Episode 10 Lilly Boron; From Off-Grid Alaska To The Superintendent’s Office

A World War II tent. A Yamaha piano hauled off a swaying dock. Five bears on the playground. A cancer diagnosis delivered in a plastic-lined hallway. And a small town that kept showing up. This conversation with superintendent Lilly Boron is a sweeping, human story about grit, grace, and what schools must become to truly serve kids today.

We start with Lilly’s off-grid childhood in coastal Alaska—hauling water, tracking tides, and learning classical guitar in a homestead cabin. She grew into a teacher who could also rebuild servers, write databases, teach Spanish one chapter ahead, and turn a culinary class into a thriving, student-run kitchen. Then life swerved: breast cancer forced a reckoning that later shaped her leadership through COVID, the Beach Road slide, and community-wide grief. She opens up about the day she became principal as the state shut down, the “honk joyfully” recess plan to clear bears, and the daily staff circles that steadied people through loss.

From there we dig into the big questions of modern education. What do we teach when Google knows everything? Lily argues for adaptability, stewardship, critical reading, and real connection as core outcomes—especially in a world warped by social media and AI. We talk neuroscience, dopamine loops, and why a tighter phone policy can actually make students happier. We unpack staffing churn, culture-building, and the difference between belonging and ownership. And we reflect on how schools can be the place where joy multiplies and grief is halved.

If you care about student wellbeing, teacher support, or how communities stay whole in hard times, this one will stay with you. Follow, share with a friend who loves education done right, and leave a review with the one idea you’d bring to your local school.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Speaker 6 0:00

Hi, thanks for joining us for this episode of Doug Has Questions. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please like, subscribe. We're available if you want to watch us on uh YouTube or if you just want to listen to the podcast version on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and each episode goes live on Thursday morning. So I hope you enjoy this episode and we're happy to have you listening. Welcome to this episode of Doug Has Questions. My guest today is Miss Lilly Boron, the superintendent of the Haines Borough School District. And she started off as a teacher a few years ago. We won't say how many. Thank you. And worked through being a principal and now is the superintendent. And so we're going to talk about her childhood, what brought her into education, and then her evolvement from being a teacher to now the superintendent and any kind of education-related questions that I come up with as we're talking. Welcome to the show, Lily.

Speaker 0:56

Thanks for being here. Thank you. I know that you've had a lot of great ideas, and this being one of them, I'm glad to be a part of it.

Speaker 6 1:03

Thank you. I hope it ends up being a great idea.

Speaker 1:05

It's gonna be good.

Speaker 6 1:06

A lot of times I think my ideas are greater than other people. Oh, that's good. So it's gonna be good. We'll see which one this which end of the ledger this one stays on.

Speaker 1:15

Okay, all right.

Speaker 6 1:16

All right, so Lilly Boron growing up.

Speaker 1:19

Yes.

Speaker 6 1:20

Born and raised where?

Speaker 1:23

So okay, so my story's a little bit interesting. I that's why you're here. Oh, that's why I got on episode 10, right? Episode 10. Um So I my family grew up on the East Coast, and I think in the early 70s, my parents um joined a church group that basically believed that the world was ending and they needed to go live off the land and um live in common with other Christians, and so they joined this community um in Ware, Massachusetts, and lived there, and then they um decided they found out there was an opportunity to buy a homestead up here in Alaska, and so there were a lot of the people in that church group bought property up in Alaska, and my parents were one of those people, so they heard Alaska and they thought, let's do this. This sounds like an adventure. And I was four years old, and me and my siblings and my parents and a bunch of other people drove up, and that was actually my first memory. My first memory was walking across the flats in Hoonah, Alaska with my parents and sleeping in a in a World War II tent. Um, and it was a very, I think it was 75, I want to say. And I remember it was like a really heavy snowfall year, and we had, you know, I slept in my clothes and my coat, and it just felt like we were roughing it out in the wilderness. So my mom was um So you spent the first you spent the first winter in the tent.

Speaker 6 2:54

In a tent.

Speaker 2:55

Yes, in the World War II tent.

Speaker 6 2:57

Just your family in the tent?

Speaker 2:59

My family was in the smaller tent, and then there was a larger tent where we had, I just remember there was like a stove and there was bunk beds and things like that. And then they built the first cabin the next year, and um my sister Rose and I slept in one bed together. They called it the flower bed um for obvious reasons, and yeah, it was kind of interesting. I I have memories of my mom telling the story and recording you know our monthly lives um on a cassette tape, and she would send that cassette tape back to the church group in Massachusetts, and they were like, wow. So, anyways, I grew up off the grid. Um, you know, we didn't have, you know, with honey buckets and hauling buckets of water from the creek and just and it's a beautiful area just outside of Hoonah. Um, so I lived growing up knowing when the tides were, walking the flats, you know, going to Hoonah, which was the biggest city, and we had animals out there, and I grew up hunting and fishing and hanging with my dad. I shot my first deer with a 308 lever action, and um, so that was just my life until I turned 12. And at that time there were lots of communities like ours scattered around Alaska, and the world didn't end in five years, so they realized, oh, we should probably do something with these young people that are now young adults. And so they started a college, and my parents were college educated. My dad was working on his doctoral thesis when we moved up to Alaska and he kind of left all that behind.

Speaker 6 4:34

Um what was his thesis?

Speaker 4:36

It was, I think it was Renaissance music, but he was all it was all music. That's what he was his degree was in, and my mom was working on her master's in music as well, and she was a concert pianist, and she was at um so they were both at Hartford School of Music before they came up to Alaska. And um is that where they had met?

Speaker 6 4:57

Or did they met before?

Speaker 4:59

I think they met in college, yeah. I'm not exactly sure, but my dad, his parents were first, I think they were first generation Polish people, and they owned a tavern. And so he grew up in a Polish tavern, and my mom, my mom's dad was a uh railroad engineer. I think he worked in on the Pennsylvania Railroad, so you know, lower middle class working, you know, people, and and they were both going to college for music, and so they must have met, I think, you know, in that music school environment. And so they um when they came up, they actually brought several other music people from that that college, which is kind of interesting.

Speaker 6 5:39

That that explains a lot because I always remember up at the farm there's always music. Good church, yes, exactly.

Speaker 5:46

And I have this memory of my parents, um, like my dad just playing classical music, you know, on his acoustic guitar, even out, you know, in Hoonah, which is so interesting because you'd look at it and go, you know, what would he be doing that for? But um, and then my mom, she eventually got her piano, her Yamaha piano, brought up to Haynes when this next group of people came up. So there was like a hundred and thirty people that lived there on the farm and kind of lived in common and lived off the land and had a farm and all that. So then they were moving up, and so she said, Oh, you gotta bring my piano. So I remember this black Yamaha piano that looked glorious, and these guys were trying to haul it across from this boat, a heavy piano, on this dock, and of course, with all the weight with all the guys and the piano, it just started listing. And I remember this one guy just got thrown off the back and he was like floundering in the water.

Speaker 5 6:48

Was this in Hoonah?

Music, Community, And Moving To Haynes

Speaker 6:49

This is in Hoonah, yes, exactly. But the but the piano made it, and it's in my parents' house here in Haynes to this day. Yeah, exactly. Um, but anyways, so they were asked to move to Haines because there was a community up here in the suburban area that is Haines, and um so my parents moved up when I was 12, and my family, there's six of us, and actually my older brother he moved to Juneau um because he was a young adult at the time, but the rest of us came to Haynes, and I was taken aback because I had not grown up with cars. Like cars were kind of cool things, sort of like a jet that you might see from time to time. And so um, yeah, we lived 20 at 26 mile, and so just driving to town, I had to get very used to that. I get sick every single trip, car sick, terribly car sick, and um and and then just everything that was Haines. It's like there's stores, there's lots of cars, there's no tide, you're not taking the a boat, you know, or walking the park.

Speaker 6 7:58

I know you don't have to walk.

Speaker 7:59

Yeah, exactly. So that's kind of interesting. But I really loved my childhood. I loved being in the woods, you know. I was just, you know, running around pretty uh, I wouldn't say quite feral, but I definitely, it was my side of the mountain kind of stuff. You know, I loved living, you know, thinking about living off the land and being a, you know, what do they call those? What's the term for it? It's it's um it's like the survivalist mentality. I was like, oh yes, if I ever got stuck out here, I could live off the land. And and I, yeah. So then we came to Haines, and of course I had to modify my lifestyle because we had like store-bought bread and things like that.

Speaker 6 8:41

And it's but when you came here, was was the bakery with the baking all the bread and everything?

Speaker 8:46

So they came in and so the bakery was here, and I that was so I don't I don't even know how to describe it, but it was so foreign to me because my life consisted of going fishing, like I just, you know, going fishing, riding horses on the beaches and hunting with my my with my dad. And then we come here and there's like store-bought bread, and I thought, wow, that's very excessive. Like there's actually bread.

Speaker 6 9:15

I think at that time the farm owned the Chilkat Bakery, and they were the one baking a lot of the bread.

Speaker 9:21

Yes, so the the Chilkat Bakery basically provided all the bread for the town of Haines and Skagway. Yep, and I started working there in the like on the weekends, so I you know, I'd go to school, but then on the weekends I'd um was the dishwasher, and then I kind of moved up in the world, and I s I then I became the prep cook, and I remember not knowing anything about cooking. And so I learned that from a guy named Walter Rodriguez, who was a chef, and he he had a yeah, it was pretty fun. He was he was Mexican and we'd have Mexican nights on Fridays. I don't know if you remember that. I do the whole town would come out and we'd have Mexican food. So I learned all about making good Mexican food. And and then I became a waitress, and so as high schoolers, we worked pretty long hours. Like we we learned to work, and we worked, you know, after like after school or on the weekends or anything like that, and then in the summer, I'd work all summer as a waitress, and I hated it, I just did not like it, and so then I thought I'll be the cook because then you know, you don't have to interact with all these people because at that time, I don't know if you remember, but we had Arnie Olsen and they would have the buses that would come to town, and so we'd have this really slow day, and then you'd see two buses drive up and go, Oh my gosh, we're not closing. We've gotta we've got to feed like 50 people, and and it was just me and and then one cook in the back, and I just hated that. So um being in the back was a little better for me. I enjoyed that, and then we were gonna close it down, and me and um a couple of my friends, we were in our early 20s. By that time, I'd gone to college, got my teaching degree, come back. I was still living on the farm, but in the summer, you know, we were talking about getting rid of the business, and I thought, I'm a high school teacher in the winter, I could run the restaurant um in the summer, just for you know, something to something different to do. So I did that for several years, and my youngest brother, he was the baker, so it's kind of funny. I still forget about that because he's a contractor now, and every so often we make like sourdough bread or something, and he's like, Are you sure you want to do it that way? And I'm like, Who are you to tell me that? And I'm like, Oh yes, you did run the bakery for quite some time. Yeah, so it's actually interesting how so then I taught at the farm as a young adult for three years.

Teen Work, Bakery Hustle, And Early Teaching

Speaker 6 11:54

So when when you went to college, because they had the Covenant Life College College up there, is that where you went to college as well?

Speaker 12:02

Yes, so I started my first year there. Well, first of all, let's back up. I graduated pretty young because at the time you could start school a lot earlier, and so I graduated at 16 and I took a two uh two years for get for a gap year. And what I did is I worked to pay to go to Ireland, and I went to Ireland because I wanted to have this European experience. So there was a church group over there, it wasn't like a big farm, but it was a small community on this property in Ireland that used to be a manor house, it was called Humphreys down house and it's very cool, several centuries old. Um but, anyways, I was over there for about six months and learned all sorts of things about living in Europe, and then um came back and then went to college, started college for my degree in education. And then at the time there were different branches. So the branch that was focused on education was in Canada, in British Columbia. So I went there for two years, and then I came back to Haines for my last year, did my student teaching here, and then went right into being the the English teacher and art teacher for grades nine, actually, it was six, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. And so I did not all of them. Yeah, yeah, it was great.

Speaker 6 13:23

It was quite the broad spectrum.

Speaker 13:25

Yeah. So for three years, I was the high school teacher for art and and English, and then I would manage the bakery in the summer.

Speaker 6 13:33

In the summertime.

Speaker 13:34

Just for something to do.

Speaker 6 13:35

For because you didn't have enough on your plate.

Speaker 13:36

Didn't have enough on my plate.

Speaker 6 13:38

Yeah.

Speaker 13:38

Yeah.

Speaker 6 13:39

So what what happened after that?

Leaving The Farm And Rebuilding Identity

Speaker 13:41

What happened after that? So I had a lot of soul searching, as you can imagine. You know, I grew up in that environment, which was very um, you know, I think the the doctrine at the time or the doctrine that I was raised with was the belief that the world was coming to an end and we were going to live as an example. And it's kind of interesting as a history teacher. I look back at the Puritans and they sort of had that same, you know, ideology of the city set on a hill and living in community. And so as it and it was called the move. And so uh as time passed on, I think people had to shift what their belief system was because what they thought was gonna happen didn't. And so, as you can imagine as a young adult, I started going, you know, this is not it, it wasn't that anything was terrible, it was just I outgrew that environment and I wanted to do something different with my life. And it's kind of interesting because in that environment, you know, you start out as a great experiment. You know, in the 70s, all these people came together and said, Okay, I think we're gonna have a Christian community and the world's gonna be over, you know, the apocalypse is gonna come, you know, in five years, and then it doesn't. And so then you become the things that you put in place to enable people to live peaceably together, then become your doctrine and more rigid, and then people start interpreting that as God. And so I had a hard time with that. You see what I'm saying? Yeah, and so um, some of those things I j, you know, as a young adult, I really became disillusioned with a lot of that. I mean, there were great people, but I had a real hard time with that, and so I made this big decision in my life to leave the farm, and it was a very, very tough time for me because I had all of the soul searching like, is the world gonna end in two years? And I will have I will miss my chance for whatever that is, you know, after. And it's it's kind of interesting because there are people that still live on the farm, you know, it's a lot of the young people have moved away. There's a f you know, but it's really dwindled, honestly. And um, but you see that in other societies, you see that in other communities, and I thought, oh yeah, our our the move was the only place that thought like that. And now as an adult and looking around, I say, I see that there were lots of people in the 70s that had all sorts of counterculture um experiences. And now, you know, the the Pentecostal or the non-denominational sort of charismatic movement really impacted sort of the changes that happened in the move. And so then, you know, looking back at it, I go, oh, okay, so that was the influence of that. It wasn't that we were entirely special or unique in that. But it's it was very interesting because, you know, as an adult I had to go through this tremendous sense of disconnection from everything because growing up in that environment, it was very close. You're very close with 130 people that are your extended family. And like it or not, you're somewhat bonded to everyone, and even if you don't like them, you learn to get along with everybody. Um and so then you leave, and then you feel like you don't know any like you feel like a shell of yourself. At least that's how I felt for myself. I felt like a shell. I felt like I was walking around with a mask because I'm going, I have no, I didn't grow up with TV, I didn't grow up with all of this music. I mean, even Christian music was considered secular because if there was too much of a beat, you know, it's like, oh my gosh, you know, classical music was okay, but you know, we didn't have any of that. We didn't travel, we didn't get, we didn't have it, it was very isolated.

