Blackstone Valley

Her quest: What makes the school tick

10:05 AM EDT on Tuesday, June 7, 2005

BY CYNTHIA NEEDHAM
Journal Staff Writer

WOONSOCKET -- You can hear her before you can see her.

"Good morning everyone, good morning, hi good morning."

High heels click on the worn tile floor.

Principal Donna Valentine rounds the corner to her office at 6:56 a.m. Shopping bags sag at her side filled with paperwork she read in bed at midnight.

"How are we this morning, good, good, good."

She plunks her bags on an oversized desk and picks up a pile of mail, flipping through it without pausing in conversation, or faltering on her three-inch heels.

"I'm the ultimate multitasker," she says, her hands full.

"I've been up since 4:45, actually."

Six years ago, Valentine had no secondary education experience, two years ago, she'd never really been to Woonsocket, except for the occasional drive-through.

Today, the 53-year-old Warwick resident heads up New England's largest middle school.

And she runs it like a CEO. Or perhaps more like a consultant, brought in to save a company from bankruptcy.

Journal photo / Steve Szydlowski

Woonsocket Middle School principal Donna Valentine visits the classroom of teacher Rachel Worthington. "I can't sit too long. ... I need to be out there. I need to be looking in classrooms," the Warwick rersident explains.

When a bell signals the start of school at 7:40, she's off, power walking her petite frame down the halls, a walkie talkie at her hip.

"I can't sit too long. I can't. I need to be out there. I need to be looking in classrooms. Seeing what these kids are doing."

She charges up one staircase, down another in the labyrinth that snakes from the sixth and seventh grade side of the building, where she sits, to the eighth grade side, nearly an eighth of a smile to the west.

Valentine estimates she's walked this route at least 10 times a day since coming to the school in September. For awhile she carried a pedometer, to measure the mileage, but she walked so much it broke.

All that walking has done more than shed those 16 extra pounds, she says, it's helped her see what makes this school tick.

She bustles towards the sixth grade corridor, her heels clickety-clacking as she goes, stopping to pick up a piece of trash, to sign a permission slip, to pass out the "kindness coins" that have become the hallmark of her administration.

She ordered the colorful circles from an education company and doles them out in handfuls to students who make an effort to greet her in the hall.

They entitle the recipient to nothing at all save a smile.

"You can only get these from the principal," she tells every sixth grader she sees.

Some students jockey around her greeting their way to a coin, others barely acknowledge her.

Valentine, never one to admit failure, prompts the less enthused, even badgers them with her familiar "Good morning, good mornings," until they say hello.

She presses a coin into their hands with a forced smile. Some roll their eyes and slink off.

She soldiers onward, stopping into classrooms, waving through windows, passing out more coins.

The round trip journey to the other side of the school takes Valentine the better part of an hour, even at a clip.

When she sinks into a chair in the guidance office just after 9:00 a.m., she looks like she's worked a full day already.

As news of problems at the middle school has spread, so has the rumor mill. But throughout it all, Valentine has remained conspicuously quiet, speaking out just twice, at recent School Committee meetings where she defended her administrative style.

"I've never spent a day with anyone. I've never talked this much," she tells a reporter as she tucks into a cup of yogurt a cafeteria worker fetched for her earlier that morning. "And I never ever get a chance to eat."

"Okay," she says, not quite between bites, "we've got to find 27 extra minutes. Go."

It's one of few moments Valentine will spend in meetings that day. She wishes it were that way every day. Meetings, she says, don't improve schools. But when you run one of the most troubled schools in the state, she says, someone always wants your ear.

As the principal fidgets in her chair, Guidance Director Jane Cotnoir firmly explains that no matter how she works it, she can't find extra time.

"I don't care how you do it, you've gotta do it," Valentine says.

She's right. The school has just learned that it is missing 27 of the 330 instructional minutes required by the state.

But it's more than that, Valentine says.

"The busier you keep these kids, the better they do."

Studies show that students get in the most trouble during the first and last 10 minutes of class. To solve that, Valentine would like to make classes longer, so less time is lost to discipline. She'd also like to eliminate the twice-daily bathroom breaks that eat away at valuable instruction time.

The principal has slotted Cotnoir in for one hour. At 9:59, she's up again, on to her next project, yelling instructions as she heads out the door.

Cotnoir is one of just a handful of experienced teachers Valentine relies on for institutional memory.

With soaring retirement rates in recent years, much of the faculty is inexperienced. Plus, Valentine's three assistant principals are all new, arriving at the building (and the administrative ranks) within the last few months. The youngest of them, Cheri Guerra, is just 27 years old.

Middle school teachers have criticized the district's decision to place three new administrators at a school where none have ever worked.

But Valentine defends her dream team.

"This school has been low performing for two years, so I don't know that having someone who's been here for those two years become assistant principal is what we would have wanted. If we were in a high-performing school, it would be different," she says.

Teacher's union President Richard DiPardo worries that attitude isn't helping her reputation with the faculty. And without the faculty's support, DiPardo says he doesn't believe Valentine can succeed as principal.

In her daily walks, it's clear the principal has made a few allies. Though she avoids some classrooms, she regularly stops by others. She talks close with certain teachers, offering confidences, promising to call them at home later that night to further discuss whatever it is that's on their mind.

Other teachers all but ignore any interaction with her at all.

During a jaunt down a seventh grade corridor between periods late that morning, Valentine pauses to distribute handfuls of kindness coins, clogging traffic in the packed hallway.

Two teachers look on, visibly annoyed, yelling to their students to "keep it moving."

"This is so distracting," one says to the other, glaring at Valentine.

They aren't alone. Dozens of faculty report feeling alienated, ignored, or just downright annoyed with Valentine's autocratic style.

