Elementary school students typically view the principal as someone they only see when they are in trouble.
Kirby’s Mill Elementary School Principal Mark Damon and third grader T.J. Cusack defy this stereotype.
On a scale of one to 10, T.J. gave Damon the highest score of a 10.
“He is a really fun principal and he does a lot of fun pep rallies and summer reading activities,” T.J. said.
This past summer’s reading theme at Kirby’s Mill Elementary was “Every Hero Has a Story.” This aligned with the collaborative summer library theme that was designed to capitalize on children’s interest in heroes and encourage them to come to the library to check out books to learn more.
“At Kirby’s Mill, we wanted to extend this theme to honor our local heroes, so Mrs. King, our school librarian, opened up our Kirby’s Mill library three times over the course of the summer to allow students to come in and check books out. Each time, we also invited a local hero,” Damon said.
Over the course of the three open library sessions, they had an EMT, a firefighter and a police officer visit the school library to share their heroic stories with the students.
As students checked out books and read throughout the summer, they visited a website to log their reading minutes.
At the end of the summer, students were able to cash in their reading minutes for various rewards offered by the school staff. All in all, the students of Kirby’s Mill logged more than 100,000 reading minutes this past summer.
Students were able to cash in reading minutes for everything from bookmarks to getting an extra musical instrument lesson with the music teacher.
T.J. chose to cash in his more than 1,000 reading minutes to be “Principal for a Day.”
“I picked to be the principal for the day because I thought it would be a fun experience,” T.J. said.
During his day, he did observations on teachers, ran a fire drill, toured the central office, organized a movie night and hooked up his classmates with a “No Homework Night.”
T.J. was able to observe some of the older kids’ classrooms and learned a lot about what he will be doing when he enters fourth grade.
“I thought the lessons looked fun and I look forward to being in those grades,” T.J. said.
Though the fire drill was very noisy, T.J. was allowed to pull the lever and use the walkie-talkie, so he felt very important.
However, his favorite part was going to the Board of Education office.
“I shook hands with a lot of important people. I met our superintendent, Dr. Del Rossi, and Mr. Fires,” T.J. said. “It was neat to hear what they do for the district.”
“As a principal, I had to beam with pride having such a mature, wonderful, well spoken young man represent Kirby’s Mill to our central office. With each question he asked and each question he answered, he made me very proud that he is part of our school community,” Damon said.
Damon described the experience as rewarding, as it was one that reminded him how wonderful his students were as they high fived and chanted T.J.’s name while he walked through the halls.
Damon’s relationship with T.J. is a special one. He could not say enough about how professional and respectful he acted in his leadership role among his fellow students and among the higher ups he met.
“T.J. is a wonderful young man,” Damon said. “Even though he is only a third grader, T.J. proved to be very mature and handled this learning experience very well.”
T.J. enjoyed getting a small taste of an experience that opened his eyes to a job he could potentially pursue somewhere down the road.
“I think it would be a cool job. I would have fun with it like Mr. Damon does. It would be neat to know all the kids in the school and to hold the pep rallies and work with the teachers in meetings,” T.J. said.