Speaker 6 17:58

And um, so that's I won't I want to ask you about that. Is that something that interact my dad was always hiring the construction crew from the farm to do some of the ones that started off, some of the work I'm still trying to fix now as it went along, and it got the work got much better and and uh always had a great relationship with people up at the farm, and I still do with people up there, yeah. Um, but looking at it from the outside, it seemed like there were some things that were very rigid about how you're supposed to dress, how you're supposed to behave.

Speaker 2 18:32

Oh, yes.

Speaker 6 18:33

And I at the time I was like, wow, that's I don't know if I I don't know if that's for me. Yeah, but looking back at it later, I thought, you know, one of the things, and this ties into your role as an educator. I always looked at it as like offering kids an opportunity to express themselves early, yes, and go ahead and set boundaries, but it's it's easier to set those boundaries and kind of develop who they are when they're younger if everything is mandated for them at a very young age, and then they get 18, 19, 20, and like I think I want to try something else. Right. And then there's so much available at that point, there's so many decisions to make or so many things to try. Right, you can get lost in trying trying to figure out where you are. And I think the like don't the Amish have something where they get to 18 and they get a year away to decide if they want to stay exactly in the religion or if they want to move off. Yes. Um, and I just thinking of myself going from that type of environment to get to try whatever, right? That'd be really scary.

Speaker 19:42

Yeah, absolutely. And and that was definitely there was no avenue for young people to test the waters or anything like that. Like there was no dating, there was no like we wore skirts, we when we really Came, you know, it's just funny to think about now, but it was like, okay, so if you're gonna play ball, then you need to have jeans under your skirt. Well, that was horrible. So I I never wanted to look like that. I I was like, I'm not gonna play basketball because I'm not gonna be walking around with a skirt over my pants. Of course, I do remember in the 90s when that actually was a style. Like happened like 15 years ago. But yeah, there were a lot of um kids that moved off the farm and honestly did not have any sort of guidelines as to what was appropriate. And they got into drugs, they got into alcohol, they didn't know how to say no, they didn't know how to have a healthy relationship because they there it was either you do you follow the rules of the farm or you're lost. So you might as well just live without any sort of structure.

Speaker 6 20:55

So when you when you leave, yeah, other than knowing your parents, I know your parents were probably still there supporting you, guiding you.

Speaker 3 21:03

100%.

Speaker 6 21:04

But did the rest of the community, did they kind of like hands off, was there still avenues for support there outside of your family, or were some of those friendships that you had once you're kind of making a move, were those affected as well that you were seen differently? Yeah or treated differently?

Speaker 21:19

I would say it changed over time. So the generation before me, like my older brother and sister, when they left the farm, it was it wasn't that they were cut off necessarily. Some people, it depended on what farm it was. Some people were very legalistic, other farms were like, oh, you're wonderful, you know. Every farm had its own flavor, its own unique outlook on things.

Speaker 6 21:46

When I would imagine individuals within each farm have their own outlook at some point as well.

Speaker 21:50

It kind of depended on who the elders were of the church. And it wasn't just one pastor generally, it was like a group of elders, and they were very distinctly different. But my my older brother and my older sister, their their age group, when they left, they were pretty much told you're a disappointment, and we're gonna pray for your soul, but basically you you're going down a wrong path that leads to destruction. And so then when I left, of course I left as an adult. I was they weren't pushing me, they were sad to see me go. I was an adult, I was contributing, and they I went with their blessing, but they were really hoping that I would leave and then change my mind and come back. And so then I felt so it was just such a feeling of like you're disappointing your parents, you're disappointing the people that that believed had had belief in you that you're gonna be a good example and all of that. And then since then, of course, when I left, maybe just a couple years later, you have the advent of technology, which transformed everything. Because now there was no, there was tremendous exposure to whatever was outside of the community. Now that was inside, and then I would see kids, you know, wearing shorts on the farm, and I'm like, hey, how do you rate? You know, I would have just been glad to be able to wear jeans without trouble, you know. And so once that happened, was that computers coming in at the farm? I think so, yeah.

Speaker 6 23:20

Because you guys didn't have TV up there because that was around when you were a kid, but you you just didn't have it. No, we didn't have TV so it was more of internet showing up and being able to get online.

Finding Purpose In Teaching And Tech

Speaker 23:29

And I still remember when we left the farm, you know, when there's a good football game going, you know, they'd be like, Could you record that? Could you record the Super Bowl? Even like the the they called them the father ministry, they'd travel around to the different farms, and it was kind of exciting because you got to get eat good food and not go to school and not have to work. You'd have these long meetings, but the food really made it worth worth it. And uh, and they would all come in and they'd be preaching, and some of their messages were attached to like really good movies at the time, you know, the the metaphors there, and it's like, oh gosh, this is the greatest thing ever. But of course, we didn't know those guys. They lit they didn't live on the farms like we did. They had they lived in, you know, normal, you know, towns, you know, they would just visit all the places that were like that were you know more rural or whatever. And so yeah, so I just remember that feeling as an adult, you know, when I should have known better, you know, I was like 25, and I like the first year I felt so bereft, like I was a person without a country. And and it has it has tempered, it's really impacted how I view every kid that comes into the school. Because I think about that, and I think about every kid comes in with a culture, and they all from the outside, they all look like kids that are the same. But I think about that with, you know, I kind of had an epiphany over the years when I would observe kids come in, like maybe kids that are from homeschool, or kids that come from another community, or kids that come from the city that come to Haynes, and they they feel that that sense of of disattachment, like nobody knows who I really am. I think of our Alaska native students, and that has really it it has been a very powerful uh thing that I've uh I that I've just noticed and I go, they have you know values and traditions and things that are so important, and are they represented in our school? Do they feel like this is home to them? Do they feel not just a sense of belonging but a sense of ownership? And because and I it's super important to me because as a leader of the school, I thought this as a teacher. You know, I remember kids saying, Oh, Mrs. Boron, you don't know anything, you know, you don't know how I grew up because they were they had really strict parents and they couldn't like watch the Ken Burns video or something. And I'm like, you have no idea. You have no idea.

Speaker 6 26:08

Let me enlighten you a little bit. Let me enlighten you.

Speaker 26:11

Can you churn butter? Can you sew your own clothes? Have you milked a cow? Um, yeah, I mean, for me, for me, rebellion was well, I did, I will, I will confess, I did make my own wine out of blueberry juice.

Speaker 6 26:28

Really? That was rebellion.

Speaker 26:29

How old were you when you were making I was in my teens and making blueberry wine? Making blueberry wine that exploded all over our house after I had just helped my dad remodel the whole downstairs.

Speaker 6 26:41

Whole downstairs.

Speaker 26:42

So let's just say there are still marks on the how much blueberry wine were you making? It was only like five jars.

Speaker 6 26:48

Five jars?

Speaker 26:49

Like five quarts.

Speaker 6 26:50

Five quarts.

Speaker 26:51

But I you know, the science wasn't there, and so I didn't know how to you didn't quite have it dialed in on the process.

Speaker 6 26:57

Exactly.

Speaker 27:00

No, and that's it.

Speaker 6 27:03

The blueberry wine. Exactly.

Speaker 27:05

Yeah.

Speaker 6 27:06

Where where did you fall short on your recipe?

Speaker 27:08

I think the distillery is where I needed some education. Yeah, there was no distilling going on or anything. The corks were just too tight.

Speaker 6 27:16

Too tight. Yeah.

Speaker 27:17

But my dad handled that very well. I thought for a he made me wait for a while. My mom just kept saying, Your dad's gonna talk to you. Of course, I was in my teens, and he just said, if you need wine, we'll figure out a way for you to have a sip every now and then. But you that's just not very healthy. And I thought that was a really good way to handle that.

Speaker 6 27:39

So were you were you more worried about what your dad was gonna say than what he actually said? Was there that sense of dread when your mom's like, your dad's gonna handle this?

Speaker 27:48

Yeah, there was a sense of dread because dad didn't usually handle it anything, but I was really worried because I knew we had just put a lot of work into like like we ha lived in a very in rough cut lumber, like four by fours. And so I got sick of living like that. And so one day I came home when I was 13 and I said, Dad, I am sick of having our kitchen table be a bunch of boards, like a bunch of one by eights that were supposed to like sand down and make look pretty and like reside the inside. And so he just said, I've got so much going on, I'm trying to get the college started. You know, there's a there are five of us still at home, and he was trying to work on the side, and I said, Well, I'll help you. He said, I don't have any help. So I said, just tell me what to do, teach me how to do it, and I'll do it. So in high school, I'd come home after work and he'd say, Okay, so we're gonna build the wall here, and this is what I want. So I had my skill saw and helped him frame up the walls, and then he I still remember I had this big drill, it was like a one one-inch drill, and I'd have to drill the holes out and run the wires because we were moving to electricity. We had battery and then a generator backup, and so that was all just very sophisticated, and I felt like we were we were really arriving, but anyways, we um yeah, we put our sheetrock and paneling up, and it was all so beautiful, and that's when I chose to make my wine, and it blew with out with such force that it it shattered across the ceiling and down the opposite wall. So all of this, all of this new sheetrock and everything was just totally messed up.

Speaker 6 29:27

New color of blue on it?

Speaker 29:28

Yes, exactly. And there's still spots you can see to this day. So yeah, it's pretty crazy.

Speaker 6 29:34

That's good that you have a rememory of that a few years later. Every time you go visit your mom and dad now. Have you did did you tell your girls that that that's what happened?

Speaker 29:42

They knew about the well, it's interesting because my parents had a very they both had a lot of experiences in their lives. But at the time, and I think this was a generational thing, I don't think it was specific to how I grew up, but I think that generation wanted to protect their kids from making mistakes. And so they didn't talk about the things that they went through. And so as an adult, I learned more things about them, and I go, why didn't you say that? It would have made it would have made things so much easier. But I also understand that everybody, they're everyone is a person, and they're we're all human beings, and we all do the best that we can. And and so it's it's not a judgment, it's just an observation. So I raise my kids very differently, and I told them the things that I did, and I hope that they could learn from my mistakes because experience isn't always the best teacher. It's good to learn from other people's mistakes, and just find out that your mom did crazy things. I mean, that's kind of fun too.

Speaker 6 30:45

True.

Speaker 30:45

Yeah.

Speaker 6 30:46

Yeah. Did you ever did you and the girls ever decide let's try this winemaking thing again and go out in the garage, or did Matt forbid winemaking in the house?

Speaker 30:55

I can't say anything. I mean, he it he doesn't have that authority for sure. Um, no, my girls sorry, Matt. So here's the funny thing. My girls are a different generation because they are, you know, they're part of a generation that's very healthy. So they would look with disapproval at a very young age when I would say crap or something like that, or I would say, I it was just the most innocuous things. And they would I still remember getting ready to go to Hawaii and I had a bathing suit that I was particularly proud of, and I put it on and I said, What do you girls think? And they were both 10, and they just looked at me and said, Are you gonna wear that? And it was like, isn't that just a little racy for someone of your age? And I thought we were.

Speaker 6 31:40

10-year-old girls were telling you that skipped a generation.

Speaker 31:45

Yeah, of course they laugh about it now, but um yeah, it's pretty funny. But I will say, my mom was a teacher, you know, at the front. She's a born teacher, one of the best teachers I ever had. My dad also taught, but I think teaching runs in the family because I definitely um have enjoyed the whole I love a life well lived, and then being able to pass that on to the next generation, you know, because there's so much that kids these days have to face that they never had to face, that we never had to face. They just have this unrestricted access, and it's almost like they are forced to keep their doors open to any possible influence that anybody wants to push on them.

Speaker 6 32:35

Okay, we're gonna get into that a little bit. Okay, all right, I'm getting ahead of myself. You're getting out of it's all right, we're on the same wavelength there. But let's let's go back to your career.

Speaker 1 32:44

Okay.

Speaker 6 32:45

So last we left off before we went back into others, is you'd been teaching English and art.

Pivot To Social Studies And Culinary Arts

Speaker 32:51

Right. So I had a bachelor's degree in English education with a minor in science. And so I did that for three years, and then I just said, I gotta get out of this. This life is not for me. I've got to go find myself. I loved thing, you know, I loved um computers and techie stuff, so I was kind of into like writing music. Um, you know, at the time there was like programs that were coming out where you could write your own music and then have the music playback, and that was very um cutting edge at the time. So I thought, well, I don't really w know what I want to do with my life. I think I'm gonna go out and find out. And so I left and I went and lived with my older brother and sister. Actually, I some of my family had left by this time. And um, and so I lived with them in Juneau, and I got a job at Legislative Affairs Agency um as a proofreader of the bills, the legislation. So I loved that. I just felt so good. I you know, it appealed to my um love of reading and just history and all that stuff. And then I just started missing um school. I I I really missed teaching. And so I decided I was gonna go back and get my master's degree at the University of Alaska Southeast. And at the time, the the um uh people who had graduated from Covenant Life College, they had it was they were had a high reputation. And so there was an agreement with um the university system that they would accept graduates and we you'd be on a probation system, and then you'd you'd you know, if you did well, then they would give you the accredited, you know, degree. And so that's what happened with me. And it's so funny because I was this teacher for three years in a private Christian school. And then I went to Juno and then I did my student teaching at JD, and I think there was 25 to 3,000, 2,500 to 3,000 students at the time. Um, I still remember Carlos Boozer was uh a student, and you could see him like about like when the bell rang, you could see this one tall kid going down the hallway. But so I I went um I did my student teaching there and I had like I think six classes with 31 to 35 kids each. So it was a very different experience, but it really taught me a lot. And I had already I already knew how to teach, but I didn't know how to teach within the public school system. And so I did that, and this is ridiculous, but I had just left the farm, so I didn't really have money. And so I was thinking, how do I make ends? Oh, I got married, I forgot to tell you that. I connected with my high school friend who had also grown up at the farm with me, and then he left right after high school and he worked for Southeast Road Builders, so he was a basically their superintendent for Roger Schnabel. And we had fallen out of touch for like eight years. We were very good friends in school, and then we started dating once I left the farm. And when I decided I was gonna go for my master's, I thought he's not gonna wanna, you know, I'm gonna stay in Juneau and he's living here. So I said, I I think I want to go for this. He said, Well, we better get married then because you're gonna need support, which was really sweet. So we got married and then we lived apart. He was building roads all over Southeast, and I was in Juneau, and so my day was I'd get up in the morning, I'd drive downtown in Juneau. It's like 7:30, I'd teach all day, and then I'd go down to the valley and I'd take my night classes, and then I would drive back downtown, and I did c I did um database coding. Like I I ended up creating databases for legislative affairs. So now we've got to re rewind a little bit. So I was this I was a proofreader for legislation and the director was very kind and and got to know me. Her name was Carla Schofield. And so then I said, I'm so so sorry, but I'm gonna go for my master's and so I'm gonna have to find a night job, like maybe, I don't know, maybe work at McDonald's or something, because I don't know what jobs are available for people that have to work in the middle of the night. And she said, We can't have you do that. No, we can't have you do that. She said, you know, I where I'm trying to get this database built, and you know, the IT department, it's taking their time. Why don't you do it? You seem like you like computers. Well, my brother was the director for IT for the state of Alaska at the time. He was an assistant director or something like that, but he was connected to all of these people who knew all this code and programming and everything. And I said, I I have a good sense for computers, but it doesn't mean I know how to read it. And she said, Well, what if we just buy you a book and you can teach yourself? And I said, But what if I can't learn in time? Like, what if it takes me a whole year? I mean, I'm going to school for my master's and teaching all day. She said, Then we'll have just supported a good person going to school. And I said, Okay, we can try this. So I worked, they paid me, it was like 20 hours a week to write databases, but first I had to learn. So I literally bought three books on building databases with access. And I just read it from front from cover to cover, and I started building databases. So I built one and they liked it so much that they asked me to do another one. So then I really got good at it. I got really, really, really good at it, and I just loved it, but that was a long day. There were times where I just go, I don't even know how I survived that. I certainly couldn't do that now. But yeah.

