At its meeting on May 1, Cottonwood-Oak Creek School District’s Governing Board approved contracts for two new principals, set to take over for the coming school year.
Naya Persaud, a fifth-grade teacher at Mountain View Preparatory School, will take over Oak Creek School as principal after Christine Griffin’s resignation, while Kelli Rhoda, who teaches eighth-grade math and science at MVP, will take over from Stephanie Jones as principal there.
The two teachers spent the past few months working together and became partners in their shared ambition of moving up to administration, attending school board meetings together, keeping each other up-to-date on their progress and engaging in what both describe as a friendly, easy-going competition as they both applied for the MVP job.
“They both put so much energy and time in, it was unbelievable,” said Jones, who served as principal over both teachers as they worked at MVP for the past year. Jones said she has long felt that Rhoda would be a good successor as principal, even encouraging the younger teacher to get a master’s degree in educational leadership so she could do so.
After 22 years in the district, including seven as the founding principal of MVP, Jones said she is sad to leave — she teared up thinking about how much she would miss seeing students every day — but feels that she can do so comfortably knowing that she has a strong replacement ready.
“I wouldn’t leave if I had any worries,” Jones said.
“I knew that with Stephanie leaving that it mattered who succeeded her,” Rhoda said. “I didn’t have any intentions of going into administration until I thought about her leaving and then what would happen to the school once she was gone. And so I wanted to make sure that I did everything that I could to make sure that I could fulfill that role to keep her vision alive and then even take it to the next level.”
Rhoda came to the Verde Valley in 1991, and spent six years working at a bank before she got interested in education.
“I got tired of working with adults, so I decided I wanted to work with children,” she said. Rhoda started out as a resource aide in the classroom, but eventually got a BA and MA in education from Northern Arizona University and transferred into teaching full-time in 2001. She is finishing up her second master’s degree, in educational leadership, and hopes to graduate in the fall, shortly after she begins her new position.
MVP presents a special challenge for educators as an International Baccalaureate school, which means it has to hold itself up to a certain set of international standards. Rhoda sees her biggest challenge as taking over for not just the middle school students, who she has been teaching for six years at MVP, but also the elementary school curriculum, which she has not taught before. But she expects that the teachers already at MVP will be able to make that easier.
“I know what these teachers are capable of, and I know how passionate they are about what they do,” Rhoda said. “I’m really excited about learning from them. They’re going to be the ones helping me through those challenges I might have with that [International Baccalaureate] curriculum because they are masters at it.”
Persaud came to the Verde Valley four years ago, after previous teaching stints in Atlanta, where she taught for six and a half years, and in Australia. Both of her parents were teachers in Guyana, where she was born before immigrating to Georgia when she was 6 years old. From a young age, she has been interested in teaching.
“When I was a kid I would babysit my cousin, and I would give him report cards when we would babysit,” Persaud said. “Now he’s older and he would say, ‘I remember you gave me this report card. You were my first teacher.’”
The joy of helping young students has not left, even as Persaud prepares to move out of the classroom and into administration.
“My favorite part of teaching has been watching a kindergartener or a first-grader learn how to read,” Persaud said. “That lightbulb, that magic that happens with their face, and how their eyes light up and they smile. They’re so proud of themselves when they can learn, or they can feel confident and say, ‘I know how to read.’ That’s more than a paycheck for me. That’s amazing.”
Persaud lamented that becoming a principal means she will not be able to be hands-on in the classroom as much, though she said she hopes to take any opportunity to go back into the classroom as an administrator that she can find, including covering classrooms or helping teachers when possible. Before spending this past year at MVP, Persaud taught at Oak Creek. She said she is excited to be back at the school she had come to love, especially bringing with her some of the expertise from teaching the IB program at MVP.
“I have built strong relationships with the faculty,” Persaud said. “One of the things I want to ensure is that I know the kids, I know their families, the community is participating in what we have to offer as well.”
Jon Hecht can be reached at 282-7795 or email jhecht@larsonnewspapers.com
