hallmark of NHS since it adopted a small-school structure.

“Based on feedback from our community, we’re working really hard for more consistency, more alignment,” Risen said. “We’re working hard to be in the room together as the five of us make sure we’re using current best practices to align all of it as we move forward with our staff.”

Perhaps the biggest question in the community when superintendent Kym LeBlanc-Esparza announced her intention to restructure the school’s leadership to have one lead principal as opposed to four small school principals, was how the administrative and leadership duties of small schools would be divided.

After all, it wouldn’t be equitable to have Risen take charge of one small school, not to mention that as lead administrator, as his main duties are on a broader scale and will often take him away from the building.

The short answer is that Santana and Cookson will be responsible for two small schools apiece, with the former taking Yellow and Green and the latter overseeing Blue and Silver. But the truth of the situation is more complex.

The first way in which Risen approached the issue, and just about anything involving the administration, was to put the emphasis on operating as a team, which, as a former coach, is his style and seemed to be one of the things district officials and stakeholders responded most positively to when he campaigned for the job as a finalist.

Risen waited until all the administrators were back on campus Aug. 1 so they could tackle the problem together. The first step was to bring Burke, whose duties were dominated by his role as athletic director, more fully into the fold.

In the end, this did not solve the prob­lem in the most ob­vious way, by having him and the three other assistant principals responsible for one small school apiece, mostly because his duties as athletic director take him away from the building too often.

The final solution was a division of labor that both lessens the administrative loads on Santana and Cookson, while also providing them with ample support from the others, especially Malone. Their roles as small school leaders will center on student support and management, while helping them navigate the small-school structure that will be one of Malone’s major responsibilities.

Risen describes Malone’s role as the operational administrator, meaning he will oversee many of the day-to-day aspects of running the school, while also being the first to support not only Santana and Cookson, but Risen and Burke, as well.

Having the most institutional knowledge of NHS, Malone will provide insight on what has and hasn’t worked in the past and therefore be a resource for Risen and the team when it comes to making year one in the new structure a smooth transition. Already very involved in Newberg athletics, Malone will also support Burke.

In that sense the trio of Malone, Santana and Cookson will be a constant presence in the building working together to lead the entire school on a daily basis.

To maintain the personalization students and parents have come to expect, small school offices will remain open, but have undergone logistical and staffing changes.

In addition to moving the assistant principals out of the small school offices and into the main office, which will facilitate the team approach to administration and promote consistency across the entire school, small school offices will have just one secretary instead of two.

Small school counselors will remain in those offices, while the remaining four secretaries have been centralized to the main office to fill other roles, including one as a school-wide registrar, which Risen said will solve a uniformity problem seen in the former system.

One of the central office secretaries will now be dedicated to athletics and activities, which will free up Burke from many of his previous duties, as previous athletics secretary Sue Anderson, whose primary role was and will remain as the school’s bookkeeper, was unable to provide full-time support.

“I liken it to hands on, hands off,” Risen said. “That clerical person is our hands-on, get-stuff-done-for-us person and we partner with them so that we can be hands off and attend to the administrative functions.”

All five administrators will serve supervisory roles when it comes to teachers, much like traditional department heads, and take the lead implementing curriculum decisions. Those will be handled as a team, in their specific content areas, such as Burke, a former math teacher, in math.

Small school offices will still be the major point of contact for both students and parents. Without a dedicated principal for each school like in the past, Risen recognizes that providing the personalized attention that they have become accustomed to will be a bigger challenge.

One way he hopes to combat that is by making the administrative team as open and accessible to all students and parents as possible. Specifically, Risen set a goal to introduce the team and spread that message in person to every classroom in the first week of school, inviting all students to build relationships with any and all of them.

And while Santana and Cookson will be the primary stop for them in most cases, because of the team approach of the principals, Malone, Burke and Risen will be both available to students and be able to support them in a manner consistent of their specific small-school leader.

“Having the administrators and the counselor and the support staff know the kids and families and being able to have open communication lines in supporting the kids was a very powerful practice here,” Risen said. “I would say I witnessed that it is. Keeping the small school offices open is an intentional effort to continue that powerful practice of personalization.”

Written by: Seth Gordon