There are more than 10 different schools serving students from Covington and Black Diamond in the Kent School District.

This fall, there will be new principals at four of them: Cedar Heights and Mattson middle schools as well as Kentlake High and Covington Elementary.

Once a Husky, always a Husky

Miles Erdly will lead Covington Elementary, which has seen a fair amount of turnover in the past five years among staff and principals, after spending 25 years in the Puyallup School District.

He graduated from Lakes High School in Tacoma, but describes himself as an Army brat. He worked his way through college waiting tables at restaurants in downtown Seattle. Though neither of his parents went to college, Erdly said, for himself and his siblings it was just expected they would go to school.

“It was a mindset they had,” he said of his parents, “you will be going to college.”

Erdly completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Washington. He is working on his superintendent certification and is working toward a doctorate.

He originally planned to study medicine. After working with disabled kindergartners and special populations through the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department while in college, Erdly realized, “this was the first job I really enjoyed and I didn’t feel like I was working.”

“It just clicked for me. I wanted to teach,” he said.

Erdly is close friends with Greg Kroll, principal at Mortin Sortun Elementary in Kent, someone he had worked with at the same elementary school in Puyallup, but had worked together in summer programs, as well.

“He was looking to start his administration (credential) program,” Erdly said. “I wasn’t ready yet. And I ended up teaching both my daughters in elementary school. I said I needed a couple more years.”

The two educators stayed in touch and when Kroll took the position in the Kent School District, Erdly began considering his options, because “Greg and I had talked about working together some time.”

“I also liked what Greg was sharing about the vision of the district,” he said. “And I had the privilege as an administrator to open a building. That’s basically the same model for the new Covington Elementary when we get there.”

The district has been planning for some time now to move the school, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, to a new building on property in another part of Covington just blocks from Kentwood High and Mattson.

“With this school there’s great opportunity,” Erdly said. “What I’m trying to do coming into the building is to bring the staff together with a focus. My goal is to build a solid foundation, to focus the environment on respect.”

He has been meeting with teachers, parents and community members, and the overwhelming message Erdly has received is they all “want to rally together and be successful.”

There are plans to get the school its own domain name — maybe www.covingtonhuskies.com to honor the school mascot — that is simplified as well as to overhaul its website, to celebrate the school’s 50th anniversary in a big way, but most importantly to help the students at the school succeed beyond what they had ever expected.

“We want to train our parents to ask their students not, ‘What did you do at school today?’ … but instead, ‘What were you successful at today?’,” Erdly said. “Every child is going to be able to look at themselves as being successful. There’s going to be high expectations. It’s how you reinforce that and keep that bar up high… and getting the kids united and believing we can be respectful.”

Erdly has two daughters, his oldest will be studying music education at Western Washington University this fall, while his youngest is in high school.

Father knows best

Heidi Maurer grew up in Renton, graduated from Lindbergh High School, and these days still lives just minutes from her parents.

In college she studied English but as an undergraduate she wasn’t sure what she was going to do with her education.

Maurer’s father, though, kept telling her one day she would end up teaching.

“I pursued English because I loved the content,” she said. “If you put the things I love together, I love my content (English) and I love working with kids… so, I got my master’s in education at the University of Washington.”

Maurer describes herself as “a Husky through and through” having done her undergraduate, post-graduate and administrative credentials work there.

She worked in the Bellevue School District teaching English and psychology at Interlake and Newport high schools.

While at Interlake she began thinking about the importance of leadership when she was tasked by her principal to start a Leadership Program to help change the culture of the school. That led her to the idea of being a leader, herself, as an educator.

She decided to come to the Kent School District in part to work closer to home and be involved in schools in her community.

Maurer spent the past seven years as an assistant principal at Kentwood High.

For some time she had considered leading a school as a principal, but, Maurer had to look at it from both a professional and personal perspective being a mom of three boys, Tobie, 6, Tyler, 3 and 1-year-old Tucker.

Last school year Maurer’s husband was a security officer at Cedar Heights Middle School and she “got to hear a lot about the school, its strengths and its challenges.”

When the position opened up, that knowledge helped make applying that much easier, and she has discovered Cedar Heights has a great deal of potential.

