New Naperville N. principal eager to get started

New Naperville North principal Kevin Pobst says he wants students to have as much of an individualized high school experience as possible and he welcomes input from students and parents alike.

Wearing an orange blazer while snacking on blue and orange jelly beans, Kevin Pobst clearly has embraced his role as the new principal of Naperville North High School.

Pobst, 54, says he doesn't plan any major changes when classes begin Wednesday, choosing instead to focus on the positive things the school has been doing.

He replaces Ross Truemper who recently retired.

Before coming to North, Pobst served as principal of Hinsdale Central High School for two and a half years. He has also been the Hinsdale district's assistant superintendent for teaching and learning.

He holds a bachelor of arts from Princeton University, master of arts in teaching from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Education Organization Leadership from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Pobst recently spoke to the Daily Herald about the coming school year at Naperville North. Here is an edited version of that conversation.

Q. What do you bring to the district?

A. I think I have a lot of passion for making sure teenagers' high school experiences create the most opportunity for them following high school. I want to make sure education opens up avenues for them to grow and develop, rather than narrowing their possibilities.

I like teenagers flat out and I want them to have an exciting, fun, energizing experience for the four years they're in high school. I want them, as much as possible, to have an individualized experience that can too easily become a cookie-cutter, factory approach in a huge high school with 3,100 kids.

I also want there to be a genuine partnership between families and the school. The cornerstone of that is really good communication. I have an orientation toward good communication - honest, candid, frequent communication between families and the school.

I have a strong interest and background in instructional issues, which means I have a lot of interest in how math is being taught ... and what we're doing about reading instruction and what we're doing about Advanced Placement instruction.

I deal with management issues to the extent the school should be well managed, but my passion is maximizing the quality of instruction.

Q. How do you do that with so many students?

A. A lot of teachers are tuned that way to begin with. They want to have powerful, high-quality relationships with individual students and they want to treat those students as individuals. Not every policy and procedure has to be applied to every student in exactly the same way. We need to be able to take into account individual student needs.

The second thing we need is to make sure our guidance services, our deans' services, our college application process services, reach out to students as individuals as much as possible. Deans tend to be oriented toward addressing each individual student's unique personality and problems and guidance counselors ... get into guidance counseling because they want to deal with individual students and serve them as individuals.

So we have to make sure our policies and procedures don't interfere and encourage those individual relationships.

It's a good question as to how you make a place this large more individualized and I think the answer is it's an orientation, it's a culture that says it's OK for kids to be square pegs and for us to find ways for those students to be successful, for those students to be happy, for students to pursue their sometimes peculiar preferences. We must become a place that's very tolerant and flexible and imaginative.

Q. What do you want students to know about you?

A. I want them to know I will be very involved in the life of the school - the activities, the athletics, the special events, the musical and drama performances. I will be very involved because I care about their aspirations to be excellent and be performers and be creative.

I want them to know that though the organization has a hierarchy, ultimately my job is to listen to people who have needs and try to see that their needs are met to the best of my ability. The door is open. Ultimately one of the roles of a principal is a problem solver.

Q. What do you think of the $5.2 million facility improvements that have been taking place around the school?

A. I was here before they started tearing up the parking lots or the roadways and there were a number of things about the arrangement that looked unsafe. I think (the new layout) is a good thing. I think it's a good thing the pool has been rebuilt. It's a better competition pool, puts our kids in a better position to compete with other student swim teams, water polo teams. It's a better PE facility.

I think the all-weather competition field is a good thing. It'll be a better surface for our athletes to compete on and we'll be able to have more teams use that field.

Overall I think the facility is in really good shape.

Q. What is the biggest challenge you expect to face this year?

A. I think the key when you're new is to assess that which is positive so you can have a really good understanding of what the school does well, rather than coming in and becoming preoccupied by the things that need to be improved or fixed.

This is a very stable, sound school. It's had good leadership and is strong across the board in programs.

The biggest challenge for me is to understand how the high quality has been produced and to appreciate that and look for ways to replicate it.

Q. The district is becoming more diverse. How do you address the changing population?

A. There's a temptation to try to de-diversify diversity, to try to identify groups who present particular challenges or appear to be a problem and then design a program to address that problem. The trouble with that is you lose the diversity within the diversity.

So if you take a group of students, Hispanic students for instance, and try to characterize that group so you can design a program, what you do is you lose the diversity within that group - the fact that there are very high-performing Hispanic students and there are high-income Hispanic students, there are low-income Hispanic students, there are Hispanic students who have trouble with math but they're fine in reading. You have Hispanic students who have trouble with reading but they're good in math. There are Hispanic students who have been in Naperville 203 from (kindergarten) forward and there are others who just came here as ninth-graders.

The temptation is to label the problem and then address a program to that labeled problem. What you do when you do that is you lose all the diversity within the group you're focusing on.

I think instead you start with the diversity and you look at the people who don't read well. Who are the people coming in below grade level in reading and math? You look at them as much as possible and say how did that situation develop? And you may be able to put in place an initiative that will assist a large number of students but it's because you looked at each student individually.

There is more ethnic and economic diversity here than there was 10 years ago, but it is not a huge number and it's very manageable. What we need to do is make sure we understand the needs of each of those students who may fall into a particular racial or ethnic or economic category and address the needs of each of those individual students.

Q. Doesn't No Child Left Behind force you to group students by those types of categories?

A. No Child Left Behind is a great thing. But people misunderstand it. Because No Child Left Behind measure students by category doesn't mean the school has to jump back the other way and address categories.

Q. In recent years North have not met state standards with special education students and most recently, those categorized as economically disadvantaged. How do you deal with those shortfalls?

A. We're not where we should be with special ed kids and we're not where we should be with ... economically disadvantaged.

Frankly there are a number of subgroups where we have a high percentage of those kids that are not meeting state standards and we need to attend to all those students. Their needs need to be a priority for us.

Q. What brings you into work every day?

A. Teenage kids are wonderful to be around. They're exciting, they're funny, they're ambitious, they're creative. They're just exciting to work with.

And school teachers as a group are a really fine group of people who care about what they do very much. They have a passion and intensity. They often tend to be pretty self-sacrificing and humble about what they do.

I've always liked the school organization in the same way I like hospitals: everybody is focused on the same purpose. Hospitals are about everybody there focused on helping people get well and everybody in schools is focused on helping kids move forward as healthy and positive as possible.

So it's cool to come each day to a place where everybody is focused on doing something really, really good for other people.

Q. Is there anything else people should know about you?

A. I would really like to know what people think about their school. What the students think about their school, what parents think about their school, what their hopes and dreams are for the school.

Whenever you change leadership it's an opportunity for people to have input. There's a transition point where there's an opening between the previous leaders and before the new leadership gets all committed to different things, different causes, certain goals.

There's an open period where things are in flux and during this period there's an opportunity for people who think they haven't been heard on a subject or issue to be heard on that subject or issue. So come one, come all.