District Will Vote On Approval Of New Associate Principals

The district Board of Education will vote Thursday on the appointment of two new associate principals for East. The board, which listed the vote in its board meeting agenda on the district website, will decide whether to approve the appointment of Jeff Storey and Britt Haney. Storey and Haney were recommended by future principal John McKinney to fill the vacancies left by him and fellow associate principal Molli Anderson, who will be taking the principal job at Horizons Middle School. Anderson’s appointment to that position will also be decided at the meeting.

In his first major personnel decision as East’s new principal, McKinney recommended the appointment of Storey and Haney to Superintendent Gene Johnson, who then forwarded the recommendation to the Shawnee Mission School District Board of Education for a vote. McKinney believes that Storey and Haney will bring energy, enthusiasm and teaching experience to their administrative positions.

“I was really looking for a lot of teaching experience,” McKinney said. “I was looking for people that enjoy working with kids, who like working with students and have good personalities sort of suited to the high school level, and they met that.”

McKinney feels confident that both men will be approved by the board.

“[It’s] not often that they deny [recommendations],” he said. “They usually don’t make it to the board meeting if there are issues.”

Neither Storey, a librarian at Indian Hills Middle School, or Haney, an upper-level mathematics teacher at SM Northwest, have any administrative experience under their belts. Should both of them be approved, they will join an administrative staff with a combined administrative experience of seven years, with McKinney and associate principal Jeremy Higgins accounting for five and two years respectively. Current Principal Karl Krawitz, who had nothing to do with the recommendations, believes that this lack of experience will be both beneficial and detrimental.

“They’ll have their challenges because they haven’t had that experience,” Dr. Krawitz said. “Now that’s good and bad. The good for them is not having the experience. Sometimes you can rely on your experience too much and good, creative solutions go by the wayside.”

McKinney isn’t worried about the lack of experience.

“It puts some more pressure on me to be a teacher myself and to help them learn how to be good administrators, but I’m not at all concerned about that,” McKinney said. “I feel like we’ve got a great group of teachers here. I’ve got fellow administrators in Mr. Higgins and Deanna Griffey and Coach Brown who will help me and we’ve got the greatest kids in the district so I’m not worried at all.”