Heather Isom was confirmed as the incoming principal of Sedona Red Rock High School at the Sedona Oak Creek School District Board of Directors on May 2.
Mr. Isom has been promoted from his current position as Vice Principal and will assume his new position from Saturday, July 1st.
Isom will succeed Dennis Dearden, who was the principal and superintendent of the Sedona Oak Creek School District. Dearden announced his impending retirement as superintendent at a May 2 meeting.
Dearden said Isom’s eventual nomination was the result of past years’ efforts to seek promotion from within the district, citing the difficulty of hiring managers in education. He said the first step in that process was to put Isom through an intensive one-and-a-half-year leadership training program through the Yavapai County Educational Services Authority.
“I am really happy to be retiring after such an impactful tenure here,” said Isom. “I will miss him, my mentor and friend. He really united the people in the district. There seemed to be a big divide between the committee, teachers, parents and community, but he worked hard to bring us together.”
Isom became assistant principal last year and has been with SOCSD since 2017, generally teaching junior and senior level social studies, U.S. history, and government and economics.
“I moved here for personal reasons. It was me and my daughter going into 10th grade, and we loved it, so we stayed there,” Isom said. I was. “I loved the school community, the administration, and the possibilities here. They seem happy to roll up their sleeves and go about their business, providing relief support to their students.”
“Demographics are changing,” Isom said. “Each year there are more English learners. We need to ensure that they have reading and writing support…and will continue to do so. We want to solve it.”
SOCSD has hired an English as a second language expert starting in the fall to help resolve these issues, Isom noted. She said community involvement is important, as is providing help to enable families to access her ESL support services.
Isom credits one of her university professors with helping develop her educational philosophy and the ideas she wants to instill in her students.
“One of the reasons I wanted to go into the education industry was because I realized that I didn’t learn anything in high school,” Isom said. “Until I had a professor who focused on discussion and critical thinking and looked at different perspectives and investigated.
Harnessing these skills has become a major challenge as student attendance is lingering in the aftermath of forced closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I didn’t feel like an organized school after COVID-19,” Isom said. “Because we couldn’t maintain the same requirements in terms of attendance, tardiness, and discipline, because children could choose to stay home or stay home. The state didn’t mandate attendance for those two years.”
Isom said this has caused difficulties in maintaining classroom attendance, forcing school districts to reassess Arizona’s attendance requirements and award completion credits to students who do not meet that standard. It said it also included an injunction from Isom believes this forceful approach has resulted in significant improvements in attendance.
More than 100 students at SOCSD missed more than 200 semesters last year. The state requires students to attend her 90% of class hours, with up to 108 absences allowed during her required 180 days of classes. No student has been absent more than 200 times this year, Isom said.
“For the most part, we continuously reduced that number by hundreds of units. [students and families] We take responsibility and make it clear that excessive absenteeism will discredit our children,” Isom said. “From now on, we can focus on seeing where they are.” [with] We look at their literacy levels and have very targeted interventions on how to achieve that level. [scores] to improve in mathematics. ”
