When Amy Dresser Held begins her new job as executive director at Palisades High School on August 1, she will take over a district. Although she’s familiar with the monolithic Los Angeles School District which administers over 700 schools, Held’s district will be the sum of one, but the tasks are in many ways identical. Palisades High School is an independent charter school, which has been detached from its parent LAUSD for the past three years. While the school is exempt from the centralized governance and its one-size-fits-all policies, PaliHi remains tied to the state for educational guidelines and funding, but is on its own for all the back-office operations the district used to control. The job, as Held sees it, is a good fit for her, with her background not only in instruction, but also budget, Internet technology, contracts and communications. “I see seven areas that are involved in this job,” Held says. “These include IT, budget and finance, communications (including marketing), fundraising, personnel and legal issues.” The executive director’s position was created by the board of directors when Pali became fiscally independent in 2003. At the apex of the administrative triumvirate, the executive director works with the management team, including the principal and chief financial officer in running the school, which currently has an enrollment of 2,700 students and a $20-million budget. The former executive director, Jack Sutton, saw the school through its first year of fiscal independence, and shepherded it through charter renewal last year. But Sutton was only part-time and had no office on the PaliHi campus. Held will have a presence on campus, where she plans to be when not attending meetings downtown and elsewhere. At 30 years old, Held has followed a professional path that has wound in and around education, offering experiences from both private and public, and from day-to-day operations to overseeing policy. A K-12 public school student from Gloucester, Massachusetts, Held attended Georgetown, where she received her B.A. in the humanities in international affairs in 1997. Her stirrings of altruism strengthened during college; she volunteered in the Catholic student ministry and tutored, but in her senior year her focus settled on Teach for America, a national teacher corps of recent college graduates who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools. Held spent her two years teaching a 5th grade bilingual class in a mixed-race 4th-8th grade school in south Phoenix. Following her move to Arizona, she decided to come all the way West, partially to be closer to her boyfriend (now husband of four years) Brian, who teaches AP history and economics at Loyola High School. Her first job in Los Angeles was with Score Educational Centers, a computer-based math and reading program for ages 4 to 14. As assistant director, she worked on opening the center in Ladera Heights, doing initial sales and marketing, building a base of students and hiring and training tutors (mostly high school and college students). “I found the work inspiring because I could see how the resources of the private sector, training and good management could be brought to the public schools,” she says. An intense training year followed as Held completed her fellowship with CORO, which offered her hands-on training in public affairs. Her CORO “rotation” serendipitously turned out to be with LAUSD, under the mentorship of then school board president Caprice Young. The relationship turned out to be key, for Young offered Held a position working as her field deputy and policy advisor. “At that time, in 2002, Caprice’s central city district was redrawn, to include most of the West San Fernando Valley,” Held says. “There were 100 schools in her new region, including continuation schools and early education centers, and it was my job to build a relationship with those new schools.” Held jumped to the superintendent’s side for a year, working as special assistant for Maria Ott, senior deputy superintendent. “I was her lead on policy, including the student information tracking system, which keeps tabs on students’ attendance, grades and discipline online.” This system is currently scheduled to be implemented at PaliHi. For the past year, she went over to the governance side, working with Marlene Cantor, who assumed her position as LAUSD president in 2004. It was almost inevitable that with all her experience and professional relationships Held would be drawn to the PaliHi position. “I heard about the position several months ago, while I was attending a charter schools association conference. I saw a lot of different charter leaders there, and later my father-in-law, who is on the PaliHi board, encouraged me. I talked to him about the school, and could see that the school has a lot of latitude to act freely on many issues. He suggested that I might apply for the job, and the more I learned, the more I was convinced to apply.” Held joins another young professional, Gloria Martinez, PaliHi’s principal, who has guided the school in its first chapter as an independent high school, and Greg Wood, chief financial officer. While her experience and energy are important in navigating the currents of her new job, equally valuable will be her intelligence in seeking out information, insight and experience from her colleagues in education. “I know how to access information, and I feel that I’ve got a great network here with the charter school association, with Caprice Young, who is now CEO of California Charter Schools, Brian Bower (executive director at Granada Hills Charter, the only other fiscally independent charter in LAUSD), Merle Price, former deputy superintendent and former PaliHi principal, and Maria Ott. “It’s exciting to see how engaged the parent community is, their high expectations and expertise.”
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