Speaker 6 38:51

That's a lot of hours.

Speaker 38:52

It was a lot of hours. So I'd always I'd drive back at midnight, go to bed, and then I'd get up at 5 30, 6 o'clock, and then do it all over again for one year. And I really I don't know how I survived. I'm sure I lost some brain matter. I don't recommend that.

Speaker 6 39:08

But well, I think with all you're doing, you were gaining brain matter too, just with the different skill sets you were learning.

Cancer Diagnosis, Recovery, And Perspective

Speaker 39:14

So here's the funny thing. So that meant that that year in Juneau, by this time I was starting to connect. You know how I told you I was kind of bereft, like I didn't feel like I was I had an attachment to anybody. I felt like I was homeless. Um so that connected me with legislative affairs, which was a great place to work. It also connected me to the public school system, which was great. It also connected me to the university system. And then, but my husband lived here. So I had to quit all of that after that hardcore time. I was like, oh, I could do all this database work, I could teach, I could do everything. But instead, I applied for the one um high school English position that was open here. And Haynes, and I still remember it was a phone interview, and I was in Juno, and I had every question I thought they would ask, like with the answers written on the floor. And I had my interview that way, and it was Daryl Klu. He was the principal. And a couple days later, he said, 'Um, we're really sorry. You had a great interview,' but we gave the position to someone else. And I was just so sad. I wasn't surprised because I didn't think that I'd be that competitive, but I was so sad. But the funny thing is, is they gave it to this poor lady who had been long-term subbing for them forever. It was the wife of the principal, the elementary school principal at the time. And so, anyways, all that to say I thought, oh gosh, okay, well, I guess I'm still moving. So I moved all my stuff from my apartment into my little blazer and got on the ferry and came here and just thought, what else? There's nothing to do in Haynes. We lived in a trailer. My husband was working out of town, and I thought, I don't know what to do with my time. I I can't even imagine what I'm gonna do. And so I thought, well, I guess I'll start like fixing up the trailer. Matt's gone, so he can't tell me what he doesn't want done. And so I started ripping out the walls and putting carpet in and painting, and so I had everything torn apart. And I get a call about a week after school started, and they said, Uh, our computer teacher just quit. Would you come in and be a sub? And I said, I just looked around and I said, Well, I have torn up my house, so you're gonna have to give me three days to finish painting, and then I'll come in. And so that was in '99, and I think school was at like two weeks in or something. And so I came in and I was a Windows gal, you know, because this was all I was all about Microsoft Windows, and and so we I come in and it's all Apple, and I'm going, who that is literally like using a sketchboard or something. Like, you need to be using some robust technology here, and so I didn't know anything about it, but Sam was the elementary IT guy, and then Sam McFeaters. Yeah, Sam McFeeters, and Bob Atkins had been in IT. I think he was the computer teacher at the high school before, so he was retired. So I think he was the sub until I could start. And so the three of us sat down and rebuilt the servers. Of course, I'd never I didn't know anything about the servers, and I didn't know about Apple. So I just quietly looked over their shoulders and figured it out, watched them, and I loved it. I loved being the long-term sub. There were a few minions, there were a few high high school kids that would fix computers, and they were whizzes. They were they loved doing it, and so I had never taken a computer apart before, so I just watched them, and then we had a couple of old printers, and they loved taking that apart too. So I'd look at them, and then it took maybe two weeks, and I'd I figured it out. I was like, I got this, I got this, and so then we started, we just took off. And I just because I loved computers and IT and all that, anything I didn't know, I'd call my brother up and say, Who's your person for this? Or, you know, your webmaster. Like, I had to build the website from code. Like, I still remember the color green is like, you know, 005500. It's like that's the shade we want. And so um I absolutely loved it. And I taught some um, I don't know if I taught English that year, but so six weeks in, things are humming all along, my passwords are in the server, we've got things going. I got a good friend in Sam because he's next door, so if I have questions, I could ask him. And then Daryl Klute says, So you know this position is open. And I said, Yeah, are you gonna hire somebody? And he said, Well, aren't you applying? And I said, Why would I do that? I'm an English teacher, I'm just doing this for fun. He said, You've got to apply. And I said, Are you sure? And he's like, Yeah, you could definitely have to apply. And I was like, I don't know if I have the time, or I don't even know if like I don't want to make myself out to be somebody I'm not. And I still remember it was like snowy, and I was like, fixing people's computers, and at that time, random people, like you know how it is in a small town, they hear there's somebody new in there and they just want to check it out. So I'd be teaching class, and somebody would bring in their desktop and just dump it in the back and say, I can't fix this. And I'm like, Is this is this normal? But I knew I didn't know what authority I had, but it was kind of funny. So I finally got around to to you know getting my application in, and it was a snowy day, and I was late to my own interview. This was the second interview, and I still remember I was walking from the high school over to Main Street because that's where the district office was, and it was snowy. I was late because I had a bunch of parents I had to talk to about their kids, and and so I come in and they're asking me all these questions, and it was, you know, they have the last question. Well, first of all, I didn't try to sell myself, I just said, I really like what I'm doing, but I'm not sure that I know what I'm doing. But and and so at the end they said, Is there anything else you'd like to share with us? And I said, I never thought I'd be applying for this job, but I really love it, and I I think I can learn it what I don't know. And I said, and your computers are working, your kids are happy, your teachers are happy, and my passwords are in your server. So that's all I have to say. And I was hired, and that was the end. So I absolutely loved uh so that what year was that? 99. 99, yes, and so then I, you know, I just loved doing that. I taught a few English classes from time to time, but pretty much I was the IT person and absolutely loved it. It was my favorite job ever. I just thoroughly enjoyed it, and then I decided I was gonna have babies, or I I thought I was gonna have a baby, right? And so I was preparing for that for having a child, and then I would have all of my lesson plans done, and everything would be perfect, and that was in 2003. So a couple things happened. First, I found out I was having twins and almost had a panic attack there, and then they had to do a bunch of layoffs, and there was all it was also around no child left behind. So they had to shift, you know, because of the budget, and then they had to move people into the area of their endorsement, and I wasn't endorsed in computers, and so they had to move to justify keeping me, they had to move me into the area of my endorsement. So the whole time I'm thinking, oh gosh, okay, I just need to ch get myself ready for them, either to be fired or to be an English teacher, because I know that's my expertise. And so they pulled me in and they said, How would you like to be the social studies teacher? And I was like, Oh yeah, forgot about that endorsement. Sure, I love that. That sounds great. And so they eased me. I still kind of was a computer teacher, tech person for part-time, but they sort of moved me over into the social studies department. And that year, I was dying because I had twins. They were four months old. My husband was out of town, and I just remember thinking, I can't do this. And it was a new we had a new principal, Charlie Jones, and I just said, I don't know if that I'm gonna give this job the you know the attention it needs. I I was like, I these are all new. You have never taught these before. And I looked at all of my nice lesson plans that I had to hand off to someone else, um, you know, for the for the computer classes. But my he had very good advice. He said, if the kids love what you teach, you'll have done your job. And so I I often think about that. And it really kind of helped me not sweat the small stuff, but just think about you know the value of education as you can deliver it. And it was like it's about it's about fostering that creativity. And and I had a great class. I still remember Wayne Stickler was in there and a bunch of other kids, but I remember they were skateboarders and they loved history, which was funny because they didn't love school, but they loved history. So I made this deal with them and I said, if you get A's on your test, then you don't have to do the daily work. You can sit and listen and just contribute thoughtfully to the class discussion. And so they were back there, like knitting their skater hats and just commenting and involving themselves in the lectures and everything, and it it was just it was a wonderful year. It was absolutely great. And they kept getting A's on their tests, and they kept getting A's on their tests. There you go. And every year I made it a little harder and a little harder. So it took me a while and then maybe six years, and then I was feeling good about my social studies classes. But but then there was a seven-year stretch where I had new classes every year, just the way, you know, how we had to adjust and shift. And as people would retire, the question would arise, you know, do we get rid of this class or is somebody interested in teaching it? And so one um one such time was when we were gonna have to lose our Spanish program. And I said, We can't lose our Spanish program. I don't, I've never been formally taught Spanish, but I did almost marry a Spanish guy once. So and I do, I can teach English, and I love Spanish, so I was trying to you know teach myself. This was before Duolingo, and I was like, I think I can state one chapter ahead. And so that's what I did. I stayed one chapter ahead, and it took me about five years, but then I was like, I'm a good, I'm a good Spanish.

Speaker 6 50:17

It seems to be like a recurring thing. You sign up for things and you get involved in things with no experience. I'm gonna figure this out.

Choosing Leadership And A COVID-Era Interview

Speaker 50:25

And then then we had our culinary arts teacher left, and they were like, we can't teach, you know, who's gonna teach cooking? And I was like, pick me, pick me. I've got some experience in that. So then all of that experience from um from working at the bakery, uh, you know, I brought that to life, and the kids were so excited. I remember we had to have a cutoff at 16, and it wasn't really set up for a commercial kitchen, but I was like, I'm gonna get into my restaurant manager zone and we're gonna run it like a work, like a, you know, like a restaurant, and the kids just thrived under that. And of course, now we know that the CTE programs that are best are those that you know mirror the workplace and so or career and technical education, and so that kind of connected me. Well, I was already connected with career and technical education um through the computer stuff, but then I was able to kind of be the spearhead for that program with the culinary arts as well, and took on the grant writing for that. And so that was a lot of fun, and and then I still remember going, However, are we gonna fund you know the cooking class because it costs money, you know, to buy food. And my husband, it was my husband's bright idea. Why don't you sell to the guys that are building the addition on the school? There's 11 guys there that are probably gonna be hungry, and I was like, Oh, that is a great idea. So we started with our little uh our little clientele of like 11 working guys on the other side of the plastic, and we would cook and then we'd bring it over there and collect the money and be just enough to pay for the next week. And then we built up, you know, we could we got a little street cred going on, and then we you know we built it up till we were. I remember we had to discuss cutting it off, cutting the lunches off at like 130 or something. And so the cooking class would sell 130 lunches in about a half hour every Thursday. They're really good, they were really good, yeah.

Speaker 6 52:33

And I think that was one of the things that I had requested from the school board. I do remember that was part of my recommendation letters that they needed to as part of your job. Yes, you need to go back and do that, and so that hasn't happened yet. Um that's not the first time people have have kind of blown me off. I'm kind of used to that, kind of expected it.

Speaker 52:51

Yeah, but well, I will tell you that I was I humbly asked the principal and the staff if I could still do my part with the Thanksgiving potluck feast in the high school. Okay, so I am cooking a hundred pounds of turkey next week.

Speaker 5 53:06

All right.

Speaker 53:08

They didn't take that away from me.

Speaker 6 53:10

They will they're they're still letting you cook things too.

Speaker 53:11

They still let me do that.

Speaker 6 53:12

All right.

Speaker 53:13

I'm I'm pretty happy about that. But you know, it's kind of funny. I moving moving forward. Well, actually, what do you have a question for me?

Speaker 6 53:25

Well, the the next step was so you're teaching, you keep yes, you keep figuring this stuff out as you go along. That's all these different from computers to English, social studies, Spanish, yes, gourmet cooking, and then you decide to get into administration.

