Heather Isom was approved as the next principal of Sedona Red Rock High School at the Sedona-Oak Creek School District board meeting on May 2.

Isom is being promoted from her current position as assistant principal and anticipates starting in her new role on Saturday, July 1.

Isom will be replacing Dennis Dearden, who had been serving dual roles as principal and Sedona-Oak Creek School District superintendent. Dearden announced his impending retirement as superintendent at the May 2 meeting.

Dearden said that Isom’s eventual nomination resulted from an initiative over the last few years to promote from within the district, citing the difficulty in hiring for administrative roles in education. He said his first step in the process was putting Isom through an intense year-and-a-half leadership training program through the Yavapai County Educational Services Agency.

“I am really happy for him that he gets to go into retirement after such an impactful tenure here,” Isom said. “I will miss him as my mentor and my friend. He really unified the stakeholders of the district. When I first came here, and he wasn’t here, there seemed to be a lot of division between the school board, teachers, parents and community, and he worked hard to bring us together.”

Isom became assistant principal this last year and has been with SOCSD since 2017, where she generally taught junior and senior level social studies, United States history, government and economics.

“I moved here for personal reasons. It was me and my daughter who was starting 10th grade and we loved it, so we stuck around,” Isom said. “I loved the school community, administration and the potential that’s here. We have a really supportive community like I’ve never seen before in any school I’ve been in. They seem willing to roll their sleeves up and get to work and provide relief support to students.”

“We have a changing demographic,” Isom said. “Year after year, we have more English language learners. We need to make sure that they’re getting the reading and writing support … and going forward. Our test scores are lower for these groups, so we want to make sure that we’re addressing these gaps.”

SOCSD has hired an English as a Second Language expert who will start in the fall to help resolve these issues, Isom pointed out. She said that community involvement is critical, as is providing assistance to families to navigate ESL support services.

Isom credited one of her college professors with helping to develop her teaching philosophy and her ideas of what she wants to instill in her students.

“One of the reasons that I wanted to go into education is because I really felt like I didn’t learn anything in high school,” Isom said. “Until I had a professor who was focused on discussions and critical thinking and looking at different perspectives and investigating. That’s how I learned and I wanted to pass that on.”

Employing those skills in the aftermath of the forced closures of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a huge challenge because of lingering effects on student attendance.

“It didn’t feel like a structured school after COVID,” Isom said. “Because we couldn’t maintain the same requirements with attendance, tardies, discipline. Because kids could elect to be home or not be home. The state didn’t mandate attendance for those two years.”

Isom said that this has caused difficulty in maintaining classroom attendance and has forced the district to reassert what the state of Arizona attendance requirements are, including withholding completion credit from students who do not meet those standards. Isom credited this coercive approach with producing a drastic improvement in attendance numbers.

SOCSD had over 100 students with more than 200 missed class periods last year. The state mandates that students be in class 90% of the time, giving a maximum of 108 allowable missed class period during the 180 mandated days of instruction. This year there haven’t been any students with more than 200 absences, Isom said.

“For the most part, we have reduced the number by hundreds by holding [students and families] accountable and making it very clear that kids will lose credit if they have excess absences,” Isom said. “Moving forward, we can start focusing on seeing where they’re at [with] their reading and writing levels and doing very targeted interventions on how we get those [scores] to improve with math.”