Principal Lehman has led Centreville highschool for over 5 years now, starting his role at the beginning of 2019. At the center of our school community, Lehman led over 3,000 students through the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, more recent challenges related to chronic absenteeism, and a nationwide decline in student’s interest in school.

Covid-19 affected the entire world’s student population and principals were on the frontlines to ensure that a good education was still on the table for children. Lehman stepped into his position just before the pandemic began and led Centreville through the most tumultuous period in its entire 36 year long history. We sat down with the Principal to ask him some of the burning questions that often go unaddressed among the student population, and some more recent controversy involving the larger school community.

You named improving attendance as a goal this year in March. The chronic absenteeism rate was 16.4% and rose to 18% in the past month. What policies are efforts you have in place to curb chronic absent use in our school?

I think the things that we’ve done this year is obviously increased communication to both students and families around where they stand with attendance so we’ve sent attendance reports home with report cards so that parents know exactly how many absences excused and unexcused.

I think some of the challenges with attendance is just that, often the reason for the chronic absenteeism is very individualized so there’s not like a one size fits plan you know so some students are having mental health challenges, physical health challenges in school. They’re having some challenges with the family at home like so often there’s like more of a underlying reason why maybe this aren’t finding success in school you know they’re not connected so it’s like one is a little bit time-consuming each one is an individual case and so you know it’s hard to say that there’s like one sweeping policy that’s going to be the magic answer.

The other thing that we’ve also done is made sure that we’ve communicated with the teachers to say as we wrap up the school year. We need to remain strong with instruction like it’s not it doesn’t become like free days at the end of the year. It’s like no we still have assignments, still a project or still a reason for being here.

Students’ grades may be fine, but those excuse days also count against us in terms of renovation.

Recently a controversial member of our Centerville community was asked to limit his work to a specific set of guidelines, and this left a lot of students, parents, and even some faculty upset. What do you say to students and other members of our community in that field?

I would say what I’ve learned in my five years here in working with this situation is that there is a range of feelings around the topic and responsibilities as principal is to make sure that students feel safe and comfortable always, and there were times when some students were feeling the picture was a little too much a little too aggressive And there were times when it was also a little bit disruptive. 

When I get the concerns coming to me I’m not able to go online right and create a whole rebuttal and share personal information and everything that I know right but I still have is a responsibility to take action to make sure that folks who may is comfortable realize that steps are being taken, and to be honest with you the guidelines that we put out are not unreasonable. They’re not unlike what any other photographer would be expected to do

Different coaches had a different feeling around it and it was creating inconsistency so what it was doing was forcing my coaches into a position where they had to police that and I don’t think that’s fair for them.

What are the three biggest difficulties you faced as a principal?

Virtual learning and transitioning back to school was a very difficult time as a principal, so just trying to implement all of those constant updates and policies and protocols and how we had to handle certain things was just a really nonstop challenge. With students and staff it’s like you really want to try to be everything to everyone you know like you really want to try to put forth your best effort and you wanna meet everybody’s needs. What you realize is that not everybody agrees on everything and you try to do the best you can to find what you believe is the best direction forward by listening to different perspectives and different stories.

In general, the job of being a principal at a large school carries a lot of weight and a lot of different challenges and you know I mentioned a few there but another is just trying to meet the needs of some of our students that are struggling and continue to struggle. I’m not blaming the pandemic anymore, but it’s just a different mindset. We know we still have students who aren’t to the point where they need to be and they may be struggling to meet graduation requirements or whatever it is. 

A challenge that has been increasingly more difficult is staffing schools. You know there are fewer candidates. There aren’t as many strong candidates for some of our positions as there were years ago and so like now when you’re trying to find a certain teacher or certain position, you know, sometimes it’s hard to find someone with experience in the expertise to produce the best when they’re just learning themselves.

Centreville has faced an increasingly large issue the past few years with students leaving campus either on foot or in their cars during lunch or plus period. Is there a strategy in place to curvy activities and what’s being done to stop this from happening? 

Well actually it’s way better than it was last year. We have fewer students leaving, but we keep talking about it because it does occur, but it’s not nearly the same that it was last year, just generally speaking. Do we still have students who walk out to the Colonnade or whatever? Yes. Last year I would come back from meetings and I would see far more students in the parking lot. I think the biggest thing is just having a security presence and making sure that we have the exit and other key points in the day monitored.

It’s really hard because we only get staffed with four security people and everybody else has other jobs to do so they can’t constantly be watching the parking lot, but we’re utilizing the security team as much as we can to monitor during lunch block during the plus times which obviously seem to be the biggest times when people leave.

The steps that we’ve taken with students who are coming back is to try and make students realize that you’re not allowed to do it, you can’t do it, and if you do there are some consequences that are gonna result. Whether or not that’s being searched and additionally like a day of suspension or whatever it may be, I think that has helped to curb some but yeah I mean it’s a challenge. You know you just can’t constantly monitor everyone all the time and be able to get anything else done.

What would you name as your three biggest achievements as the principal of Central high school?

I would say that we have made improvements in conversations around instruction approaches and working in teams. Having teachers work together on our cloud on collaborative teams and working to align instruction, ensuring that we’re talking about instruction, and making sure that the teachers are working together to put the best instruction forward is one of the key improvements.

I would also say that we have more systems in place, while still not perfect, put some systems in place to try to address students’ struggles sooner with support staff and trying to make sure that we to the best of our ability are looking at the date, catching students who may be struggling and trying to provide additional support. Some of the things that we’ve had to do over the past five years have been really interrupted as a  result and response to changes for the pandemic so there has been some evolution with that and some upkeep. Even though again not perfect I still feel good about the work that we did and that we did successfully get students back into the fold of school and try to put the best environment in place for people to return.

We didn’t accomplish everything that I would’ve necessarily wanted to, but I also feel like the team faculty have worked really hard to kinda keep pushing forward and keep making positive changes and trying to meet the needs of what’s going on in the current time and we’ll keep doing that.

What’s your position on students’ abilities to organize and participate in walkouts during the school day?

I understand students desire to express free speech and to organize and be able to share their perspectives and their opinions on critical topics that are happening but personally I do get concerned about walkouts because what I find more and more is that some of the topics where students are choosing to walk out for are two sided so whether right or wrong, there are multiple opinions on the topic. 

For example something like ending gun violence, people have different opinions on weapons but nobody I don’t think wants violence. When you’re talking about some of the other controversial topics that may contribute to a walk out what you get sometimes is conflict and for me as the principal one of the biggest fears that you have is kind of like losing control of the building and so when these walkouts occur, it makes me very nervous because there is a very high potential conflict and for disruption and when you have the volume of students that we have here, those types of things can’t escalate quickly

It can go downhill fast and so I would prefer that students choose other avenues that might be more productive. I feel like there might be other ways that students could explore for really capitalizing on their viewpoints that might have a bigger impact and so that’s kind of the best way I can say it. I am not necessarily in favor of walkouts in schools, I think that it’s dangerous, but I’m not opposed to students expressing opinions. I think we have to find the right way to do that safely.

We’d like to thank Principal Lehman and the Centreville administration for making this interview possible. It was a goal of ours to relay as much information regarding our school and we think the interview will do just that for the student population.