For more than a decade, one person filled the middle- and high-school principal position at Luverne Public Schools.
When the district opens the doors Monday for the 2019-20 school year, the middle and high schools will each have a principal.
Jason Phelps, a former teacher in the district, returned July 1 after a five-year absence to fill the role of middle school principal. He also assumes the district assessment coordinator position.
Luverne is unique among area schools with the hiring of a middle school principal.
“Our district has always been in the middle of ‘Do we have separate middle and high school principals or don’t we?” Phelps said.
Financial issues going into the 2005-06 school year resulted in the Luverne School Board merging the separate positions into a single middle-high school principal position as a cost-saving measure.
Stacy Gillette, the middle school principal at that time, moved to the open elementary position, and Gary Fisher became the middle-high school principal. Gillette has also been the district assessment coordinator.
A year later Fisher became the district superintendent and the position remained a combined middle/high school principal position until this year.
Phelps said he views his position and that of high school principal Ryan Johnson as co-principals since the sixth- through 12th-grade students are in one building.
The arrangement allows the pair to operate as a team. If one principal is out of the district, the other will be available to staff and students since both principals share a similar student-centered philosophy and what is needed to support their abilities to learn.
“What a principal wants, on the learning end, is how to make that possible at the classroom level,” he said.
Phelps grew up in Westbrook and was influenced to pursue a career in public education by his dad, Digger Phelps, who was a teacher.
He came to Luverne in the fall of 1999 as a history teacher and girls’ basketball coach after graduating from South Dakota State University in Brookings. He taught classes in both the middle and high school levels.
In 2014 he became elementary principal at the Hills-Beaver Creek School District.
Phelps sees his role as principal as one of support for both students and staff.
“Every student deserves an opportunity, no matter where you’ve started,” he said. “The best influencer of students is the classroom teacher.”
Phelps commuted to school in Beaver Creek while he and his wife, Summer, and children Harper, 7, and Jaxon, 5, continued to live in Luverne.
The opportunity to return to work in Luverne as a middle school principal was a challenge that appealed to Phelps.
“I enjoy being a principal enough to want to try something new,” he said. “And that drew me to the position.”
As the new school year gets underway, Phelps will sit back and observe the strengths and weaknesses in the school processes versus rushing in and make immediate changes.
When Phelps left the Luverne district in 2014, the staff was just implementing standards-based grading, and he was on the teaching team to get it started in the middle school.
Standard-based grading is now fully implemented.
He sees the change away from the conventional letter grade system as a positive one, and he intends to move forward by supporting standards-based teaching principles.
“The ultimate goal is to get teachers in position to do their best work,” he said.
Phelps brings his own philosophy to the district assessment coordinator position.
He will oversee the gathering and disseminating of the state assessment test scores in reading, math and science for grades three through 11.
Last week’s release of Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments results will be Phelps’ first opportunity to build positive momentum for both students and staff.
He views the yearly tests as a snapshot of student learning on one single day and balances what the scores mean by looking at the five-year local and state averages.
“We don’t want to overreact to one piece of data,” he said. “The part I like about the five-year average is that if you have one year that’s lower than the average, it kinds of evens it out.”
From the data, his focus as principal is centered on what can be done to improve student learning and support teachers to meet grade standards.
“There is always the question of teaching the kids the tests, or are we teaching them life skills,” he said.