Editorial
Front Page - Friday, January 7, 2011
School principal experiences renewed passion for education
David Laprad
Krystal Scarbrough is the principal of the Chattanooga School for the Liberal Arts, one of three magnet schools in the county. While her plate is full, she says serving as the head of CSLA has revived her enthusiasm for children and education.
- David Laprad
With one exception, the hallways and classrooms of the Chattanooga School for the Liberal Arts are empty and silent. The holidays have arrived, and the teachers and students qgi usually populate the building on a Tuesday morning are enjoying the break. However, Krystal Scarbrough, the school’s principal, is in her office, taking advantage of the peace and quiet.
Scarbrough has come a long way from her days as a broadcast major at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, but she still remembers the experience that changed the direction of her life.
“I was placed at a school to do a field study with children. The teacher said, ‘I want you to sit with Mark every day you’re here and help him learn to read.’ By the time I finished that assignment, I was hooked,” she says.
After earning a Bachelor of Science in Education at UT and a Masters of Education from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Scarbrough landed a position as a reading teacher at Daisy Elementary in Soddy Daisy in 1983.
She then became a first grade teacher at Alpine Crest Elementary in Chattanooga in 1986. Scarbrough worked on and off while she and her husband, Carl, started a family, then resumed her career in 1995, once their third child was old enough to attend kindergarten. After a year teaching at a private school, Scarbrough moved to Big Ridge Elementary in Hixson, where she and her family live.
“That was a good experience. My principal, Mary Carlson, and Pat Boston, my mentor, taught me how to teach,” she says.
While at Big Ridge, Scarbrough applied to become a Leadership Fellow at the Public Education Foundation in Hamilton County. Through the year-long program, the Foundation trains educators who want to become school leaders. The Foundation accepted her, and upon completing the agenda, Scarbrough submitted an application to be placed in an administrative position. The school district made her a trainee at Clifton Hills Elementary School in Chattanooga.
In 2002, Scarbrough was promoted to assistant principal at the school, then served as interim principal at Normal Park Museum Magnet in 2003. In 2004, she returned to Clifton Hills as principal. She transferred to CSLA, one of three magnet schools in Hamilton County, in 2009.
Since 2004, Scarbrough has learned that the term “multi-tasking” might have been originally applied to a school principal. Her duties at CSLA include overseeing the school’s curriculum, evaluating its teachers, tending to its finances, ensuring the safety of its people and reaching out to parents and the surrounding community. She says if she could eliminate one thing from her day, it would be the enormous volume of email that comes her way.
“I have to let some of it go because I need to be out in my building. I could stay in here for three days and not come up for air,” she says.
Scarbrough says taking off her managerial hat and becoming the leader of instruction at CSLA is the most challenging aspect of her job, but that sharing the load with her teachers helps.
“I trust my teachers. I empower them to make decisions. For instance, we started working on our schedule for [the current school year] last January. We worked on it all year, including the summer, spending hours and hours and hours to get it to where we thought it would be the best for our kids. The interesting thing is that it’s not the best for our adults. But because the teachers worked on it, they were more willing to make a difficult change,” Scarbrough says.
“My job is to encourage my teachers to work at their optimum level. There’s a balance between overbearing and not enough push. I’m at my most productive when I’m working with a little bit of adrenaline, and I feel like others are, too. So my job involves a balance of support and push.”
Scarbrough’s position also entails diplomacy. Rather than passing down rulings with an iron fist, Scarbrough likes to ask questions that engage her teachers and encourage them to see a different point of view. She offers a recent change to their foreign language program as an example.
“Schools likes ours typically have middle school foreign language teachers and elementary foreign language teachers. But middle school students are unusual kids – their transition is amazing – so I thought it might be in their better interest if they didn’t have the same teacher for three years in a row. So to get our teachers to teach both middle school and elementary foreign language classes, I asked them questions. They weren’t crazy about the idea, but the more questions I asked, the more they realized it needed to be done.”
Scarbrough also spends as much time as possible interacting with her students. CSLA is serving about 400 kids, kindergarten through eighth grade, and she tries her best to get to know every one, though she says she probably wouldn’t ace a pop quiz on names just yet.
“When they arrive in the mornings, I’m usually out greeting them and walking them to class. It’s important for me to know their names and who the significant adults are in their lives. I’m also in and out of classrooms all day. The second grade class across the hall sees the most of me because of proximity,” she says, smiling.
Scarbrough says she loves to see a child grasp a difficult concept, and enjoys seeing the multiple ways a teacher will teach a tough concept to help his or her students take hold of it. Once, she watched as a third grade math teacher asked a student who’d figured out four ways to solve a single problem to explain the process to the other students. When the rest of the class lit up with understanding, Scarbrough felt a surge of pride in CSLA.
“Year after year, we’re among the top scoring schools in the county. So I salute the teachers and what they do,” she says.
Like the math student, Scarbrough has a knack for coming up with numerous ways to solve a problem. And she says her “EIQ,” or emotional intelligence quotient, is stronger than her IQ.
“I have a good sense of people. That makes me a little more successful than someone who’s incredibly intelligent but doesn’t have any people skills. When you work at a school, you’re providing a service to the community, so you have to be able to get to know not just the children who come through your door but also their parents, their extended family and the teachers who work for you. You have to know your people in order to get the best out of them,” she says.
Scarbrough serves her community during her off hours as well. In addition to doing volunteer work, she’s active at Abba’s House, where she and her immediate family are members. Scarbrough is currently serving on the pastor’s council and working with mission initiatives at the church.
She also has a wide range of personal interests that includes reading, traveling, water skiing, snow skiing, sewing and cooking.
Wherever Scarbrough is, and whatever she’s doing, her thoughts aren’t far from CSLA. As challenging as being principal of the school is, she says it has revitalized her zeal for children and education.
“It was hard to leave Clifton because I was so passionate about it, but coming here has renewed my passion for excellence in instruction. At Clifton, we had to meet a lot of physical needs to even get to the point of teaching. We have poor children here, too, but we don’t have to overcome as many hurdles. So I’m excited again. This is what school is supposed to be like for every kid.”
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