By Rita Christopher, Courier Senior
Correspondent:
At the end of the month,
Don Gates will fold away the Red Sox pennant on the windowsill, take down from
the wall the prize-winning letter he wrote to the Hartford Courant, and remove the candy dish filled with mints from
the corner of his desk. And then Gates, the interim principal of Valley Regional
High school, will also
leave.
All this, in fact, was
supposed to happen at the end of the last school year but the Regional District
4 Board of Education asked Don to remain another year while it continued the
search for a new principal.
Now the Board of Education
has named Ian Neviaser, assistant principal at Guilford High School, as the new
principal of Valley Regional and Kristina Martineau, dean of students of the
Fairfield Warde High School in Fairfield, as the new assistant principal.
“Meeting Ian I’m impressed
with his demeanor and I think he will be a good fit for this school,” Gates
said. “I see a lot of myself at his age in him. Of course, maybe he won’t
agree.”
Gates, who had retired as
principal of Portland
High School before he
came to Valley Regional as interim principal, admits parting is sweet sorrow.
At its April meeting, the Board of Education commended him for his work and
then everybody in the room gave him a standing ovation.
“It touched me,” he said.
“I’m sad. I’m going to miss the school.”
“He’s done an outstanding
job,” said Deep River First Selectman Richard Smith, “The school was having
some issues–he was the right man for the job. The teachers, the students, the
parents, everybody felt positive about what he was doing.”
Gates said that when he
came to Valley two years ago, his first task was what he calls refocusing the
school.
“I came in knowing we had
to go back to emphasize what school was really all about and create structures
for effective learning. That was the first challenge, ” he said. “I think the
school’s a better place for what we’ve done.”
He uses the pronoun “we”
deliberately, crediting the work of students, faculty, staff, and the community
with bringing about school improvements.
“You can’t do these things
alone. You need a team,” he said. “It’s not about me, it’s always about how we
impact kids.”
He also had a message to
communicate to students printed on small red business cards, which he regularly
handed out. His “Valley Regional Daily Reminders” included 10 commonsense
suggestions, among them: Make someone smile, Say ‘good morning’ or ‘hello’
more, and Realize how lucky you are.
As he looks back at some
of the innovations of the last two years, Gates pointed to the introduction of
web-based learning with Virtual High School, a program that lets students take
courses on the Internet with students from all around the world; the new
language laboratory that was recently constructed at Valley Regional, and a
Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) preparation program.
He is also enthusiastic
about Engineering by Design, a pre-engineering sequence for high school
students. Gates worked to bring the program, with state involvement, to Valley
Regional though it will not begin until next fall.
For Gates, there were new
learning experiences, too. He had never worked with block scheduling, where
students take fewer courses each semester but each course runs for a longer
time period. All courses are only one semester long, with no classes running
for a full year.
Gates said one drawback to
the block arrangement is that students can’t take as many courses as they could
with a more traditional schedule. He said he would like a system in which at
least one block period could be redesigned so courses could run for the entire
year. He’d like to see more students have the opportunities to take classes in
the arts. He’d also like to see a marching band at the school.
“I think a school this
size should have a marching band, but you need to be in band all year for that
to happen,” he said.
At the end of the month,
Gates is traveling to Ireland,
to see where his grandmother was born in Drumshambo in County Leitrim.
“I always said that before
I died I wanted to go to Ireland,”
he explained.
Not that he plans on
retiring to a life of travel and leisure. Gates has other ideas.
“I like to look for
another interim principalship,” he said. “I’m not done with kids and education
yet.”