Q&A: Salem Hills' New Principal Talks Background, Priorities

This summer, School District 199 officials hired Tina Willette as the new associate principal for . Patch sat down with Willette, an experienced teacher and reading instruction specialist, to talk about her background and priorities as a new principal. Willette's answers have been edited for length.

Inver Grove Heights Patch: What kind of educational and professional background do you bring to your position as the associate principal?

Salem Hills Elementary Associate Principal Tina Willette: I started my professional career in St. Paul public schools. Back in 1996 I was a kindergarten teacher at one of the most challenging schools in the St. Paul system, Maxwell Magnet Elementary School, it’s the Midway and Frogtown area of St. Paul. Coming from being raised in the west suburbs, growing up in Minnetonka, living in Edina, it was a very big shift in what I knew from the way I was raised and when I went to school to go to an urban, inner city elementary school. So, I started my career there, was a classroom teacher for seven years teaching kindergarten with a very diverse group of kids, At one point, I was the minority in the classroom, that was a huge learning experience for me.

Patch: What do you see as your role or responsibility as as admin or principal for a school? It's obviously a new thing for you to be in charge of a facility, so how do you define that?

Willette: For me, the 21st-century leader is not just a manager of  a building, he or she is an instructional leader. Yes, you have to manage the school building, and keep your human resources and all that in check, but the bulk of my work needs to be aligned with the instructional practices that the classroom teachers are employing in their classrooms, because If I’m not aware of what’s happening the classrooms, I’m not leading this establishment. So, an instructional leader is more of someone who can look and analyze student data fairly quickly. I see my role here is twofold: Being able to look at data we’re collecting in the system and make some bigger, systemic structures and adjustments that need to happen, but also training and working with classroom teachers. An instructional leader is really powerful, because I'm aligning myself at the elbow of classrooms teachers and helping them be the best practitioners that they can be.

My job as their administrator is to have clear communications to [the staff] and clear communications to the families, so they know what’s happening at the school. It’s not jut managing what’s in the walls of the building, but thinking around where my communication is with the families.

The other piece of leading this building is that the district initiative this year is really to tie the three elementary schools together, and align what’s happening at the three buildings so we don’t have three separate sites doing three separate things, but we have three elementary schools that have foundational pieces that align.

Patch: What's on you radar, as far as issues and goals you'd like to address and focus on?

Willette: Part of the work that I’m doing is obviously tied to district initiatives, and that’s important to focus on ... so I can tie and align the work that we do on the school level. If we’re talking initially, it’s going to be getting the PBIS structures in place ... being able to support the teachers as we’re working our way through that implementation is important. [Editor's Note: PBIS—or Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support—is a program that encourages appropriate student behavior.]

We'll continue to work on the response to intervention process, because that’s big and having people understand what that’s all about. All three elementary schools, including Salem Hills, have time set aside for [response to intervention] instruction time. We have our core instruction times, and then we have our—if you will—double dip. The child gets a double dose of instruction targeted to their needs, based on the data that we analyze. So the long range goal is to continue that process and be very fluid with the moves that we make with children based on the data that we have from them.

Thre is evidence that response to intervention has worked here, based on the AYP status that was just released, because this building managed to make its AYP targets or safe harbor targets in all the areas except for Special Education students in math. We made tremendous gains from where we started to the work that students did last year, and to be able to use that momentum to continue the work that we started last year, and that was really around the response to intervention and using data to shift instructional practices.

The ultimate goal has not yet been met, but we’ve certainly made steps in the right direction, but we’re going to continue to do that through our work and target the students that need our support.

Patch: I know you haven’t been on duty here for a very long, time, but from your perspective, what stands out to you about this school, and the community around it, whether that be good or bad?

Willette: I would say there’s such a sense of pride in this school that comes from the students, to the parents and to the staff. From the minute I was assigned this building, [Superintedent Dr. Deirdre Wells] said 'You have a fantastic staff that care deeply about kids and want to do what’s right for kids.'