The First Month

It has been a little under a month since I have taken over as the principal at my school. We have moved a few hours from our hometown and left behind family and many friends to take on this new opportunity. Most of the first month has been spent attending district meetings, meeting individually with all staff members and hiring new staff to fill our needs. The greatest surpise in hiring has been the low number of candidates that are available to select from. Those that I have hired have been high quality, though. In my previous position, there would be 20-30 candidates looking at each opening, and here the numbers are far reduced. I am pleased at the folks that will be joining our staff. In total, when the new school year begins in a couple of weeks, we will have 12 new staff members - or about 15% of our staff will be new - including myself and my assistant principal. The challenges that lie ahead are great. Test scores have much room for growth. Upgrading technology and teacher's ability to integrate that into the daily curriculum remains a focus and goal of mine.
The returning staff members are enthusiastic and have welcomed me to their school "family". I am looking forward to school opening. There remains a great deal of work still to do to get ready for the school year. Writing and updating the handbooks, creating calendars and filling a few more vacancies are on my "To do list".
I was told by my previous principal that you would know you are fully immersed in the job when you start to wake up in the middle of the night and think about all that needs to be done...I must be fully immersed!