Educational research shows that effective leadership is the best indicator of a school's future success. but what if that leadership isn't properly communicated through the ranks?

Valentine says it doesn't matter. "Either you're part of the solution or you're part of the problem. If teachers aren't feeling supported, it's because they're not looking for that support."

"The teachers who are complaining have been complaining about everything forever. I can't focus a lot of attention on them right now. If you don't want to come on board, don't do it, but don't get in our way."

Journal photo / Steve Szydlowski

Principal Donna Valentine keeps seventh grader Deshoone Hill on the move in the school corridor.

Instead, she says she'll continue to concentrate her attention on "the middle section" of teachers, those who may feel academically overwhelmed, or rankled by the administrative turnover, yet see that change isn't always bad.

Those teachers are the school's future, Valentine says, the ones who will help her implement her "vision."

She talks a lot about this vision, says she loses sleep over it, but she has trouble articulating it.

Theoretically, it's a plan that would engage the most troubled students, while encouraging the advanced ones to thrive. To get to that point, Valentine says she'll start making more regular classroom visits, watching how teachers interact with students and tracking discipline referrals to see which teachers are having trouble with classroom management.

When it comes to specifics, she refers to the School Improvement Team, a group of teachers, administrators (she is a member), parents and students which she says is drafting a plan to address all of these problems.

On a larger scale, Valentine talks about phasing in a looping system that would leave students with the same set of teachers two years running, to promote continuity. And she's thinking about reworking the building, grouping seventh and eighth graders on one side, separating the sixth graders to smooth the transition from cozy elementary environments to the middle school maze.

It's a hopeful vision, but it's vague. What if it doesn't work? What if teachers simply refuse to buy into her way of doing things?

"They have to. There are serious implications if they don't. The Department of Education is going to be looking at us. They could say at any time, 'Hey, we need to go in there and help them."

Back in her office just before 1 p.m., Valentine retreats to her desk for the first time in hours. She slings her leg up on a drawer and pops a Mounds candy bar in her mouth. "I never eat, you know," she says again.

"My son and I were out mowing the lawn until 8:30 last night," she says, smiling at the pictures of her two teenage boys.

Valentine switched to secondary education after her husband died in 1997, in hopes of making a more "single-mom friendly" work schedule. Prior to that, she worked for nearly 20 nears in corporate positions at the now- defunct Zayres Department store chain.

Along the way she also taught management classes at Johnson & Wales' business school, so teaching was a natural segue.

She started her secondary school career in the Warwick school system, teaching high school business. She earned her secondary-school certification in part by filling in whenever administrators were out.

In 2003, she began applying for assistant principal jobs of her own. When a position at Woonsocket High School opened up, Valentine says she jumped.

"I grew up poor, and I grew up surrounded by poverty and diversity. This is the type of community I wanted to be in professionally," says Valentine, who grew up in Providence with nine siblings and attended Classical High School.

As she tells the story, the phone rings. It's High School Principal Bob Vachon, checking in to see how her week is going.

He does that once a week, she says, just to make sure she's still afloat.

"Listen, this is not an easy job. If it was easy, everyone would be standing in line waiting to take it."

Does she every worry she'll fail?

She shakes her head. "Everything I've done, I've done it well or not at all," she says.

These aren't the words of an egomaniac, but a fighter, who is willing to accept sleepless nights and a few enemies if it means finishing what she started.

And if she finds she can't run this school well?

"I'll only quit if I've exhausted every opportunity here and that's not failing, that's saying this is not the right place for me."

Then the phone rings again and she's back in reality, fielding phone calls from district administrators until a teacher appears at her door an hour later, a disinterested eighth grader at his side.

The boy was caught wearing a yellow bandana, banned from Woonsocket schools several years ago because the district worried that students were trying to sport gang colors. When the teacher asked him to remove it, the student ignored him.

The boy knows he's done something wrong and he doesn't care, he stands slouched in the doorway, barely listening to the teacher who has flown into a rage at what he calls "this constant lack of respect."

Valentine handles the situation calmly. She takes the bandana and gives the boy a wry look.

"Ain't gonna happen," she says.

Journal photo / Steve Szydlowski

Woonsocket Middle School principal Donna Valentine sits at her desk. In the foreground is a bowl of her "kindness coins," which she distributes to courteous students.

He asks for it back. She stuffs it in a drawer. "Bye" she tells him, ending the conversation.

As he takes off down the hallway cursing loud enough for her to hear, Valentine softens.

"I'm not going to reason with him now. Let him go home and cool off. Tomorrow I'll talk to him and we'll have him meet with the school psychologist. They talk about cops in schools. These kids don't need cops, they needs a psychologist. We need to get to the root of these problems."

At 3:05, Valentine packs up her backpack and heads for the door. She'll be back, but first she has to meet with district officials across the Blackstone River at the McFee administration building.

She squints as she walks out into the bright sunlight, the first she's seen in eight hours.

She tosses her backpack on the passenger's seat of her Nissan coupe. The once sporty model is tired looking and covered with bumper stickers advertising everything from the Patriots (her favorite team) to Harvard (where she's currently enrolled in a biweekly principal's workshop).

Valentine says goodbye and slides her slender frame into the driver seat.

Then she reappears.

"You know, this happened for a reason," she says, elbows propped on the roof. "When I decided to go into secondary education, I went to bed one night and said, 'Okay, put me in a place where I can do the most good.' And I ended up in Woonsocket."

"When I step into that school every day and see those kids walking down the hallway, it doesn't matter what anyone says, because they are what it's all about."

She slides back into the coupe, which starts with a roar and shrieks as she eases it out of the parking lot, past the quarter mile stretch of school.

Then she turns towards McFee and on to her next challenge.