Principal taking North to 'next level'

By Tina Griego Rocky Mountain NewsSeptember 25, 2008Every two weeks since he took the job as North High School principal, Ed Salem calls a meeting with each class of students. The third meeting of the year was Tuesday and juniors and seniors filed into the auditorium just after 9 a.m. They chattered and shouted and rustled around until Salem took the stage. He's a medium-built guy, wearing a blue dress shirt and tie. At 36, he could pass for 25, the kind of looks that ensure Salem will be described as boyish until he's well into his 50s.
What's the first thing I show you guys? he asked.
Attendance, they called back.
How do you think you're doing?
Good, the chorus sounded.
A power point with a bar graph went up on screen. True juniors and seniors - those on track to graduate on time - averaged an attendance rate near 90 percent the first five weeks of school. Count the entire class - including those lacking credits - and the average fell slightly for seniors and to the mid-80s for juniors.
"The students who don't have enough credits aren't showing up, and they're bringing the average attendance down," Salem said. "If you don't come to school, you're never going to finish. You're never going to graduate. . . . We need to get you on track."
The good news, Salem told them, is juniors and seniors are still meeting district-set attendance goals. The same cannot be said for freshmen and sophomores. Set the example, he said. "You guys are the school leaders."
Cheers. Hoots. Hollers.
OK, he said, pulling up another chart, "now, about tardies . . . "
When I first heard North had another new principal, my reaction was along the lines of: What is this? Four principals in six years? How is the school ever going to find its footing if the administration keeps churning?
I tell Salem this and he nods. He knew that would be the public reaction, but more worrisome to him, he says, was that skepticism was almost certainly going to be the student reaction, too. As long as it existed, he'd never get their buy-in.
North is a tough school. I don't mean just its academic challenges, which have been well-documented and slow to change. It is one of the district's lowest-performing schools by a variety of measures and is now on probation, subject to greater district oversight.
I mean North is a school with a history of leadership and staff turmoil in a gentrifying neighborhood with competing visions for what it should become. Taking the helm of North has been like walking into a pressure cooker. In the past five years, an ambitious reform plan has been launched and most of the teachers replaced. Last school year, Academia Sandoval Principal Joann Trujillo-Hays came in to build the new teaching staff and beef up training and curriculum. After laying that foundation, she said she would return to Sandoval if a good principal could be found for North.
In July, Superintendent Michael Bennet called Salem, who was then an assistant principal at Lincoln High.
"What were the discussions around you becoming principal?" I ask Salem.
"There weren't really any discussions," he says. "I didn't apply. It was a recommendation that came from other principals."
It was, he says, a call out of the blue.
What did Bennet say?
" 'Are you interested in being a principal at North?' "
What did you say?
"To this day, I still can't remember. All I remember is sweating a lot. I was in a groove at Lincoln. We had momentum. I think I just kept thinking that it was a moment that arrived a lot sooner than I thought. I was in shock for about a week."
Salem is the son of immigrants from Argentina who settled in metro New York. It's the classic immigrant story, he says. Dad was always working and held several jobs, janitor, baker, before finding success as a contractor. Mom worked part-time jobs and stayed home with Salem and his two brothers. Spanish was his first language.
He graduated from State University of New York in Albany with a degree in Spanish literature and took a circuitous route to teaching. His first students were 17- to 21-year-old convicts in a maximum security prison. Bad guys, he says, but they treated him with respect.
He taught science and worked as a student adviser in New York schools for six years. In 2001, he and his wife, Christine, who is also a teacher, moved to the Boulder area, where his parents now live. He ran a pizza parlor for a while and then in 2003 started teaching at Kunsmiller Middle School. Three years later, he took an assistant principal job at Lincoln.
Lincoln, under the leadership of Antonio Esquibel and his three assistant principals, is making strong progress. Its population is also similar to North's. The students are low-income and most of them are Hispanic.
What advice did you give Ed? I ask Esquibel.
"I said the first thing you need to do is everything you can to get the kids to class on a daily basis." Sounds obvious, but North has had among the worst attendance rates in the district - 75 percent last year.
"You need to focus on the students," Esquibel says he told Salem. "Make them excited to be Vikings. You need to make sure the kids see you and that they're saying, 'Mr. Salem is everywhere.' "
Which is exactly what has happened.
Salem has proved so far to be a dynamic principal, winning rave reviews from students, teachers, staff and parents. It's become known in the school that if you want to talk to Mr. Salem, you better walk with him because if he's not in the hall, he's in a class or out in front of the school or walking the perimeter of the building.
The kids tell him he "rocks." His staff says he's taking North "to the next level." I'm always looking for a reason to be optimistic about North, and these days there's palpable enthusiasm and energy in the building.
"What goes on in the class should definitely be the most important thing, but you need to make sure you have structure, discipline; you need to be consistent," he says.
He is bringing much of what he learned at Lincoln to North, including the emphasis on student attendance and discipline, as well as frequent - as in 20 per week - classroom observations. The students are in uniform this year, white and black polo shirts for the upperclassmen; purple, gold or gray for the freshmen and sophomores.
Salem made a deal with juniors and seniors: They can leave school for lunch as long as they're back on time. More than 20 tardies and they lose the privilege on Fridays. So far, the students have kept their end of the bargain. In October, he'll move the goal to 15 tardies.
Last Thursday, Salem met with the student organizers of Jovenes Unidos. They told him they wanted credit recovery classes, college prep classes, rigorous classwork. Absolutely, he said, and then he asked them what they think rigor is.
"A lot of people, some of them teachers, think difficult and rigor are the same thing," he said. "They're not. If I say, 'there are three major causes of the Civil War' and I ask you to learn them, that might be difficult. If I say, 'how did the Civil War influence the future of the U.S.?' That's rigor. It's using facts to further ideas, using higher level thinking, critical thinking, and what rigor is shouldn't be a secret. You need to know what it looks like to make sure you're getting it in class."
At the end of Tuesday's meeting with juniors and seniors, he pointed out a student with a 4.4 grade-point average who was named athlete of the week by a local news station.
"Stand up, Joseph."
Joseph Manilafasha gave a shy wave.
"No matter where you are, represent yourself the best way you can," Salem told the students. "You are Vikings. Remember that."
Everyone cheered and then went back to work.
griegot@RockyMountainNews.com