“The cohesiveness of the staff is a huge strength for this school,” she said. “I was looking forward to the opportunity … to use that cohesiveness to continue to grow.

The other piece that I found interesting is that the student make up, although we’re a majority white school, we are becoming more diverse and our poverty rate is increasing. With that changing demographic there will be challenges… but I am going to embrace that challenge.”

Another challenge Maurer is embracing is the work the staff will need to take on to help students achieve at a higher level because “if you look at our data, we’re not performing where we need to be at.”

She plans to evaluate why the students aren’t as successful as they could and should be as well as what Maurer and her staff can do to change that.

“That’s not easy for anyone to do… looking at weaknesses is hard,” she said. “But it’s important to move toward making sure we’re meeting all the needs of all of our students.”

Another big advantage for Maurer will be working with another former Kentwood assistant principal, Joe Potts, who has taken over Kentlake High.

“Joe and I have a very strong working relationship,” Maurer said. “Having teamed with him the past four or five years I really know him well. We’re going to work on creating some alignment… the more we can provide those sorts of opportunities the better for our kids.”

From the Midwest to Covington via South Central Los Angeles

While a student at Loras College, Joe Potts fell in love with reading, writing and teaching.

“It’s my passion in life to work with kids to help them achieve their goals,” he said. “That’s what’s driven me through the years.”

After finishing his bachelor’s degree, Potts went on to earn a master’s degree and doctorate in a program at the University of Iowa, where he wrote a dissertation on standards and assessments, new standards and performance tasks.

In other words, he became an expert on student testing, working at the national, state and local levels.

He then took a job at California State University at Long Beach where he worked with teachers at inner city schools in South Central Los Angeles as well as in Long Beach.

But, Potts really prefers working in a school, having a direct impact on student learning.

“The happiest I’ve been in my 20 plus year career is working in a school with kids and teachers… I dig this stuff,” he said.

After spending several years in Southern California, Potts decided it was time for a change, and his wife suggested checking out the Northwest as she is a University of Washington graduate.

“I was exploring opportunities to get back into the public school setting,” he said. “I knew (former superintendent) Barb Grohe from Iowa. I knew that she was a very good superintendent and I knew that wherever she was would be a good school district. Kent School District had several openings and we thought this would be a wonderful area to raise a family.”

Potts has two boys, ages 7 and 11, who are both students at Meridian Elementary. His wife, who has taught in the past, now works with the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction in school improvement.

He bounced back and forth between Kentwood and the school district administrative office before settling in a few years ago as an assistant principal there.

What drew him to Kentlake was the staff and the school’s potential.

“I understood that the school had enormous capacity in terms of achievement

that interested me, it had a talented staff and it had room for improvement,” Potts said. “I saw in the school and in the opening an opportunity to contribute and maybe take the school to another level in terms of its ability to connect and integrate with the community and to provide the students a world class education.”

Not to say that the new job doesn’t have its share of challenges.

Potts has come into a school with “a culture I don’t know a whole lot about” that he will need to learn quickly as well as get an understanding for how things were done in the past and what the level of expectations were for students was previously.

“There’s a lot of questions for what’s been done in the past,” he said. “That’s something you have to just dive into and experience to understand.”

Having worked at Kentwood, he had heard people describe that school “as a finely tuned and well oiled machine.”

It’s his task now to find out how finely tuned and well oiled Kentlake is now.

It is not his job, though, to make Kentlake in Kentwood’s image because “it needs to have its own identity.”

Part of creating that identity will be working with Maurer to create culture that seems similar to what students have experienced at Cedar Heights to ensure a smoother transition from middle school to high school.

“We’re going to collaborate,” he said. “That gives me great hope for raising student achievement. We’ve got a whole list of things that we’re going to do to align ourselves vertically and that is really fundamental to success. That kind of alignment and collaboration with the middle school feeder is really going to help us as a school and Heidi is awesome. She is a fine administrator, one of the finest I’ve ever been around.”

Potts said he is looking forward working at Kentlake.

“In that opportunity there’s great promise to turn a good school into a great school,” he said.