I've had a lot of conversations with people about failure. There is a 13-year old young woman I have been privileged to work with for the last several months, who I've been told was drastically different the previous year. The way she was described was constantly getting in fights, getting kicked out of classes, and ultimately failing any and all classes she did show up to. When I began working with her, I could instantly see what a special young woman she was. Even thoug

Before I became a Vice Principal, I was terrified of the aspect of being an administrator where you had to "put down the hammer." Meaning, my thing has ALWAYS been building relationships with my students, and I wondered how possible that was going to be when I had to discipline them on a more severe level - suspension, expulsion, etc. One thing I learned was that there WAS a way to have those difficult conversations with students while also having and building a good, solid

Have you ever been bullied? Either during your school years or in your adult life? My guess is that at some point your answer would be "yes." I am incredibly fortunate to be working with a group students this year on what I call "lost skills." In this work, one of my students came in one day looking sad. I asked her what was wrong and she said she had been bullied earlier in the day. This got me thinking about all of the instances I dealt with last year as a vice princi

My apologies for the delayed blog - getting back in the swing of things at the beginning of the year can be tough to manage. I'm finally getting into a groove and am super excited to announce that I have my first guest blog by Science teacher, Nicholas Russo. I have never been the guy that steps up and introduces himself. I like to wait until other people extend their hand and introduce themselves or a mutual acquaintance does the job for us. You might be able to imagine m

I am proud to be a Sandy Hook Promise leader, and I was fortunate to be able to give a presentation to a school last week about a potential partnership for the 2018-19 school year. I went through a lot of data, statistics, professional experience I've had that is evidence I am able to do this important work, and ended with the compelling video Sandy Hook Promise created about recognizing warning signs in students who are struggling: Through my work with Sandy Hook Promise, I

Here we are again. ANOTHER school shooting. Another group of innocent people dead, and another gunman who could have gotten help so he didn't feel the need to act in such rage. According to the Washington Post, one of the potential motives of the shooter, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, was romantic rejection by a peer, Shana Fisher. This was called out - this behavior was called out by the FBI in The School Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective. Specifically the FBI says, "clu

One of the most publicized solutions to the school shooting epidemic is arming teachers with guns. Being a former math teacher, I was intrigued and wanted to research the actual cost of arming teachers with guns. I have my own beliefs about whether this "solution" would actually solve the problem, but I created and taught a financial math class, I was eager to do the financial analysis (I am a data nerd after all). This blog is my ideas spread out after researching various

growing up i never felt like i "fit in." i was painfully shy, and the idea of talking about surface-level, useless stuff the way other kids and teenagers would just didn't interest me. but i did my best. right around middle school i was fortunate enough to find several individuals who shared my distaste for small talk, and we are still good friends to this day. we get together (not as much as any of us would like) and talk about what is going on in each of our lives, we l

going through massive life changes sometimes inspires us to look at the past and analyze our experiences to make decisions about where we want our future to go. i've done this at multiple points in my life, but of note are the following circumstances: *my first year in college at UCSC - i was nearing the end of my freshman year in college and trying to figure out what i wanted my major to be. i enrolled and was accepted in the "undeclared/undecided" major. i was 18 at the

i've never wanted to shoot up a school (or any public place large or small for that matter). i don't own a gun, i've never shot a gun, and i don't know how to shoot a gun. but i DO know how the many school shooters have felt in the moments leading up to the school shootings. the FBI did a study on school shooters and found several personality traits, characteristics, motives that were prevalent in the school shooters minds prior to the horrific acts they carried out. a few