First-Year Principal: Pandemic And Bears

Speaker 53:42

So over the years, my evaluations would always include a section of you know, how can you improve? And there was always the recommendation that I get into leadership, and I said no. I felt so strongly and passionately about being a good teacher. I love teaching, I still love teaching, and I felt that the world needs good teachers, and I just felt like there were more people who wanted to be like principals than wanted to be teachers, and I thought it was super important for kids to have somebody in front of them that loves the job and that is committed to the job and is passionate about the job. Um, and so I just said I'm never gonna do that because I know exactly what happens. You get the credential, and then you find yourself getting pushed into that position. And so um, you know, my girls uh grew up in our school from kindergarten all the way through um graduation, and um, and I just really loved I loved being a part of activities because you know, they were involved in music and and in athletics and art and everything that there was, they were involved in. And so I got to be part of that that as a parent. And just kind of seeing them grow up through the system, I realized that it was time for me to kind of grow with them, that they just had a couple more years left. And so I thought I need to think about what's gonna happen once they're out of school, and I need to have an exit plan, basically. And so I I wasn't sure that I I just was feeling comfortable and I felt like okay, I think I have neglected my growth edges at this point. I think I could do this for a long time, but at the same time, I think that I could um impact the school, the Haynes School, in a different way, and and still be here and still contribute. And so we had a family meeting about it. I still remember we were walking along the beach and I talked to my family about it and said, you know, I'm thinking about going for my um ed leadership certification, which was just short of a master's. And they said, do it immediately. You should do it. And I was like, but what this means is, you know, I'm gonna be having to work longer and I may not be able to do all the things that I do. And they said, Do it. We're gonna be adults, we're gonna be out of your hair anyways, you just need to do it. And so I did, so so I signed up for that program, and I st I still remember. Um, I was taking the class and just going, What am I doing? We were on this trip, it was a summer trip. We brought the girls to space camp in Alabama, and so it's like five hours different, and I start my first class, and there's like a thunderstorm. I'm terrified that the girls are scared in in Huntsville in their dormitories or something, and I'm up all night in the in the um lobby of the hotel where we were staying, and the poor guy, the desk guy, kept saying, Could I get you anything? It was a three-hour class. And I'm going, Oh my god, a three-hour class in the middle of the night. I can't believe I'm doing this. So the thunder is is peeling. My husband's asleep. The guy at the front desk keeps coming over, going, is there anything at all? And I'm thinking, No, I've got to be sharp and I'm so exhausted. So I took that first class and survived it and kind of got warmed up to taking class, you know, going back to school. And then um I so then I was also I had gotten into running, and so we had a, you know, I ran the Klondike, and I still remember having this wonderful, I don't know what it was, it was like 13-mile leg or something. It's a relay. And so I ran, and and just before that, I had found like a a lump on my breast, and I thought, something is off about this. I need to get this checked. So I didn't tell anybody. I just because my mindset was I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do this. And so I ran my race, felt like a million bucks, and then I got a sub for a day, and I thought, I'm gonna fly to Juno, they're gonna tell me I'm fine, I probably got to do something, and then I and then I'm gonna come back and do this, this, and this. And so I get there, and I um they're remodeling the section, the radiology area of Bartlett. So I'm going through this plastic hallway into this tiny little side room, and you know, getting all checked out and everything, and it's taking a little longer, but I'm just I'm already thinking about what tomorrow's schedule is gonna be. And uh, and so then I'm just waiting, and and they said, Oh, somebody will go over the results with you, and so this itinerant radiologist comes in and he just said, So have you thought about treatment for the cancer? And I just looked at him and my whole body started to shake. I said, What are you talking about? And he said, You didn't know you had cancer, and I said, No. And and I could I literally found out and and I just started shaking so bad, I just had to sit down and he said, Oh, I am so sorry you didn't know. And I said, he said, What can I do? And I said, You can get my sister, she works here in the hospital, her name is Rose. And so he just hustled out and she came in, and I've I was just like it was terrible. Um yeah, it was definitely terrible because I was the same age as my husband's mom was. I was 46 when she died of breast cancer, and so my first thought was how am I gonna tell my husband? Oh my god because he lost his mom at the same age I am, and we have two children at home, and my one daughter, she's such a smarty pants. She, you know, she she called me before anybody and she said, Mom, I just need to know you're okay. And I said, I'm okay, but the news isn't good, and don't Tell your father. So it's just very interesting because when you get a shock like that, you do you don't know how your body's gonna respond. And I still remember trying to call call my husband, and I could not make my fingers touch, I couldn't make them work on my cell phone. And so I had to like put my cell phone down and hold my finger and press the buttons like this to get it right. And that was that was definitely pretty crazy. That was very, very crazy. So in one fell swoop, my my children, it was their first year in high school, and I'd really been looking forward to teaching them, and I found out that I would not be able to teach them because I'd be gone. So um it's just interesting how your lives intersect with others, though. Um because my sister-in-law had just gone through breast cancer and she had just been declared clean, and it was literally that same Thanksgiving. We were we had this whole celebration because she had her last treatment, and then I got the news that I was that I had cancer. So it was just it's just crazy. But she and my sister were, you know, my whole family was around me, but to have somebody that knew because I didn't, you just don't know. You don't know it's you just don't know what to do.

Speaker 6 1:01:37

That's well until until you go through something like that personally. It's one thing to just even be on the periphery or know somebody that's done it until you've gone through it yourself. You have no idea what that's about.

Speaker 1:01:46

Exactly. And so it's just crazy, and the whole, you know, and then my first thought was, oh my god. Actually, it was wasn't my first thought. My second thought was I gotta get a sub. So of course I call and I say, I'm not coming home, and just like that, everybody knew in the school because that's the school that we have. We have a staff that was very close, and so not everybody knew, but enough people knew, and so they were so kind, and I just had such a lovely, you know, so many expressions of love during that time. Um, I had a surprise. I don't know if you were um in school at the time, but I I this the students put on this whole assembly for me. Um, and it was my breakfast.

Speaker 1 1:02:39

I was there for that. Yeah, I was a part of that.

Speaker 1:02:41

Yeah, and it took my breath away. I mean, it's just amazing.

Speaker 6 1:02:48

I was that reminds me a few months ago, I was cleaning out cleaning stuff in my house. I still have my wristband.

Speaker 1:02:56

You do?

Speaker 6 1:02:57

I still have my wristband.

Speaker 1:02:59

One more leg.

Speaker 6 1:03:00

One more leg.

The Beach Road Slide And Community Grief

Speaker 1:03:01

So I I had that wristband because and it said one more leg on it, and everybody wore them because it was like it was the whole metaphor with racing, because I learned how to run, you know, I at a very, you know, I was 38 when I started running. I had never run in my life, and my first race was a half marathon.

Speaker 6 1:03:20

Because before you would have had to do it in a skirt and pants. It would not have been a comfortable running experience. I'm glad you waited.

Speaker 1:03:28

Exactly. And so I loved running, and and so that was just, you know, I had I had another race to run, and I just felt so supported by the fam by my family and by my community and by my school. And but it was such a, you know, it's just an experience that you you can be bitter about because it's like all the things that you look forward to happening in your life, and then it doesn't. And for me, I just was so sad not to be able to teach my girls, and um it just took a while to get over that. It was the teaching part, you know, it's like I'm a good teacher. It's like they gotta learn Spanish, they gotta learn history. But we got through that, and and I'm happy to say I, you know, I I was, you know, I went through radiation treatment, I had surgery and all that, and and I got better. And I've been I'm seven years clean.

Speaker 6 1:04:29

So how from diagnosis to when you were they the told you're cancer free, how long was that?

Speaker 1:04:35

Um, well, they don't tell you you're free for like a good year after because you they've got to make sure you were done with treatments and everything like that. So it was um it was like six months. Six months, yeah, yeah. So you pretty much missed the rest of that year. No, it was six, no, no, it wasn't because it w I came back. I came back in the second semester, and I taught the second semester, so I was just out the first, yeah.

Speaker 6 1:05:03

Yeah.

Speaker 1:05:04

So it was really more like probably four months, four or five months. And I would have to leave and go get checked up and all that. But and then you know, there's the whole processing, so you have to take all this medication for five years, and that makes you feel miserable. And that's the hard part that people don't tell you about about recovering from cancer. Like when you have cancer and you're you have you're getting treatment, then you can say, Yeah, I have cancer and I'm getting treated. Yeah, but then when that part's over, you're living with the all of the the way your body is impacted, you know, and in all the ways you don't feel like the way you did before, or you don't feel like your body is impacted as a result, but you don't want to say, I look a little older because I had cancer treatment. You can't say that. You just have to be thankful. Why can't you say that? But you can't that's a legitimate reason. Like I remember being so sad because like my arm looked different because I didn't have lymph nodes in my arm, you know, and it's like I want to say, I really had good tone, but I had cancer. Like that's a terrible thing to say.

Speaker 6 1:06:15

So now I think if if you didn't have cancer, it's a terrible thing to say, but yeah, I think the fact that you had it and you survived, if somebody's looking at you a little, I'd just like, hey, shut up. I had cancer and I survived. Yes. If I'm looking a little different, if I'm looking a little right.

Speaker 1:06:31

So we'll come back to that because because there's a funny part of this story. Well, well, I I don't want to get ahead of myself because oh I have to think about what I was gonna say about all that.

Speaker 6 1:06:46

We can come back to it later.

Speaker 1:06:47

Okay, we can come back to it later, but so yeah, so I got treatment and all that, and um oh yeah, we'll we'll talk about it later. But oh no, this is what I was gonna say. So when I found out I had cancer and I didn't know, like you think that, oh, I have cancer, so next week I'm gonna get surgery, and then the next week I'm gonna go through treatment, and then it's but it doesn't happen like that. It takes weeks and sometimes months, and then people want to ask you what's happening, and you don't know what's happening, and then you go, Am I gonna die? Okay, are you and it's just horrible because you're ready, you're ready, you steal yourself, but then you have to wait. And it's not on the timetable that you would think that it would be. And so one of Chuck Mitman came to me and he said, Lily, this is one of the hardest things that you'll ever go through, but it's also one of the most beautiful things that you'll ever go through. And he said, You'll know what I mean. You won't you don't know what I'm saying now, but you'll know. And I would find that out because as a principal, I had multiple of my staff have cancer, and I could say things to them that nobody else could say. I could have hard conversations with a door shut saying, No, you're gonna let your spouse support you. You don't have the right to to work. You are gonna go. You know, I could say, you're not gonna stay, you're not gonna teach, you're gonna, you're gonna go do the important work. And and I would have never had the the grace or the ability to the gift of being able to speak plainly with people about those things. And I couldn't say, and and if they were having a hard day, or they were, I could say, you know what, the cancer doesn't take away life. You can still be angry at somebody and they can be angry at you. You just have cancer on top of it. You know what I mean? And so I could have those conversations and say, you know, just any there was nothing that was off the table for multiple of my staff. And I felt like that was the gift that I could pass on to them. It was a gift that was given to me because I could there was no, there was no um filter. There was none needed because I'd been through it and I knew that I could have a conversation, I could support them in a very real way without them having to have a mask up or have I it was just understood.

Speaker 6 1:09:27

Who who was doing that for you when you were going through treatment? Was it Ruth?

Speaker 1:09:32

I think Ruth, I think my family, um my sisters.

Speaker 6 1:09:39

I I well, yeah, I I think I I think, you know, I I feel like I was in a real Because it's it's one thing for the community to support you and say, hey, we're with you if you need anything, but those conversations that you're talking about that you're now able to have with staff, right? Somebody had some of those with you, I'm guessing.

Mental Health Response And Collective Care

Speaker 1:10:00

Well, that is where I am so thankful because I have always and this is why I love what I do, because I feel I've always felt so much love from this community. You know, if I started I mean, I couldn't count them. Probably a thousand people in my life that have given to me. And if I started naming them, I would miss someone that had such incredible that gave me strength. And that's my students. I mean, I think of every student that gave me a hug. I think of my staff, I think of you, you know, I think of the parents that said stay strong and and you can be weak. I just there are just so many people in my life and my colleagues, and that's why I'm just so blessed. That's I just I don't know that everybody has that, but I never felt I felt so rich. I mean, I just felt so rich. I never felt like people, I like I had no one. I always had the person that I that I needed when I needed it. And I think that we shouldn't have to have cancer to have that. And I think that's how I've tried to live my life because after that I had so many fears and insecurities as a young adult when you think about my life and how I wish I could have had a different life, you know, growing up, you know, I I wish I could have had activities in a public school, you know, but I had other things and I am who I am because of those things. And and so when I, you know, when I got through cancer, I st I remember the first time I went on a little run. Because I I think it was the next year actually, I started running, and I said, I'm gonna if I'm running 12 minute miles, I'm gonna run. And and I just said, What is my goal? Because you know, you always have to have your goal. Is it gonna be a nine-minute pace? Is it gonna be a 10-minute pace? You know, am I gonna run hills? And I just realized that my goal was just to run because I could. And um, and so I just would run, like I remember running out towards the cannery, and I would just say, I run because I can, you know, and and that just was like a a mantra to me that I run because I can, and and and I'm thankful, I'm just thankful. I'm thankful that I'm here and I'm thankful that I can run. And then it changed my whole perspective on life. And um it was very interesting. So back to back to starting my master's program, I thought I'll never be able to get my program because I have cancer, and they're not gonna let me take a break. Well, they were all supportive. They said, no, you go and you get taken care of, and then you can come back. So I had to come back after that and go back through the program and do all that stuff, and and so I was a different person coming back in with a different set of, you know, just a different perspective entirely. And so I finished my program and I was hired that year. So I was right not to go for it any earlier because I applied for that position. I remember thinking, oh my god, I have not applied for a position since I went trooping, you know, traipsing through the snow, you know, in '99. And um, so I prepared for that interview and I was I was pretty nervous, but I was more nervous. I wasn't sure what I was nervous about for that for that interview because it was oh it was during region five. And Haley and Hannah were both at region five. So Hannah was in the pep band, and Haley was on, you know, the team. Yep, the basketball team. And I was so worried because I knew Wrangle was gonna beat them, and she hadn't won a single conference game in her high school career, but she was like, I'm still gonna, I'm still gonna do this, I'm gonna be a good example. You know, there were they're only seven on their team, I think. And so she was like the team captain, and I was sitting there waiting for my interview at 6 30 at night after a day of like teaching cooking, because I was still teaching cooking and we had we were doing these exploratories, and so I'm like, oh my gosh, I hope Haley's doing okay. So I'm watching the the Wrangle game, and they call me in, and I have this, you know, I I have this interview, and this is where this is the funny part. So one of the questions were was uh so tell us about something difficult that you've experienced, and and tell us how you handled that. But I was so focused on leadership and being a principal that I'm thinking about it.

Speaker 6 1:15:20

You didn't talk about cancer?

Speaker 1:15:21

I couldn't think of anything difficult that wasn't there was nothing really difficult. I was like, can I come back to that question? Like, sure. So they kept going on to more questions, and and then and they said, Okay, can we go back to that question? Tell us about something really difficult and how you handled it. And I was like, I am so sorry, I can't really think about something that was difficult. And then I was like, Well, maybe you know, where you're you know, I was a union president and I was trying to support a teacher, and maybe I felt like I could have done a better job.

Speaker 6 1:15:56

Yeah, I I'm not really pulling up anything, and so they thanked me and just just so every what I'm thinking here, everybody in the room that's interviewing knows about cancer. And they keep coming back. What's difficult? And you're like, eh, I don't really have anything.

Speaker 1:16:14

So then after the fact, I called my sister, my sister Rose, and Juno, because she was rooting for me. And Haley did get beaten, you know, our team got beaten terribly by Wrangle, so there was that. And I called up my sister and I said, I think I did fairly well in the interview. I said, There was this one where I really messed up. I said, I guess I could have said they asked me one that I had a difficult time in my life, and I said, now I realized when I had twins and I was teaching, I could have said that. She said, What? You had cancer? It didn't occur to you to say you had cancer, and I was like, dang it. I'm gonna tell them tomorrow. Um, I would like to revisit that question. So, but she said, you know what, you're crazy. I can't believe you didn't tell them that. But she said, you need to tell um the superintendent, Mr. Gretchel, that he needs to bring everybody home because she worked for the hospital at the time and she knew that the state was shutting down. She had just been in a meeting.

Speaker 6 1:17:14

This is spring of 2020.

