EDITORIAL: Top Principal Delights in Students’ Success

By The Bellingham Herald, Bellingham, Wash.

May 13–Saturday, May 13, 2006

Marion Evenson deserves congratulations for being named the state’s top elementary school principal.

She is getting the job done right while earning the respect of her teachers and the love of her students at Nooksack Elementary.

Educators across the state and nation are struggling with much more demanding requirements that they teach all children well these days. Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) tests and “No Child Left Behind” rules have turned up the heat on public school educators like no time before. Many schools are finding the tough new standards hard to meet.

Evenson and her staff are proof it can be done.

Nooksack has a high number of low-income and rural students, more than 40 percent are from “disadvantaged” backgrounds by federal standards. But Evenson and her staff refuse to let that be an excuse for themselves or their students.

Last September the school was named a “No Child Left Behind Blue Ribbon School” for 2005 – one of only seven in the state to receive the award from the U.S. Department of Education. About 94 percent of Nooksack fourth-graders passed the reading portion of the WASL test in 2003-2004 and 88 percent passed the writing and math tests. The number of students passing is up from 73 percent in reading and about 61 percent in writing and math in the 2000-2001 school year.

That award led to her being named “Distinguished Principal” by the Association of Washington School Principals this month.

Evenson, 62, takes a no-nonsense approach to all of this testing, and to her job.

Her philosophy: “We believe it is our responsibility to help them learn. Kids have to believe they can learn and teachers need to believe they can teach.”

And she delights not in the awards for herself or her school, but in the success of her students.

With that kind of attitude it’s no accident she is the state’s top elementary school principal this year.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Bellingham Herald, Bellingham, Wash.

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