90s14 Becoming a Principal

The summer I completed my Ph.D. I also became principal of the Mediapolis elementary schools. The younger students (k-3) went to school at the Mediapolis site and the upper elementary kids went to the building in Yarmouth. It was a rural district but included some folks who worked in the factories in Burlington. Generally, they were hard working people who expected us to run the schools and not bother them much.

The two buildings were about 10 miles apart. Yarmouth is a small town with a grain elevator, a few houses and a place that served as a café in the daytime and a bar at night. I knew about the community because one of the residents was well known for his lavish outdoor Christmas displays.

I knew Yarmouth, too, for being along the terminal moraine of the last glacier that came into Iowa. It retreated about 12,000 years ago. It was the Illinois lobe of the Wisconsin glacier and it forced the Mississippi to run west of what is now Mt. Pleasant. The little stream that starts there in the playground eventually becomes Big Creek and nearly circles Mt. Pleasant.

The Yarmouth building had been the site of a k-12 school that served the community until they joined the Mediapolis district. It had a nice large gym but the floor had been seriously damaged by water after a storm and it was never fixed properly. The overall building was in pretty bad shape. It was an old building that everyone except those who lived in Yarmouth thought should be closed.

The building in Mediapolis was about the same age but in much better shape. It had a large addition for the high school and a nice gym. The football field was across the road. The community periodically entertained the idea of closing Yarmouth and adding on to the Mediapolis building.

Mediapolis had a little over 1000 students with about 600 of them being elementary and covered a large area from just north of Burlington to near Wapello and from the Mississippi to just west of Yarmouth. The buses transporting kids to Yarmouth from the far southeast part had trouble meeting the state requirement of students being on the bus not longer than an hour. Consequently, there were lots of bus behavior problems.

Besides being principal of two buildings, I was district Title I Coordinator and had to supervise a third of the district events. I was thrilled with the opportunity and a little over whelmed. I had to evaluate about half of the 40 or so teachers each year and that was a huge job not matter how you looked at it.

Most of the teachers were good, competent people, but like everywhere else, there were some bad ones. Some were very set in their ways and told me right up front they weren’t about to change. They said other principals had come and gone and I would, too. I soon began to understand why principals didn’t stay there very long.