Speaker 1:17:16

Spring of 2020, and that same day she said they are shutting down all the airports tomorrow. So anybody who's thinking that they're leaving for spring break should not go. Yeah. And I was like, oh my gosh. And and so then I've got a text. Um, I got a text from somebody else, and they said, Yeah, are they really shutting down the airport? So I thought, this is kind of awkward. I just finished my interview and I'm home, but I better call Mr. Gatchell. So I called him and I said, This is not about my interview, although I would like to say that there was a hard experience. Um, I did have cancer. And he said, I was wondering why you didn't say that.

Speaker 6 1:17:52

And I looking back at it really wasn't that big of a deal. I bring it up.

Speaker 1:17:56

Exactly, exactly. I said, but I also have this other small situation. My sister just told me that the whole state is shutting down tomorrow, so you probably don't want to go to Disneyland because I know you said you were gonna do that, and all of our kids are in Juneau. And he said, Are you serious? Okay, I gotta make some calls. So they ended up bringing everybody back and you know, early from region five, and he said, Can you come? Can you meet me at my office? And so I go back down. I'm thinking, okay, we got to figure out how to get these kids home. And he said, We would like to offer you the position. And I said, So I didn't utterly bomb that question. I said, I'll remember, I'll take notes next time. He said, I cannot believe that you did not put that in. Um, so it was just so crazy. So I was offered the job the day the state shut down for COVID, and I had no idea what my life would be like as a first-year principal. So that was the beginning of, yeah. So that was my that was another issue, another year that I couldn't teach my daughters, so you know, their full year, that was their junior year, and I was so sad. I was I was thinking, oh, I do such a good job teaching government, and now they're not getting that quite for me.

Speaker 6 1:19:12

And so you didn't set up a little classroom at home in the dining room. I was gonna say, I'm sure your daughters probably still got the same experience that they would have in the classroom.

Speaker 1:19:22

No, they didn't because we had to be in separate rooms because I was the teacher, and then it would be so we would try sometimes. So Spanish, sometimes it worked a little bit better, but it was really hard. We had to like it was very strange. It's a strange time.

Speaker 6 1:19:36

Yeah, I I hope we don't have to go back to those times. Yes, me too. So then so 2020.

Speaker 1:19:43

So 2020.

Speaker 6 1:19:44

So you're you're a principal for four years. So then my five years.

Speaker 1:19:48

Yeah, so then my 2020, and you know, I started out that summer instead of being the principal I thought I was gonna be, I was working with Roy Getchell, coming up with COVID plan for starting our year. You know, and and so that was a very interesting period of time because he was a wonderful mentor to me and we worked really well together, just kind of having our you know, our committees and saying how is this gonna look and working with the community and I really was able to just see how he was so careful to bring everybody together before making a decision. And of course, working with you and with the borough. It wasn't yet it was it wasn't that part, no.

Speaker 6 1:20:33

I didn't I didn't get elected till fall of 2020. Seriously, yeah. Well, fall of okay. I missed that part.

Speaker 1:20:40

So wait, I was ahead of you just a little bit.

Speaker 6 1:20:42

Yeah.

Speaker 1:20:42

Oh wow, yeah, and so we were so it took us so much time. We had picnic tables outside, we had everything prepared the first day of school. I'm feeling so nervous, but so hopeful. And I was so worried about how things were, and we had everything in place except for one thing, and I bet you can't guess what it was.

Speaker 6 1:21:05

You're right.

Speaker 1:21:06

There were five bears that showed up on our playground the first day of school. The first bear came across the playground and they said, There's a bear out there, and I was like, We have worked too hard to open this school, we are not closing it down because there's a bear on campus. So I literally ran out the door with my high heels on, and I'm just clapping, saying, Get out of here, get out of here. And and the assistant principal, Kim Sunberg, said, What did you just do? And I said, There is no way we're shutting this place down. The kids deserve to be on the playground.

Speaker 6 1:21:42

Exactly.

Reimagining School: Belonging To Ownership

Speaker 1:21:43

So about two hours later, Tiana, she you know, she worked in the front office and she said, Lily, there's a bear on the playground. I said, She said, You need to pull the kids in because she was training me, right? I'm a new principal, I don't know what I'm doing. And I said, No, that's ridiculous. I already chased the bears away. We don't need to bring the kids in because there was a bear there an hour before. And she said, No, this is a sow and a cub. They're coming through now. And I said, You've got to be kidding me. So this time I was a little smarter because it was a sow and a cub. Get the kids in, and there was one lone horn on the filing cabinet. So I'm out there honking the horn, and I just said, We cannot have the kids be inside. This is ridiculous. They deserve to play. So then they came ambling through again at at um like when we, you know, at the end of the day when the kids were leaving. It was ridiculous. And so then I was just like, maybe this is a one-off. Maybe they were just passing through.

Speaker 6 1:22:41

Was that was there a thought in your mind going back to that young girl in HUNA that I need to get the 308?

Speaker 1:22:47

100%. The police were there, and I said, Are you gonna shoot the bear? And it was off Officer Dryden.

Speaker 5 1:22:54

Uh-huh.

Speaker 1:22:54

And he said, Lily, I can't just shoot by a school. And I was like, Oh, yeah, that. That's right. That's right. And it was like a stun gun or something. But they had basically because of COVID, there wasn't a lot of people out and about at the time. And so the bears had sort of there was like a game trail right there. And so we actually had to buy. So I came here to your store and we bought a bunch of horns, and so we had our safety meeting. It's like, well, we've done pretty well with the COVID part, but not so well with the bears. So it was such an issue that we had to honk before every recess to kind of shoo the bears off and make sure they were away so that the kids would have their 15 minutes out there on the playground. And so then, you know, we had some very diligent staff saying, um, but isn't this part of our like crisis plan that you hear the honking of the horn? How will we know that it's not like a crisis situation? It's just scaring the bear. I said, Well, honk joyfully. And he said, Well, what is honking joyfully? And I said, It's three strong blasts is danger, but a honk, honk, honk, honk, that's that's sort of a joyful sound. And so every day our recess, you know, the pairs would go out, and I still remember Sean Asquith. He's over there going, honk, honk, honk, honk, and he's over there laughing. I said, That's joyful. So that was the first year. Yeah, it was pretty crazy.

Speaker 6 1:24:22

And then well, and then December of your first year is when we had the slide. Exactly. So you're dealing with that emotional aspect because exactly one of the residents that we lost during that, Janae, was your kindergarten teacher.

Speaker 1:24:36

So, yes, and her mom was my child ran the daycare for my children. And so she was their nanny for since they were born, and every day I would bring them up to her house, and so um, Janae was like a sister to them, a big sister, and and Janae was my first hire as a principal, and I was so proud of her because she had wanted to be a kindergarten teacher here in Haynes, and I remember her preparing her application packet, and she was so nervous, and of course it was still COVID time, so she said, Do you mind if I practice my interview with you? And I said, Absolutely. So she practiced, and you know, we'd talk and take notes and then we'd try it again, and she did such a lovely job. Um, yeah, she was my first hire, and and so, you know, when it when it got so bad, you know, my husband, you know, was the DOT uh manager, and so he was in charge of keeping the roads open and everything, and so we had that terrible rain, and I knew that it was not I knew that we were not gonna have you know school open. And so I said, it and remember all that flooding that happened that day, and so I just said, girls, your dad is out trying to get you know the roads open, and so we need to go in with our backpacks and and get some food because I'm sure that the power's gonna be out, and it we, you know, the water, the roads were washed out on both sides of our house. And then we had like the there was like a mudslide that came down Piedad on our street. And so I said, we need to just get food and whatever we need supplies we need. And so it was just it was actually, you know, back to the Huna days, like a little doomsday prepper, you know, came out, and I said, Okay, let's get our gear, let's get our backpacks. So they had their little music going, and we walked all the way into town, and we could just tell where the road was because there was a little edge on the highway, the upper edge of the highway where you could see the water. But you could see people out there with their canoes like paddling, and we were like, we've never seen anything like this.

Speaker 6 1:26:48

Right at one mile there. Yep, right at one mile. I remember walking in that morning and seeing that because I had to walk on that other edge because otherwise it would have been over my boots. I could not believe the amount of water that was in that area.

Social Media, AI, And Student Wellbeing

Speaker 1:26:59

So we went in there and we went into Olrood's and got a bunch of food, and I was I said, Okay, we're gonna be ready, we're gonna make food, and and then um then we had just checked out and everybody's neckles went off that said, get off Beach Road right now. And so we had just stepped out and I looked up and I could see the streak across the mountain, and you could see that the whole side had collapsed. And so I knew Matt was out um, you know, with the road, you know, working on the roads and stuff. So I thought, oh, I'll try to call him. No answer. And then I thought, I better make sure my people are good. The one person I know who lives out there is Janae. So I called her. She didn't answer. I left a message, and I just said, I want to know you're okay. Just call me when you can. Called Andreessen's. She didn't know what was happening. I said, You need to get out of your way. I all I saw was get off of Beach Road now. And so she was gathering her stuff trying to get out of her house. And then we start walking, and at first we're going like, boy, that's crazy, because we're used to mud slides. We're used to, you know, the 19-mile slide, all of these slides, and of course, this was crazier than anything we had seen. And so then I'm just calling other staff that I know that are in the area or that might be in danger. I heard then I we started getting the Nexel reports of Lutax slide, and so then I thought, well, Rami Carlson's out there, I want to check on her. So I'm calling my staff, and I'm not getting any answers. And so about halfway, I just start getting really sick to my stomach. And so I get to the bottom, and then I said, girls, you need to you need to go and we we need to bring the food to our house, and then we'll go f go see Kim because she lived at the top of the street. And I got to the bottom of Piedad and I thought, I can't, I can't even go home. So I gave the food to my girls. They brought brought the food, and I just went straight to Kim's, and of course she was she was just in an awful state, as anyone would be. And, you know, we're crying, and and then I get a call from Anna Jacobson, and she just which is interesting, speaking of the connections you have. I mean, she was my student, but she's an adult, and she called me and didn't was beside herself. And because, you know, her sister's fiance, David, was also there, and and it was just the beginning of just this awful, awful, awful time of waiting. And and then it was, you know, Kim spent that first night at my house, but the rain was so bad, you know, and we went through all of that, and that's a lot to go through. Um it was just crazy, crazy time.

Speaker 6 1:30:00

And this is your first year on the job.

Speaker 2 1:30:05

Yeah. It was yeah.

Speaker 6 1:30:06

You don't you don't know what it's like to be a principal yet, and now you're dealing with COVID and a slide and losing a staff member, and of not to mention the close family friend and everything like that, but just on the job aspect of that.

Speaker 1:30:22

And that that was where Roy did such a good job because as you can imagine, I mean, we had the slide, we had the deaths. Of course, it at that point it was a search and rescue, but it was rapidly becoming search and recovery. But we had all of these people that we had our families that didn't have houses that had been flooded, that were displaced. We had the Red Cross, we had the fear that more slides were gonna come down. I think everybody was scared, you know, you'd get these Nixel reports, and you know, we spent one night at a, you know, at a different house, but then we were worried because we thought, what if Santa Claus has a slide, then that's gonna be a tidal wave across, you know, it's just that constant fear. And every day um, you know, we'd we'd be out. Like I just remember being in my reindeer and coming in and having a staff meeting via Zoom with the people that were there and saying, here's where we don't know where this person is. We haven't heard from this person, we haven't heard from this person. And so we ended up having a staff meeting every day, sometimes twice a day. And I just have that feeling of it was just such a sickening feeling, you know, to be there in your rein gear. And I'm my girls actually prepared this is what they were doing. They were preparing food and they were preparing like bags so if there was a side that we could just run run out of the house and grab our stuff. And so trying to be a principal during that time, it was so hard.

Speaker 6 1:32:04

Well, and the other aspect of this that when you were talking about having those meetings, we were setting up the school as a mass casualty or a mass evacuation point that if pe if there if there were other people that needed housing, that that was gonna be mass congregation site for housing.

Speaker 1:32:19

Right. So we were so then after the so that part was kind of interesting because you know, just trying to make sure that our families were okay, still not sure what was going on, you know, we kind of were figuring by that time that Janae and David were dead. They were still trying to account for people. And then um, and then we I I still remember I can't I I'd have to think about when this was, but one of those days um we ended up spending the night at this other house, and it was ice. There was such ice glazed over everything, and we had to have a special board meeting to decide something. I don't even know what it was. I think it was just I think that was when we found out that Janae had died, that that they had declared her dead, that basically they said there's no way, and David. And so we had to have a board meeting, and we and part of that was also to figure out how we were gonna provide for all of the people that may need a place to live to stay. And so I remember going out with my gear, with my rain gear, and my daughter, one of my daughters, Haley, she was the board representative, and and so she was the student representative on the school board. Uh yeah, the student representative on the school board, and and so we get our rain gear on and we're hacking the ice. I mean, it was like an inch thick, the whole and I couldn't even open the car door, and we get in and we come in. I've got my dog and my daughter, and and we have our board meeting via Zoom, and they're trying to figure it out, and there are people spending the night in the school at the same time. And so I just those times were so tough. But it's interesting because at that same time I had been already concerned about our student and our staff mental health because of COVID, because there was such isolation that I had already been talking, I'd asked permission of my s of Roy if I could talk with Bartlett and other state agencies about having people come in and provide mental health support because we had just seen some rural depression come in, you know, and just isolation. And so it was very interesting because we had already had the talks, so and we had already kind of set up a tentative schedule, and so when the disaster happened, there were already people that were ready to come out and provide support, and so you know that's another bit of serendipity, really, where my sister was working at the hospital, and she was able to kind of spearhead that effort of Bartlett helping us, and it was people volunteering to come and provide um support for us, and and by then I just remember you know, you were walking through the school, and I remember that because I was heading home from the from the EOC.

Speaker 6 1:35:26

I forget because it was in the middle of the day, and I I don't remember what it was. Um, but I just saw a bunch of cars. I saw your car and a bunch of cars I didn't recognize at the school. I was like, well, that's kind of it's kind of weird. I'm not sure what's going on in there. And the door was open, so I just kind of walked in. I was like, I'm gonna just go see if I can find somebody, and then you were giving them a tour of the younger grade classrooms and everything, and talking about what they were gonna do. And I was like, All right, nobody's breaking into the school, so I'm just gonna go home and do my thing. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:35:56

Well, it it just goes back to it's kind of interesting. One of the one of the class assignments that I had when I was going through my principal program was there's a disaster, and you don't have a school. How do you build what what constitutes a school? What makes a school a school? And so I had thought about those things, and I never in a million years thought what that would be my first year. You know, is what makes a school? Because we had to ask ourselves that for multiple reasons for COVID and also for the disaster and and what that looked like. It's like, how do you keep moving forward through something like that? Because you do. We can we live, we we grieve, but we live, and we know that Janae wouldn't have wanted it any other way. And Janae and David were such great examples of living, and we honor them by that. But to be a leader in those times, as you well know, you just feel so unprepared and inadequate. Um but one thing I've realized is that you just you sit with people in their grief. You know, you sit with them in their loss, you sit with them in their fear, and you don't always fix things. And I like to fix things, I like to make everybody feel great. And I think as as a leader, I've grown to understand that you can't always change things, but you can sit with people and and don't hide from the grief and don't hide from them, you know.

