New Glendale High principal settling in after taking the reins two days before start of school year
Two days before school started this year at Glendale High, Benjamin Wolf stepped into his new job as the school’s principal.
It was early August, shortly after Glendale’s former principal, Monica Makiewicz, announced she was leaving Glendale High to work for the Covina-Valley Unified School District.
Without much time, school officials tapped Wolf for the job, and he arrived on campus on Aug. 6, two days before 2,400 students arrived for the first day of school on Aug. 8.
Since then, he’s kept last year’s yearbook on his desk, getting to know the names of the 100 teachers on campus and additional support staff.
Wolf comes to the district most recently from the Anaheim Union High School District, and he has spent the majority of his career as a high school teacher or administrator.
But when he was a student himself, Wolf didn’t initially intend to pursue a career in education.
Upon graduating from high school in Irvine, Wolf studied public administration and worked in city management both in Southern California and Illinois.
After a few years, he started to think about a career that would bring more meaning into his life.
Aware of his passion for talking about government and politics, he returned to school to become a high school teacher.
In addition to all the activities and sports that high school students pursue, Wolf also enjoys watching them grow from being shy freshman to graduating seniors with opinions about the world around them, ready to determine which career they want to follow or who they’ll vote for during an election.
“I really like that, that you can see that growth over four years,” he said.
One of his goals at Glendale High is to encourage students to complete course requirements that will enable them to attend a four-year university upon graduating.
The latest data shows about a third of Glendale High’s students meet those requirements, he said.
Every Wednesday, he added, teachers wear a jersey or shirt representing the university from which they graduated to stir up conversations with students about earning a college degree.
Wolf said he is also eager to learn about teachers’ technology needs, particularly which devices they want to use in the classroom and how they’ll use them.
In the meantime, as he continues to learn everyone’s names, he’ll take his time to enact his own vision for Glendale High.
“Principals always have their own vision for the direction a school should be going. But really, that has to be mated with the vision of all the staff members, too. It takes time to have conversations with people to pick a direction,” he said. “You’ve got to build up a level of trust with people before you have conversations about doing things differently.”
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Kelly Corrigan, [email protected]
Twitter: @kellymcorrigan
