Leo looks back, thanks community

With just a few short weeks left in her position, Continental School District Superintendent Gaye Leo can look back at her two years in Green Valley with a sense of accomplishment.

In addition to raising the school’s state rating from “highly performing” to “excelling,” Leo says she’s most proud of maintaining the quality of education while dealing with increased enrollment.

“We’ve increased our enrollment by more than 20 percent,” Leo said. “I think that accommodating growth effectively has been something very important that we’ve accomplished, and at the same time achieving excelling status. So there’s been no compromise regarding the educational program.”

Leo said she’s also proud of the enhancements made to the school itself.

“We’ve modernized a lot of things,” she said. “We have a media center, which we didn’t have before. We had a very limited library, now we have what I would call a 21st century learning lab.”

A teacher and administrator from the Phoenix area before she was hired, Leo took over the position of superintendent in July 2006, but soon found out that in a rural district like Continental, a job’s duties are not necessarily defined by its title.

“I think the biggest challenge serving as superintendent is that it is a small district, and simultaneously I needed to be the district superintendent, business manager, principal [and] special education director,” Leo said. “It’s just a very embedded position. I got a lot of hands-on experience that I would not have gotten elsewhere.”

That same small-town experience brought about challenges also also brought with it a caring community, she said.

“As a small rural school district, there’s a lot of familiarity,” she said. “I think I’ll miss our connection with our volunteer community, and the sense of participation that we get from our parents. It’s just a really high involvement district, and that’s something that’s something that you don’t see very often in public schools. I don’t know that I could ever replicate that, because it’s an extraordinary commitment.”

Leo will be succeeded by James Nelson starting July 1. She said she has been in contact with Nelson in order to ease the transition for the district.

“We’ve been working together over the course of the last few weeks and I think we’re both really on the same page. There’s been a seamless transition, which really helps, because it doesn’t cause any significant impact on the day-to-day operations of the school,” Leo said.

Bonnie Klahr, Continental Governing Board president, praised Leo for her accomplishments, one of which was getting Continental into consideration for a new school.

“One of the things we’ve been trying to do—and this is something she really pushed—was to get the new school on the agenda for the School Facilities Board,” Klahr said. “We had been dealing with the board for years,” she said. Leo was able to get a consultant involved, and along with help from board member Chet Davis, got Continental on the agenda for a new school in 2013.

Leo also aided in departmentalizing the 7th and 8th grades, allowing students to move from one class to the next throughout the day, preparing them for high school, and allowing the teachers to focus on one subject to teach their students, Klahr said.

An educator most of her life, Leo said she would like to continue being a superintendent at another school district, and if not that, then work as a teacher or consultant.

“I’ve taught at three universities in the past, and that’s something that I really enjoy doing and will always probably be involved in,” she said.

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