Speaker 6 1:37:29

Well, that was one of the you know, with Cesre and Kelly and Riley always being over in that POC, and I mentioned this to Cesrey when we were interviewing her, that one of the things that stuck in my mind was joy shared is joy multiplied, grief shared is grief halved. And so what you're talking about, yeah, sitting there with somebody, you're not gonna solve anything, you're not gonna make it go away. But just that presence of I'm here with you. Right means and I before then I won, yeah, whatever.

Speaker 1:38:02

But going through that, there's yeah, there's nothing quite like it.

Phones, Policy, And Parent Partnerships

Speaker 6 1:38:08

Nope. No, the the the bonds that were created between people that I worked with during that time are some of the strongest I've got in my life. Yeah.

Speaker 1:38:24

And I think about that with with Kim and with David's family. And I I I you know, Jeremy and I just go, if if I were to lose a child, I'd want their name to be spoken and not hidden. And and so I say that, you know, I I'll I'll speak their name, you know, I'll I'll say their name, I'll I'll remember them. And and we did that, you know, in our school, we had this beautiful installation of of cranes and butterflies, and we still have some in the in the building. And it's it's just, you know, you just don't know what life is gonna bring you. And and that there was nothing that prepared me for that, or any of us for that, you know, as a community and you as a leader, like you think about just why me? Why am I the person that has to figure out how to live and how to support people through this crisis? And and what does that even look like? And so there's a tremendous amount of humility, like there's things we learned and things I've written down. I mean, I have I actually was just looking at this because it's December. December's around the corner. And every December I look at that folder and I read every note because I wanna be prepared. I don't think you lose that. You don't lose that sense of what may happen. And you know what's crazy is since then, you know, we were I know that Sitka experienced a similar situation, but you know, when you're in a school or a community in like ours, you're connected on s there's so many threads can that connect you to everybody. And so and that just has a multiplying effect as well because you feel everything, you know, and I think about that class that lost students, you know, I think of you know, before the the disaster happened, I was actually preparing to remember Zane and Matthew. And and you know, I I just the year before. It was the year before, and I had actually seen them the day before at Mountain Market, and it's just those those little intersections of your life, and so I guess you just learn humility and you learn to care for people, and you just don't want to have regrets in your life, you know, you don't want to regret and and you just want to know that you've done your best, and you don't have to be perfect, but you just want to be all in, and I know that you're all in, and I know that I'm all in and whatever that looks like.

Speaker 6 1:41:19

Yeah, it just it just hit me while you were talking about going through your notes because we're coming up on December that uh after my term ended in October 23. I've been out of town every beginning of December, and I'm planning to be out. I it it's not a conscious decision that I'm gonna be gone. Yeah, it's just I'm I'm yeah, and maybe it's my subconscious like you can't be in Haines. But I remember the one with um because I was in Seattle when the Wrangle, when Wrangle had their slide, and that was hard because I you know I got a call from the newspaper wanting a comment about that, and I had to I had to I was with friends and I was like I'd I had to put myself away for a couple hours before I could have that conversation.

Speaker 1:42:16

Can you think of the communities that have suffered since ours? And I don't know, you know, it's weather patterns are changed, you know, it's it's it's a reality. And you know, you think of the storms, you know, I was just talking, I I teach for the university um in their ed leadership program. It's for me, it's a way of paying forward, you know. I believe in our our profession and I want to grow good leaders for the state, and and and so I love that. But some of my prin my aspiring principals are interns in these communities that just got hit. And it's kind of interesting because because of what I went through and I'm their supervisor, so I was able to call them up and say, How are you doing? And they're there by themselves and they're like half the village is floated away. We don't know what to do. And you know that feeling. And and so just to be able to support other people kind of goes back to the cancer thing, you know, or whatever you go through in life, it's like you know, once you experience it, it's you just it connects you to people in a different way. Because I had, you know, I have three of my three of my interns this year are in communities that have had significant damage because of those storms and you know entire communities displaced. So it's pretty crazy.

Speaker 6 1:43:52

Yeah. So when I when I told you I wanted to have you on, we talked about education funding and things like that. But I kind of want to change and not we we might get to that depending on how late we want to be here.

Speaker 1:44:08

Maybe that could be the 20th episode.

Speaker 6 1:44:11

This could be the 20th episode or the 15th or whatever. But what what what you're talking about was something that I wanted to talk about in conjunction with that, that the system we have for education, and I'll give you my theory, and you can tell me how I'm wrong or right, whichever it might be. Um, it was designed, it was designed a hundred and some years ago for public education. There's been some changes over, but not significant changes.

Speaker 1 1:44:39

Right.

Speaker 6 1:44:39

And like I told you, I'd I'd rather us not fight about the money.

Speaker 1 1:44:43

Right.

Staffing, Culture, And Hard Decisions

Speaker 6 1:44:43

Let's figure out how we can best educate. The students we have today are not the same students that when you and I were in school. So the the teaching environment, the the teaching mechanics, I think has to change for that. And the part that I want to get into with you now on that is the amount of trauma. People will say there's always been trauma. Like to some extent there has. But it's also magnified now with social media and how easy it is the access to so many good things on the internet, but so many bad things and destructive things, the way that we can bully easier on the internet, the way that you look at the way our public discourse goes now, and then you see why would kids want to be respectful in their conversation when they see our our leaders at all sorts of different levels being disrespectful and and and the siloing in social media that you must be bad because you get a green bubble instead of a blue bubble on your you don't have the right phone, that you know, such and such got so many heart emojis or likes on their picture, and you didn't get any. That right there's so many ways that kids are being traumatized. I'll it's trauma, it is trauma, yeah, and it builds up and it builds up. Not all families are built to support that. No, so now you have these kids coming into the school district. Right, you've you're not experiencing the same kind of trauma, right? But you're somebody that has experienced a lot. Yeah, there's a lot of things that you've had to work through, and I look at it as you can it, you know, it's the old adage, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And yeah, it builds resiliency. Right, right. You have that resiliency. You've you've figured that out. There's a lot of people in this community that have that resiliency. How as a superintendent, how do you instill that in the curriculum at the school? How are we supporting these kids that that need that without you need to go to not nothing against mental health specialists, we need them, right? But there's a stigma to that as well.

Speaker 1:46:52

Right, right, yeah.

Speaker 6 1:46:53

So that's gotta be a a huge challenge for you.

Speaker 1:46:57

It is, and it's kind of interesting because I think our community was so appreciative of the mental health supports that we had after the disaster in 2020, and that I think that transformed our community to a certain extent because we were not just serving our students, we were serving our staff, we were serving our families. I mean, we basically had a revolving door um in our school, and and people we all benefited from that. I really it makes me sad to see um there's a lot of you know there's there's just a lot of talk about SEL being terrible. And it's like if you look at the kids and what they have to deal with today, no adult should have to deal with SEL. Social emotional learning. Okay. And it's basically we want kids to build resilience, but they need to understand how their brain works, they need to understand the negative impacts on their psyche. It's child growth and development, and it but you add this layer of this barrage of constant negative influence. And then now in the last two years, it's AI, so it's compounded. So we are feeling horrible about things that we don't even know that aren't necessarily even true. You know, you the majority of people don't even understand the basic principle that they're that all social media is designed to focus you on the things that you look at or that you care about. And so it creates this tunnel vision and there's no regulation, there's less regulation now than there was three years ago. Three years ago you could at least hit report, but now the question is who's who's regulating and why, right? So then it turns into this huge thing where it's like, well, it's one political side, you know, filtering out the other political side. But the reality is it's algorithms, it's clickbait, it's not even real, half of it. And and our adults don't have the capacity to be able to filter that out. Why would we think that our children would? And it's designed, it changes brain structure. And there's a lot of neuroscience to that, but without getting too nerdy, you can be nerdy all you want.

Speaker 6 1:49:18

It's all right. But but I You might have to go buy it a couple times so we'll understand it.

Speaker 1:49:23

Well, what I love is that I think I I'm in a unique uniquely position to make a difference in our in our school because I came up through the school. So I understand the kids and the next generation because I was their teacher. And now I'm the principal, and I understand what the teachers are having to deal with because I was a teacher. I was also a parent, I was also a coach, but I also know the family in a generational sense. So I know the families of the town. So I loved as a principal to walk around the cafeteria and say, Your mom was my student and your dad, and maybe there's a a fifth of the kids in there who whose parents weren't my students. But but that's a pretty cool thing. And so you have this generational commitment to the kids that's different than say me just going to a community and saying, I'm gonna be a principal in the school. You know, I know that the what our town struggles with, and I know what our town does well, and and I love that, but I'm also aware of just the the subtleties of the influences, and I also know that parents don't know. They don't they don't know all the science. So how are they supposed to be good parents? How are they supposed to provide an environment when they this is it's like everything is compounding so quickly?

Speaker 6 1:50:46

It has and part of that is there's there's so much distrust with the science now, because which which science do you believe? Right, exactly because you can now that was one of the frustrating things with me with COVID, yeah, is you could have somebody that from John Hopkins been studying this for 30 years or whatever, nationally recognized.

Speaker 3 1:51:07

Right.

Speaker 6 1:51:07

But if they disagreed with certain people, then they would be platformed. Yeah, you can't listen to them. Wait a second, this seems like a pretty smart individual. Why can't we have a conversation amongst these different sides? But not like you were talking about with AI. You don't know if the video or the picture or whatever audio is actually the people that or actually real people at all.

Rethinking Success And What Schools Teach

Speaker 1:51:32

But it's um Lord of the Flies because a lot of the bots that like respond, they're horrible. Yes, it's awful, and it's designed to create like it's interesting because I used to actually teach about this in current events. But I think it was Stanford did a study, and they were tracing back in the early days of social media, they were tracing back all of these websites that were like creating a lot of confusion and and just strife. And it was like, where's this coming from? And they said there were like 83 sites that came from a place in Eastern Europe, and they were designed essentially by these 20-something year olds that were just making money by clicks. And so they would it had nothing to do with the United States, but it was a way to make money, and so it was infiltrating and it was it was kind of gathering a following because anything that creates strong feeling is going to gather a following, one whether it's negative or positive. And so it was kind of interesting, and I and now the same situation is exacerbated by just technology, right? There's so much more that you can do, and so you've got millions of clicks and millions of responses, and then the Lord of the Flies aspect is people see that behavior and they go, Well, I'm gonna respond in kind. And so you may not even be interacting with a real person, but it's bringing out the worst in people instead of the best. And so I think back to leadership as a principle. I look at this from an IT perspective, a historical perspective, you know, when are the best the worst times in history are when people kind of let go of their human ethical framework and they are allowed to go a certain way because everybody seems to be swimming that direction, and then they go, you know, why did I ever do that, or why didn't I push back, or why wasn't I true to my my values? And the the reality is is we do have shared values, but it's very hard to see those when there's this cacophony of of just hate and vitriol, and and it's it's um, it's it's not even it's not mechanical, it's it's technology, just the ability of technology to to magnify that so many times. It's it's exponential.

Speaker 6 1:53:57

Yeah, and that's so how do you fight back as a school district because you can be trying to do one thing in the school with the kids, but depending on what the parents are doing at home, they can be getting as we're talking about, you can get a totally different view of something depending on which website or depending on social media profiles or whatever, so they're getting a totally different viewpoint of what's going on. Right. You're under the firing squad because you're telling your the kids this, or you want this kind of behavior, you want to model this, and then that comes back to you.

Speaker 5 1:54:32

Right.

Speaker 6 1:54:33

So trying to, you know, I I think everybody wants our kids to get a really good education. You're the leader of that in our community, right? But the forces working against you I think are greater and um more diverse than ever before, and they're getting more so in that direction.

Speaker 1:54:56

Absolutely. And there are days when I wake up and I go, I don't even know if I have it in me to get up and and be a leader today. But then I go, I I gain hope because I think we need to make change where we make like in our in our closest circle first. And I believe in that ripple effect, and I think that's where relationships matter, human connection matters because you can read something on the internet about me. You, Doug, can read about me, but chances are you're gonna go, I know Lily, and that's just baloney. I believe everything I read on the internet about it. You better not. You better not. But but there's truth to that. And so when you think about parents, you know, there are parents, I've had parents that come in and and again, I'm very fortunate because a lot of those parents know who I am because I was their teacher, you know. But there are some that come in and they think, oh my God, what are you teaching or what are you allowing? And I go, come and see, you know, and so you build that relationship, and hopefully with that relationship comes trust. And it doesn't mean that we do everything perfectly because we're human beings, but just maintaining that connection, and I think um skipping forward a little bit. Um, you know, I said I I never wanted to be a superintendent. In fact, I was firmly against it. However, I was against being a principal, I was even more against being a superintendent.

Speaker 6 1:56:25

So I I think some career advice for you. The things that you don't want to do, you just say, I want to do that. Because the ones you don't want to do seems to be the ones you end up doing.

Speaker 1:56:34

I know, because I still want to be a painter and a writer. And yeah.

Speaker 6 1:56:38

You need to start saying that you're never ever going to be a painter or a writer, and it's gonna happen.

Speaker 1:56:42

And it'll happen. Exactly.

Speaker 6 1:56:43

This is what I'm learning about you here, Lily.

Speaker 1:56:45

That's right.

Speaker 6 1:56:45

Just career advice from me here.

Speaker 1:56:47

Exactly.

Speaker 6 1:56:48

There's no guarantees any of it'll work, but you might want to give it a try.

Speaker 1:56:51

I know, I don't know.

Speaker 6 1:56:53

So, but taking that beyond to like the larger community, how how can again money off the table? There's only a certain amount of money out there. We can discuss that in a different in test standards, all that stuff.

Speaker 1:57:06

2025, or no, episode 20, 25.

Speaker 6 1:57:08

Episode 20 or 25. We'll have you back and we'll talk about school funding, school results, test results, all that stuff. But I think this is actually more important than all that is because if how do we change the system? Well, not only just how and it's not just the school system, but until we can find a way to counteract the way that we're going with the way that we're communicating with people that have a different idea than us, right, and unless we start recognizing some of the the generational trauma and childhood trauma that the kids that are showing up to school, not not to mention the us adults that are dealing with that on our own, right? But when you have kids coming into the school district that don't have a don't and they never they shouldn't have the capacity of knowing about that, right? Your teachers, your administrators, right, you're trying to teach them as well as help them through that.

