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Schools

New principal starts on clean slate

Susan Avery doesn't fret over past problems at the school. She just wants to get on with the job.

By JEFFREY S. SOLOCHEK
Published May 21, 2006

She wants to give the school a fresh start as its new principal.

"I know there's a lot of upset and hurt feelings from what happened, but I don't want to know the specifics," says Avery, who took the reins on Wednesday. "I want to move on."

On her first day, she spent much time meeting individually with teachers and parents. A self-described "people person," Avery has set team building and fence mending as her top priorities.

"If people aren't happy, they maybe can't concentrate on their jobs as well," she says. "We want to bring the school together. That's the focus now."

That doesn't mean that the school won't look at ways to improve academically.

Avery intends to spend much time implementing a new districtwide program called "continuous improvement," in which teachers look at student data to determine what the students at each grade level know and what they need to learn. The grade-level teams then establish common education goals, and the administration creates an instructional time line to achieve them.

Low and high achievers alike will get attention, Avery says, as the faculty looks at what more must be done to push all children to their top performance.

The Carrollwood job is her first opportunity to lead a school. But it's not Avery's first stint in administration.

After teaching for 22 years in Indianapolis public schools and at Northwest Elementary, Avery became a trainer in 1993 and, three years later, the school district's kindergarten supervisor. She left that post in 2003 to become assistant principal at Crestwood Elementary School and to attend the district's two-year principal training program, a step back in pay and position.

After being away from campus life for a decade, she says, "I just missed the familyness of the school, being every day in the same place really impacting a place."

School is, she says, a million small moments that make life fun, such as playing with energetic kindergarteners, spending time in the lunchroom, looking at report cards, getting to know the little things that make students human.

An "insane scrapbooker," Avery expects to look for others who love the hobby and perhaps to create some memory books for Carrollwood Elementary. She does not have plans for major program changes, saying now isn't the right time.

Avery lives in Palm Harbor with her husband, Jack, who works for Franklin Templeton. She has two adult sons and two grandchildren.

Jeffrey S. Solochek can be reached at 813 269-5304 or solochek@sptimes.com.

[Last modified May 21, 2006, 08:34:38]