Portland State Magazine Fall 2013

10 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE FALL 2013 Not many people would choose to serve as principal in a failing, inner-city high school and the assignment wasn’t Deborah Peterson’s first choice, either. She certainly didn’t expect transformation. But that’s just what happened during her four years at Portland’s Roosevelt High School—radical change occurred for her and for Roosevelt students. From 2005 to 2009, Peterson and her team saw community pride in the school increase as families became involved in their students’ learning, and students enrolled in college-credit courses. The improvements continue today. Roosevelt’s four-year graduation rate rose 16 percentage points between 2009 and 2011, and last year one-third of its gradu- ates received $1.6 million in college scholarship offers. Peterson now teaches the teachers who aspire to become school leaders. She is a professor in the PSU Graduate School of Education’s Executive Leadership and Initial Administrator’s Licensure program. Her students are future principals and vice principals, as well as school and district directors in such areas as curriculum, instruction, and family involvement. They benefit from Peterson’s real-life experiences at Roosevelt High School—a slice of which she reveals here. WR I T T E N B Y DE BORAH S . P E T E R SON EVERY LARGE urban school system has one school where the principalship is seen as a career-ending appoint- ment. In 2005, Portland Public Schools in Oregon was having a particularly challenging time finding the right principal for one such school—Roosevelt High. As you might guess, Roosevelt wasn’t an affluent school where all the kids were above average and white picket fences abounded. Student achievement scores were in the dumps, with only two of 10 students reaching grade-level benchmarks. The community was disenfranchised from the school. There was no parent-teacher association or active parent groups. The school was truly multicultural but was in a gang-impacted, isolated part of town, and 72 percent of its students lived in poverty. Incredibly, it had had 34 administrators in the previous 15 years. Although administrative openings in Portland’s high-prestige high schools regularly receive at least 75 applications, Roosevelt received only a handful for this opening, most of them from administrators applying for their first principalship. As the human resources admin- istrator in charge of filling this position, I knew within a week of posting the opening that the search was in trouble. Our superintendent used her considerable national net- work to bring qualified candidates to our area. But none of the candidates accepted the opportunity. So the superintendent decided to appoint me, a district-level administrator and former elementary school principal, to this difficult high school principalship. With the guarantee that the appointment would be temporary, I reluctantly accepted. ON MY FIRST official day on the job, I walked into an office containing only a splintered wooden desk and a decades-old office chair with a huge depression in the worn leather seat. No bookshelves, no filing cabinets, no computer. The barren office foreshadowed what else I would find missing in this school: an instructional philosophy, master schedule, bell schedule, teaching plan, A temporary, two-week post as leader of a struggling high school turned into four, life-changing years. Urban principal finds hope