Speaker 1 1:58:05

Right.

Speaker 6 1:58:06

That's how does the how can the community get involved?

Speaker 1 1:58:10

Yes.

Speaker 6 1:58:11

How do we how do we come together? And this is again something we talked about with Cesres. How do we start building these bonds again? Right. Where it's in-person conversation, where it's people coming in, like you said, usually once people come in and they see what's going on with their own eyes, they're good, they might not, they still might not agree, but they have a better understanding of what's happened compared to just what they might have read online on social media or newspaper, whatever. They're seeing it firsthand. Right, it makes a difference.

Speaker 1:58:41

Right.

Speaker 6 1:58:42

So how how can the community support the school better in that way?

Looking Ahead And Closing

Speaker 1:58:47

Well, uh first of all, I think we need to do a better job of telling our story. And to talk a little bit about that, it my idea, like when I envisioned being a principal, I envision myself sitting at my desk thinking about lofty ideals like what we're discussing now, with my door open, and people would enter and quietly exit after having some really good conversation, and I would wave at the students and occasionally walk around the building and think about values and vision. And that's not the way it was at all. For five years, it was just like putting out fires after fire. Just fire after fire. I got a lot of steps on, you know, on my you know, my Apple Watch and felt pretty good about that. But I could not, I mean, you're always busy, and then you're busy on the weekends. There, there's just always something to do, especially for a K-12 school. And so I would think about things and I'd go, we should do this, or we need to do this. But the reality is, is there wasn't enough, you know, we didn't have enough um staffing to be able to sit and quite and reflect and think about things intentionally. So we're we're always trying to do that. But You know, they're always talking about good leaders taught looking at the 30,000-foot view. And so some of the 30,000-foot view is our strategic plan that we were reviewing two years ago. Well, we want to keep working on that, but we haven't had the time because I didn't have an AP. You know, I didn't have an assistant principal. So, or we had this revolving door of assistant principals, and one year there was none. So we had to, we're always just in a state of triage. Five years later, I'm like, ah, triage. We can do it. You just never know what's gonna hit you. But some of the things that are important to your question is we do need families who are involved. We do need to have the conversations, and I wanted to do that as a principal, but I never had the time. So, why am I a superintendent? Well, I finally got coerced by my superintendent to take the program, but actually I I I realized it was time because I wanted to grow. So, as a principal, I wanted to impact my community, but I also wanted to advocate. And so I joined the um, you know, the Alaska Council of School Administrators. I was not that person. I was not the person to say, okay, I'll be the region rep. I ended up being the national rep for secondary school principals in Alaska, not because I had this goal of being a somebody. I just wanted to know what what are the things that are working in our state and in our nation and and globally. And it just having those conversations with with the researchers, with people who are who are far more informed than me, because the reality is a principal can't is not a researcher. A principal is making sure that everything's all the balls are in the air and everybody's got a place to go, and pe you know, and so honestly, that is what sort of gave me the impetus to become a superintendent because I'm not quite in the firing line so much every single day. I do have two hours, a two-hour block where I can sit think about it and say, and support the work that's being done on the ground with some reflection. And I can take the time to make those connections, not just because I like to make connections as a person, but I want to do it on a systemic level. I want to say, let's have a conversation about what it means to be successful. Let's how do we communicate better about the successes? Because the reality is as as much as we need to improve our education system, when you look at what our graduates do, I'm very, very proud of what they do. But we also need to ask our, we should always be thinking about how do we prepare the next generation because the skills that this generation needs might be slightly different. And what I'm starting to think and what I want to have a conversation about is what what does it what do we what does it mean to be successful? And I know that sounds so lofty, but when you think about it, you've everybody has a different idea of that. But but what do you teach kids when you have access to everything? So what's the base level, the fundamental knowledge that every graduate needs when you have Google? You know, and of course there there's answers to that in depending on a scientist or English or you know those things. But the the more important thing that I think we need to look at is how do you teach stewardship? How do you teach integrity? How do you teach work ethic? How do you teach adaptability? Because adaptability is not a skill that we say, oh, we're gonna teach this. But the reality is you think about you and how have you had to adapt, and and who do you know that does not like change and is unwilling to adapt and and how successful are they? You know, they're i so it's you you know, create the creative mindset, the work being able to work and work in discomfort. I mean, that's actually a skill because change is uncomfortable. So it's and and I don't mean that lightly, I I just think about you know, who are the you know, what does it mean to shine in today's society and be successful if you're in the trades or if you're in business or if you're in education, or if in your if you're in service, if you're just any of those things. Like, what do we want this next generation to have? And how do we work with our families? Because here's the other interesting thing, as an educator, you know, I'll have parents that are very upset because you know, I would have to call them in and say, you know, your kid did this, and they're like, Not my child. What are you know, they didn't get this from home. And I used to say, Well, they didn't get from school either, but I didn't know how to say that because I was too shy, and so I just wouldn't say anything. But then I I started saying, Yeah, I don't think they did, and I can assure you they didn't get it from school. So what does that leave? It leaves the iPhone, right? And so it seems so simple, but you know, we're looking at that. We're actually changing our cell phone policy because kids so that kids don't have it anywhere near them for the day, and the science is already showing, and kids are saying that they feel better, you know, because they're connecting instead of you know it's well, even at my advanced age, I I notice it because I I s when I'm not at work, I'm usually by myself.

Speaker 6 2:05:46

Yeah, and yeah, it's really easy instead of well, I want to do this project, I want to do this, and you pick up to read a text or something that's oh, I wonder what 45 minutes later. I wonder what the sports score is because I I took all the social media apps off my phone when I was mayor. I was like, this is not gonna be good. I got I got rid of those right away. And then about a year ago, I said I got some stuff I need to sell on Haynes by Cell Trade, so I put them back on, and then I realize I would get the report at the end of the week. I was like, there's no way I spent that much time on my phone. So it's like I just won't go onto those sites anymore. But as long as they're there, I know I go on them. Yeah, and it's uh it's the dopamine hit is terrible. It yeah, it changes the brain structure, it changes your brain structure and it makes it makes me a very lazy person having a phone.

Speaker 2:06:34

Yeah.

Speaker 6 2:06:35

And um so I can't imagine what it's doing to to younger people.

Speaker 2:06:40

To 10-year-old kid.

Speaker 6 2:06:41

Not that my brain is that much more developed than theirs, but I think it's just a wee bit more. Like 1% maybe. Um but yeah, no, that's a it's it's a very tough topic to how much how much pushback have you guys had on that?

Speaker 2:06:56

None.

Speaker 6 2:06:56

None? Good. Because I know there's some areas where there's been a huge amount of pushback on.

Speaker 2:07:01

Yeah, and and I think I think what I have learned is any there there may be yeah, anything can be controversial in this day and age. Literally anything can be controversial. And you go, Are you are you serious? Are we really having this conversation? But I think the heart of it, if you you know, for something like cell phones, it's just an expected thing now. And parents will say, Oh, yeah, my kids should, I don't know what to do. It's like, well, don't give them a cell phone.

Speaker 6 2:07:33

Don't give them the one the one thing I like now is they've got just like the the phones that all you can do is call on them.

Speaker 2:07:39

Right. Oh, that's good too. I think somebody was selling school flip phones.

Speaker 6 2:07:42

So it I don't know if it's a flip phone or what, but that all you can do is make a phone call on it.

Speaker 2:07:47

That's interesting.

Speaker 6 2:07:47

And they're also having I read an article a week or so ago about um it's digital, but it's like your old rotary phone.

Speaker 2:07:56

Oh, bring, yeah.

Speaker 6 2:07:57

And so so they're giving those to the kids so they can still call their friends to arrange play dates and everything. Hey, we're gonna get together here. So just like we did, you'd have to call somebody up, or you'd have to walk to their house to find out if they're home and be like, crap, I walked a mile and have nobody here, or you ride your bike, or whatever.

Speaker 2:08:12

At least you get your exercise.

Speaker 6 2:08:13

But at least you got your exercise. And so they they can't go online, they're not doing the texting, they're not doing any of the social media, but it's it works off Wi-Fi, so you just set up your house, you hook it up, and they can still so they have a way of still being connected to their friends, they can talk as long as they want. But some of the other negative aspects of modern technology are off of that. Well, here's something but the part, the hard part for the parents is there's so much um bullying with kids on if you don't have the phone. Like if you're the kid that doesn't have the phone and all your friends do, or if you don't have the right phone, if everybody's got this model and you don't have that model.

Speaker 3 2:08:53

Right.

Speaker 6 2:08:53

And I have parents, friends of mine that have kids that are telling me some of these stories, and when I when I hear the age of their kids that this is happening, I'm like, oh my god, we're screwed.

Speaker 2:09:03

Right.

Speaker 6 2:09:04

We're totally hosed if this keeps happening.

Speaker 2:09:06

Well, I used to tell my girls, you know, you can just say your your mom made you, you know, your mom wouldn't let you do it. You can blame me. It's a safe thing. But I think that the younger generation will likely not allow their kids to have phones, you know, probably because they're gonna be far more literate. But this is funny, I just have this memory. I've always been uh an early adopter with tech because I found out when I was living in Huna that you could attach a string to two cans and it would be like a telephone. And of course we didn't have telephones. I thought that was the coolest thing. So I got out a 20 penny nail and I hammered it into the side of our house, you know, in the upstairs, and I brought it over to my friend's house, and we would like yell out the window and point to the can and then we'd have a conversation. It's pretty fun. But uh, but I yeah, and I do think, you know, I think adults have to take a good take stock of who they are, and I think we have to speak truth to each other with kindness and humility. But if we see that behavior, I think we have to say this is not acceptable. And and and we have to be accountable for our actions.

Speaker 6 2:10:20

And adults aren't right now, you know, like even if you think about people that you're only seeming to be they only seem to be accountable to the people that hold they they want the people to have a a different viewpoint than them to be held accountable, but yes, their viewpoint and people that agree with them get to say whatever they want, and that goes across it goes across whatever party you're in, whatever group. I can you can just see it that they have a different opinion, and so and then the harsh rhetoric comes out. But if somebody agrees with them, they can say whatever they want. Well, they didn't really that wasn't that bad a deal, and it drives me crazy. Yeah, if you can't if you can't hold the people that you agree with accountable, you need just need to shut up about everybody.

Speaker 2:11:04

Yeah, it's true. And so, you know, at a local level, you know, as a school leader, as a superintendent, I'm approaching it very differently with five years of five really hard years of being a principal. Um, and and I I just have a different outlook, and it's to be able to speak the truth, to be an advocate for what's right, to educate myself, and not just wait for other people to get the information for me. I think that's that's my goal for myself, and to create systems that protect our kids and that invite civil discourse. And you know, I remember as a principal, I always said our goal is to create belonging where our school can shine and be an example of the behaviors and the values and the things that we want to see in our society. And I really feel strongly this year it's going beyond that sense of belonging and getting into ownership. And we can save that for episode 25, but really there's a difference, you know. We want people to feel ownership, and that's an active feeling. Belonging is a pass is more of a passive feeling when you walk in and you feel like this is a place for me, but ownership looks different, and so that's my goal to myself as a leader is where you know, create systems, speak the truth, show love, show, show the things that matter, show the love that I experienced in my life during hard times when I wasn't at my best. And you know, I always think about I thought about this as a as a um teacher because I had a I knew this guy who was always very humble and soft-spoken, and he treated people with such respect, even the worst assholes he would treat with respect. And they in turn would treat him with respect. And so I always think about don't treat people as they are, treat them how you know they can be. You know, treat them as the person you want them to be, and hopefully they'll rise. Not everybody will rise, but it keeps you from soiling yourself as a human being, and and it it elevates people around you. But and and so I I just think that you know, talking about force multipliers, you know, I hope to be a force multiplier for good, you know, in my community. And we don't know the ripple effect, you know, the technology and connection is the world is so small now that you have no idea how you're gonna impact people but beyond your sphere. I mean, I know you will. I know you have, and and I think that about myself. Like I don't know where my story ends, so I better keep moving forward and and wanting to be a force multiplier for all the things that are right, because you just never know when you're gonna your life is gonna intersect with somebody else who's then gonna turn around and do that. Um and so I think as a superintendent, those are the things I think about is just kind of carrying that forward and and not just being, you know, there's every reason to feel despondent and hope hopeless every day. But then I get up and I go to work and I just go into a classroom and I see the teachers teaching and I see the parents sitting with their kids at the cafeteria, and I know there's good in this world. We just have to focus on that and get off our screens and get off the noise and shut it down and and just say no.

Speaker 6 2:14:39

So as you're as you're building that, as you're providing that leadership, and you have the kind of turnover you're having the last few years at the staff, that makes it even harder because it's one thing to build a culture, right? You know, you're building a culture from the ground up, but how many employees are at the school right now?

Speaker 2 2:14:59

50.

Speaker 6 2:15:00

50. And you had nine changes last year?

Speaker 2:15:03

Yeah.

Speaker 6 2:15:04

So you had 20% turnover this last year.

Speaker 2:15:06

Yeah, and the same before that.

Speaker 6 2:15:08

In the same before that. So we when you're having 20% turnover a year in staff, and you're trying to build that culture, trying to get it to where you want it to be, and you're having 20% turnover and you've got those people for a year, because it's not it's if if somebody gets here and they don't fit the culture, right? You can't just like get out of here and you're gonna bring somebody else in and try it out. Like if somebody comes in here and they're not working out, it's like, all right, we're right. And right a lot of times it's harder too because trying to find somebody that else that'll fit, there's not a lot of people willing to work in our industry in Haynes, and so to try and find that to get that culture is hard as well. But you've got to wait a full school year in order to try that cycle again.

Speaker 2:15:53

Exactly. And what you tolerate becomes your culture.

Speaker 6 2:15:56

Exactly.

Speaker 2:15:57

And so you have to be able to have, you know, that turnover piece, it's very hard on students. It's you know, I've seen its impact on our school. And quite frankly, it's hard on it's hard on our staff that has been here for a long time because they're constantly trying to support the new people. It's it's a lot of support, and you you you just start getting your momentum and then you lose it. And for me as a principal, I think that was the thing that single-handedly wore me out the most was, and we had great people, but just having that constant turnover, there's a tremendous emotional cost. And like a like an um intellectual, not intellectual, that's not the word, but you expend so much energy of thought and planning and emotional desire to make sure that they feel included and attached and all of that. And then it, you know, if if it doesn't work or if it goes away, then you just feel like you've lost something, you know, because you never got to reap the benefit of the investment. And so then it starts the cycle starts again. So um, you know, and again, like I said, I think this is for episode 25. But we need to start teaching, we need to treat our schools as an investment. We need to try you know, start treating teaching as a profession because that's where we've gotten sideways. If we don't teach it or if we don't treat it or see teachers as a profession or as something to be highly valued, then we're not gonna get high value out of it because you're depending on public service and people doing it out of the goodness of their heart. And some people want to do it out of the goodness of their heart, but they can't afford to live. And that's been part of the issue, you know, for us. And I know it's not all about money, but people have to be able to, you know, it's a it takes a lot out of you emotionally, so so people need to have to have benefits to the job and not just loss, and it can't just be exactly so.

