Barbara Kline, Orcas Middle/High School Principal, has been selected as the Distinguished Principal for League Area 2B/1A by the Washington Association of Secondary School Principals (WASSP). Schools within the 2B/1A League are Orcas, Concrete, Darrington, La Conner, Friday Harbor, and the private schools, Shoreline Christian and Mt. Vernon Christian.

Don Beazizo, Concrete High Principal, nominated Kline for the Distinguished Principal award last fall, after being involved on the “Small Schools” committee with her at a principals’ conference. Beazizo was impressed with programs Kline has implemented at Orcas High, specifically, the Digital Learning Commons, through which students can make up credits and learn online. Other achievements that impressed Beazizo are the high WASL scores among Orcas students, Kline’s involvement with changes at the state level and her performance at the conference.

The Distinguished Principal award was to be presented to Kline at the WASSP Conference last week, however Kline was attending unexpected family matters on the east coast.

In an interview with the Sounder, Kline deferred personal praise to comment, “What we’ve created here is quite a gem that has a number of excellent programs.”

From Advanced Placement classes to partnership with community organizations such as the Funhouse and the Orcas Center, to Career and Technical Education and alternative education, Kline has endeavored to serve all students, “creating systems to make things work – to see how they fit into the pattern – such as OASIS.” Kline is the first to acknowledge, “life happens. Families have issues.”

Although her workload often involves 12-hour days and weekends, she says, “I don’t think that’s unusual for a person who runs a business.”

Kline credits her staff as “hard-working people whose hearts are fully into the education of every child. They are very willing to believe that every kid comes to school every day intending to learn and do the best they can.

“When they get into difficulty, it’s not their intention to create problems,and when the teachers realize that, it makes a difference in how they deal with them.”

Middle School teacher Lyn Perry says that this attitude stems in great part from Kline’s own advocacy of her students. “As time went on, she personally got to know every student and her office door was open to students that needed to talk to her. Her style is to listen and then move that student forward wherever she can.”

Last August, the OISD board selected Kline to serve as the School Superintendent, replacing Glenn Harris, who had worked in that capacity for the previous two years. In the 19 years Kline has been Middle/High School Principal at Orcas, she has seen great improvement in the public school system.

In the beginning, the major challenge was “working with parents and students to change the school climate and culture. There was a sense that Orcas was not a very good school,” as evidenced by vandalism and negative attitudes towards school in general.

“But there were a lot of good students, parents, and teachers looking at creating quality education for all students. There were several new teachers that year [1990-1991], and no history of curriculum. Some teachers knew what had been taught the previous years, but there was no record of some classes.”

Kline tackled that problem by organizing times for the teachers to plan the progress of learning from grade to grade, building to advanced placement classes.

Science teacher Gregory Books says, “Kline excels in really creative job placement for her teaching staff.” He recalls that her response to his skepticism about the value of online learning was to put him in charge of the school’s online learning program, the Digital Learning Commons.

Perry comments “Where my classroom is positioned, I would watch students walk lackadaisically towards class. But the first year Barbara came, I watched them running into class – it was that much of a change.”

Nineteen years later, Kline says that her biggest challenge recently has been “training and retraining superintendents – the last few years have been a revolving door.”

She was raised in Washington D.C. and graduated from the University of Maryland before moving to California with her husband Steve. She taught elementary school, earned her principal credentials and worked as the principal of a 1,000-pupil middle school., She also ran a reading clinic as a private business that was eventually bought out by Britannica

Kline applied for the Orcas job as Middle/High School Principal, but didn’t make it to the final round of candidates. Later that summer, she was called back because the board wasn’t satisfied with the first-level candidates they’d chosen.

For Kline, “The greatest satisfaction has come from the watching the kids grow up from little tiny children – and now they’re even younger.

“To see young people so uncertain of themselves, and they come back and they talk to us – that’s a really glorious thing.”

“One of the gifts the island brings – that you don’t see in many places – is interaction with adults and that’s a huge strength our kids take away with them. Here, a lot of the educational pieces come from the community. It gives students an outlet they might not otherwise get.”

Kline says, “Sometimes it feels like living in a disorganized mishmash, but it’s a pretty complicated dance we’ve created of students working with others for success.”

With Kline away this week, and Elementary Principal Tom Gobeske filling in, he applauds that “dance,” saying, “You can tell the way a teacher conducts a class by how they act when the teacher is gone. In the same way, Barbara has a strong system in place, and we’re doing fine.”