Pictured is Allyson Smith, Jamestown High School’s new principal. Smith said she plans to focus on student engagement and communication in her new role. Submitted photo

When it comes to the ever-evolving field of education, Allyson Smith acknowledges it’s difficult to predict what teaching may look like five years from now — let alone a decade.

But for Smith, Jamestown High School’s new principal, that crystal-ball like perception for her own career was much more telling 10 years ago.

“For my pathway, I kind of became that teacher-leader pretty quick in my career as a special education teacher,” she told The Post-Journal this week. “At some point, I kind of knew that I wanted to go into administration. That’s the path that I wanted to take just as a leader.”

Smith began her career as a private kindergarten lead teacher at KinderCare Learning Center in Webster, N.Y. Just getting her leg in the door proved tricky, having graduated college amid a recession.

Smith eventually arrived at Jamestown Public Schools where, for seven years, she worked as a special education teacher at Persell Middle School.

“That first day of teaching middle school, I actually just remember being incredibly excited,” she said, later adding, “I didn’t know that within 10 years I would have seen myself doing this, but I’m incredibly happy and blessed to be here.”

FOCUSING ON STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

Smith officially began her tenure as principal of Chautauqua County’s largest high school this past Jan. 16, succeeding Dana Williams. But she arrived at the East Second Street building in 2020, a time when COVID-19 upended how students were taught.

Prior to being named principal, Smith served as dean of students and later as an assistant principal.

In a recent interview, Smith acknowledged the impact COVID-19 has had on education, both for students and teachers. Her comments are supported by numerous studies, including one last spring by Harvard and Stanford universities that indicates the average U.S. public school student in grades 3-8 lost the equivalent of a half-year of learning in math and a quarter-year of learning in reading.

Smith said she’s focused on student engagement, which she believes will bolster participation and, ultimately, graduation rates in the high school.

“We’ve made a lot of gains to move away from COVID, but obviously there’s still those lingering effects that are going to continue,” she said.

How can that be accomplished?

“It’s a lot of working with families and it’s a lot of communication I think,” Smith responded. “We’ve got people out, maybe people at their homes, having those conversations about what it’s going to take for graduation, describing the different pathways that are available.”

Teachers at Jamestown High School, like many beginning in the spring of 2020, were forced to find alternative ways to engage students from afar. Some school districts fared better than others.

In early 2023, nearly three years after the pandemic began, an analysis by the Associated Press, Stanford University’s Big Local News project and Stanford education professor Thomas Dee found an estimated 230,000 students in 21 states whose absences could not be accounted for. These students, the AP reported, didn’t move out of state, and they didn’t sign up for private school or home-school, according to publicly available data.

Many schools have struggled to bring students back to the classroom. In Jamestown, the graduation rate is about 77%.

“I think it’s a struggle that everybody is seeing across our state and across our nation of re-engaging students post-COVID,” Smith said. “It’s definitely something that we’re working toward. We’re looking for the methods that work best all while just trying to keep in touch with these people and make sure that they know we’re here and the different ways that we can help engage their students.”

‘MODERNIZE OUR TEACHING’

Smith acknowledged her predecessor and his tenure with Jamestown Public Schools.

In an interview with The Post-Journal in June 2023, Williams said one of the most rewarding parts of his job was overcoming challenging times, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I took over in December of 2019, and then within three months, here comes pandemic time,” he said. “We went right into that, not having ever gone through anything remotely like that. Especially when everyone went to remote learning, it created a need to really pull together and do things out of our comfort zone and adjust, and just seeing how everybody really rose to that challenge.

“Just getting through that to where we are now and how it’s really improved how we can teach and how we can help kids learn, I think that’s been the most rewarding thing.”

Smith is now looking to leave her own mark as JHS principal.

“Mr. Williams has been a great leader for us here,” she said. “It’s not that I’m not going to follow in his footsteps, and it’s not that I’m going to make incredible changes next week. We definitely are looking over time to really modernize our teaching and make sure that we have those engagement strategies and learning opportunities for kids that are really going to provide them opportunities after high school.”

She noted the difficulties in predicting how technology may alter how students are taught in the future. Teachers already use a variety of programs and equipment to enhance their classrooms.

“When you ask what it’s going to look like in five years, I’m not sure that any of us even know that,” Smith said. “Technology is definitely changing the state of education at a fast rate and we are constantly getting professional development and learning. Sometimes kids are learning one step ahead of us.”

She added, “To guess what it’s going to look like is a little difficult because that’s just education and it does change so much since we were in school.”

Smith said incidents at the high school that may not always show the facility in the best light often are misleading or misunderstood. She alluded to quiet hallways between classes.

“People are here; people are teaching; people are learning,” she said. “When there is that negative press out there, it paints a picture. But if people were here, they would see a much different world than I think gets painted.”