Speaker 6 2:18:01

We're gonna we're gonna dive into this now instead of saving this part for episode 25. Okay. Are you can we stay?

Speaker 2:18:07

Maybe yeah, like just maybe 15 more minutes. Is that 15 more minutes? Yeah. All right, we'll go 50.

Speaker 6 2:18:11

But this might take us longer than 15 minutes. Okay. But touching on that, yeah. I think there's for me looking from outside the school system, you know, I went through the Haynes school system and I was thinking from when I talked to you last week when we were planning this, right? Um, I think I had 25, 26 from K through 12, yeah, 25, 26 teachers I took at least one class through through my high school career.

Speaker 3 2:18:37

Yeah.

Speaker 6 2:18:38

I could I could name all of them.

Speaker 3 2:18:40

Right.

Speaker 6 2:18:40

I'm not going to.

Speaker 3 2:18:41

Yeah.

Speaker 6 2:18:41

Out of that, I distinctly remember six of them that were life-changing.

Speaker 2 2:18:48

Yes.

Speaker 6 2:18:48

Phenomenal.

Speaker 2 2:18:49

Right.

Speaker 6 2:18:49

Over the top.

Speaker 2 2:18:50

Yeah.

Speaker 6 2:18:51

Some of them mid-level, and there's probably about a third of them that never should have been in the teaching profession.

Speaker 2 2:18:58

Yeah.

Speaker 6 2:18:58

Looking back on it, there's some of them that's like, this was the wrong profession for you. You never should have been involved with this. And so at looking at it from the outside, and I remember um when Roy's first year, you guys were working on a mission statement, and Ford and Roy asked me to be a part of that group. And when we were doing a SWOT analysis, strengths, everybody listed staff. Came to weaknesses, I said you need to put staff up there, and everybody looked at me like I was crazy. They said, Well, that's a strength. I said, but it's also weakness because you have a great staff, but not all of your staff is great.

Speaker 1 2:19:30

Right.

Speaker 6 2:19:30

There's a difference unless you acknowledge that some of them are a weakness as well. You're never going to improve that weakness. How do we sub how do we support them? How do we help them rise to the level of the rest?

Speaker 2:19:42

Right. And that's leadership that you coach people up or you coach them out.

Speaker 6 2:19:46

Exactly. But and so I think one of the issues with the school system and the education aspect of it is there's enough stories out there. And I know Haynes has been very proactive about not offering tenure.

Speaker 3 2:19:58

Yeah.

Speaker 6 2:19:58

And t unless you're This is somebody we really want.

Speaker 3 2:20:01

Right.

Speaker 6 2:20:02

But from my own experience, I know there's people that had tenure that were great at the beginning because I talked to people that had them when they first got there, and like, man, those are the best teachers. While I was there, it's like, yeah, not so much. Right. And so being able to change that dynamic.

Speaker 3 2:20:17

Right.

Speaker 6 2:20:17

I read a book by um William Bennett, who's the education um secretary of education, I think, under uh the first Bush administration. Right. And that's so this was 90s that he was writing this. And at that time he was saying teachers should be over a hundred thousand dollars a year.

unknown 2:20:32

Yep.

Speaker 6 2:20:33

And and I agree, but you're not gonna get you're not gonna get that when people see the teachers that shouldn't be there that can't be fired.

Speaker 2:20:42

But they can be.

Speaker 6 2:20:44

They can but let's be honest, it's really, really hard to get rid of teachers.

Speaker 2:20:48

So this is what I would say about that, and this is why I like what I do. You have to have good leaders that are willing to make hard decisions. And I think that the culture of leadership has changed over the years. Um and I'm just saying this because I had a really, really strong leadership program, and it is the philosophy of leadership is different. Servant leadership. I mean, was servant leadership an issue? Did you hear about that? No, I mean it was very bureaucratic, institutionalized. You're going through this is a professional thing, we do it this way, this is what we do, very traditional. But that is not even the environment. So the teaching environment is the learning environment. Just like the learning environment has changed, the teaching environment, the leadership environment has changed. The culture of that, and I'm not saying everybody's willing to make hard decisions, but I know that in my role being um part of the Alaska Association of School Principals, we have these conversations where we go, we have to be able to have those hard dishes hard decisions. And I mean, you have to be able to function, there's that piece, but you don't see you know, we're we're actually and as a superintendent too, you know, this the state of Alaska has partnered with several states on something called the leadership paradigm. And it's it's becoming well-doing. So it's this continual cycle of reflection about who are you as a leader and what is the culture, what are the beliefs, what are the values, because we're all asking that same question. It's it's not an Alaska thing, it's not a Haynes thing, it's a national thing and it's a global thing because there's countries, everybody's asking the same thing. You know, how do we do better? Um, because ultimately we're all humans trying, you know, and we have our different cultures and and things, but the reality is is we want leaders. We're building leaders that can make those decisions. And I do think there's the legislative piece, so tenure isn't acquired till your fourth year. But I know I had to learn as a leader to make hard to have courageous conversations and make hard decisions, and of course, then you've got the byproduct of everybody sharing their feelings about those decisions on on the community chatters site, right? And it's just like, okay, I'm gonna put the blinders on. But I know that I have colleagues that are very brave and we encourage each other in making hard decisions, and it doesn't make it any easier, but it makes you feel better knowing that we're not gonna pass somebody on to another school that is ineffective. We know, you know, and that doesn't mean like somebody can be effective, like you can have a good teacher that's not the right fit, right? You've got the it takes a different person to be a teacher in one community or in Anchorage than Haynes and or the village even.

Speaker 6 2:23:52

Even amongst their student population, you're gonna have teachers that would have connected with me, right? Might not have connected with other kids in the same class. And so the the six that I picked that would like stellar, right? There's other people that could have picked a different six out of that same one. And so it's it, I I recognize that all of us respond to different, and I saw this when I was coaching that the the all of us respond to different inputs. Yes, and so the way there's some people you can coach really hard, you gotta do this, you gotta do this. There's others needs to be more nurturing, more caring coming up from above. And so that the the ones that I'd picked that were my best six, yeah, were the ones that could do both, right? That they could be that hard disciplinarian, but they were also doing that hard disciplinarian came with I want the best for you. Right, I love you, I care for you, I want the best for you. And so it's this you knew that they even at a young age, you didn't want to let them down, right? Because they were going over and above because they cared about you and they wanted the best for you.

Speaker 2:24:56

Exactly. And I think that philosophy And that's really, really hard to find. It is, it is because you are not like to be a teacher today is not the same as being a teacher 25 years ago. No, because there was like a demographic I mean, there was a sh and thank you for thinking I was in school 25 years ago. No, but I'm just thinking about, yeah, yeah. Um but but the reality is this kids' lives were different, they were far simpler, there was a lot more um common ground, but people's like people just have such different feelings and different experiences and different going back to the traumas and and they don't have the foundation that we had. Like you think about you, you know, and the work that you did as a kid or as a teenager, you know, and and then you'd have you you didn't come to school because you necessarily needed a kind person who you could, you know. I I don't know, I don't know even how to describe it, but the nurturing, you you got your nurturing from your family, and it was great to have good teachers and you appreciated those. But now more than ever, the school is providing a lot of that.

Speaker 6 2:26:08

Providing a lot of that, it's a lot of the social services as well.

Speaker 2:26:12

It really is, and so it and I say that with such caution because it's a lot to ask. It's a lot to ask from for staff, you know, because you know, as a leader, the emotional toll that it takes when you're giving, when when you're contributing that. So it's back to the education piece of it. Like we're talking about restorative practice and we provide that training, and it seems so ridiculous, but it's like we're teaching our staff and not just teachers, but the support staff who often have to engage with some of our most most challenged students, you know, giving them the skills and the awareness and the the competency that allows them to be able to do their job well, but also not lose their soul in the process.

Speaker 6 2:27:01

And and so the the catch-22 on this whole thing that I see is in a way it comes back to the money part.

Speaker 1 2:27:10

Right.

Speaker 6 2:27:11

Because in order to in and and to solve that, I have no idea how we're gonna solve it because the borough's already maxed out the amount that they're gonna give. State doesn't have more money, the feds.

Speaker 2:27:21

Well, and there's a maximum, right?

Speaker 6 2:27:22

There's a maximum the borough can give, there's the limits that you can give. States doesn't have money to give, federal government, you have no idea what's coming from there, but I don't anticipate a lot of money because $38 trillion in debt. Um but to get to $100,000, let's say starting teacher was $100,000. The a lot of the people that are going through teaching now may or may not have the skill set to be worth a hundred thousand dollars starting salary.

Speaker 1 2:27:58

Right.

Speaker 6 2:27:59

But how do you start that to get people that are gonna say, okay, instead of doing this, I want to go teach because now because then you're gonna be attracting more people that might have that skill set that would be able to solve both of those. And so there's that delta between and that trying to figure out how do we raise a salary so we're attracting those people, but realizing some people that are in the system now, whether as teachers or going through school, aren't going to be proficient enough in what we need them to do to justify that wage. And if it was a bit defending it, if it was a business, it wouldn't be an issue, but you're a public entity and everybody knows your budget, they know how much of their property tax is going to your budget, so it's it's very out there. Everybody knows what a teacher's getting made. It's it's you you know that, and so when when you have people that are like, Yeah, this one isn't read, you hear about it. Right. People don't know how much I pay my employees, except the people that are getting it, and so they're like, Yeah, that person they broke my eggs or whatever, and they're pissed off. And I was like, There's no way you should be paying them X number of it's it's a it's a totally different mindset, right? Because everybody knows how much they're getting paid. And to get that, right? To get the people that want to do that, you're gonna have to pay them more. There isn't money in the system to do more, and so that's why I've the conversation I want to have with you, and we'll do this in episode 20 or 25, whichever one we get to, is start from scratch. Yeah, each state you get this amount of money from the feds. The one of the things I like with Trump is get rid of the Department of Education. I think it's a bunch of bureaucrats, just whatever that money is, funnel it to the states and go back to the go directly to the districts. So you you lose the overhead part that's getting spent somewhere else. So there's more direct funds coming in, and the state of Alaska has education conference statewide. Get all the best minds together, parents, teachers, past administrators, whatever. How do we build the best education system for the state of Alaska?

Speaker 2:30:08

So we've got there's a midline. I think there's a midline. Like we don't have to throw the baby out.

Speaker 6 2:30:13

Like I said, we can we can you can use some of the stuff that's going now, but my my thought is go back because what works in Juno might not work in Haynes, might not work in Kaktuvik, or you know, we Alaska is very different in the different school districts. Haynes and Skagway were 13 miles apart, but our school districts are very different on what because of the size on what we're able to offer to the students. So, how do we come up with a curriculum or a way of educating the kids that fits a diverse because what works in Haynes might not work in Florida, or what works in Alaska might not work in Florida, Mississippi, whatever state. So just but start from scratch, bring in the things that are working in Alaska now. Let's use that, let's fill in around that, and then figure out how much it's gonna cost us. Instead of arguing about the money now, this is what we want our education for our kids to be like for the next 25 years. This is what this is the standards we want.

Speaker 2:31:13

So this can be the next conversation particular because because I've thought about this because I always go, okay, I need I can't do this as a principal, so now I'll become the superintendent. And then I'm like, but I still can't impact the change, so maybe we need to run for office, Doug. And then I go, but that's not gonna fix it. Maybe we've got to go on a national level, and then I go, Well, we got to change the world.

Speaker 6 2:31:37

So are we are we are are you saying you're we're gonna change the world?

Speaker 2:31:41

Okay, I am gonna say we'll change the world one one podcast at a time.

Speaker 6 2:31:45

I don't have enough energy to change the world.

Speaker 2:31:47

Me either. Me neither. I just want to leave a small improv, you know, just a little bit of improvement. No, I want to build a system that will outlast me.

Speaker 6 2:31:56

Yeah, I think that's a I think that's a worthwhile goal. Yes. And that's that's kind of that's that's gonna be our next for everybody that's watching. If you want to watch the next episode with Lily, she's gonna she'll probably be our first repeat guest. Oh you could be our first I would feel so that we'll we'll plan we'll plan on this for number 20.

Speaker 2:32:12

So we talked about the wine and the off-grid living and all sorts of things.

Speaker 6 2:32:18

We we tell the next podcast will be business. But the key the key part of this that uh the reason I wanted to do this is a lot of our conversations, it's all about the issues.

Speaker 1 2:32:30

Right.

Speaker 6 2:32:31

And your view on an issue is why somebody likes or dislikes you.

Speaker 1 2:32:36

Right.

Speaker 6 2:32:36

It's about that. And the reason I wanted to hear about you living off-grid, your cancer, your all these are the things that have shaped your beliefs right now. Right. How do we develop resilient kids? How are you giving back? You've had all these experiences, you've had a lot of amazing things happen in your life, you've had a lot of struggles. Yeah, you're human, right? You're like you're like everybody else. We have really good days, we have really crappy days, and it's how we move forward from that, how do we find the good in those struggles, right? A learning experience going forward. And so it's to get the full idea of a person or more of a full understanding of what a person's gone through, right? I think can help our public discourse. And so that's why I start with that. And since we ran out of time, we'll we'll skip that next time, yes, unless there's something huge that's happened before we get to you again.

Speaker 2:33:29

Well, let's hope there's not.

Speaker 6 2:33:30

Let's hope there's not. It's gonna be really good stuff.

Speaker 2:33:32

Yeah, it'll be great.

Speaker 6 2:33:33

So we'll talk about all the great stuff and then we'll start talking about how we're gonna reimagine the education system.

Speaker 2:33:37

That sounds great. I've got some ideas.

Speaker 6 2:33:39

All right, I know you do. That's why that's why you're here.

Speaker 2:33:42

All right.

Speaker 6 2:33:43

Thank you, Lily. I appreciate you joining us.

Speaker 2:33:46

Yes. All right, this is great.

Speaker 6 2:33:47

Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for watching this episode of Doug Cat's Questions. Just a reminder if you've enjoyed the conversation today, please like, subscribe, and we're available on YouTube if you want to watch us, if you just want to listen. Uh, it's on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and you have new uh episodes being launched every Thursday. So thanks again for watching or listening and following us. We appreciate your support.