Just a week after Sedona Red Rock High School Principal and Sedona-Oak Creek School District Superintendent Dennis Dearden wrote a letter announcing the mid-year resignation of theater teacher Max Peters, another SRRHS teacher resigned.
Haley Clark started at SRRHS as a first-year teacher. She taught world history to students in grades nine to 12 until Tuesday, Feb. 18. The 21-year-old, originally from Wyoming, moved to Sedona after graduating from Black Hills State University in South Dakota.
Clark told the Sedona Red Rock News that she left SRRHS because she was accepted to an Arizona State University graduate program to study World War II history.
While she is still living in the Verde Valley, she will be relocating to the Phoenix area this summer to start the program.
“It pulled at the heart strings for me leaving [Sedona] Red Rock High School, but this is the best opportunity for myself,” Clark said. “I absolutely loved it. I loved the administration at Red Rock, the kids there — Red Rock is a really, really great school.”
Clark added that there weren’t any challenges that stood out to her as out-of-the-ordinary that every other first-year teacher wouldn’t have experienced.
SRRHS principal Dennis Dearden saw it a bit differently.
“There were some things that we were concerned about and students were concerned about and parents were concerned about.” Dearden said. “We completed everything we needed to do and she decided to resign.”
Dearden made it clear that although it didn’t necessarily apply to Clark’s situation, he said the SRRHS administrators take every concern brought to their attention with the utmost importance.
“What we try to do is what’s best for kids always. We look out for the welfare and protection of kids in everything we do, so we take everything that parents bring to us or students bring to us and we take that very seriously,” Dearden said. “Sometimes there’s something, sometimes there’s not, but we see to it to look into it. We owe it to the students.”
Temporary substitutes have filled in for Clark’s classes while they try to hire a replacement with only three months of the school year left. Two roving substitutes that worked for the school district recently took over for Peters’ theater classes.
“We’ve created some assignments for [Clark’s students] for the week and [Assistant Superintendent] Deana DeWitt is working with the subs to make sure they have strong lesson plans and projects for this week,” Dearden said.
In a letter to the parents of students in Clark’s history classes, Dearden said that besides looking for a new teacher or long-term substitute for the rest of the school year, the administration was also “investigating curricular options that will provide meaningful, rigorous learning experiences for all students. These may include a blended, online and direct teaching format.”
However, online classes may not be necessary. Dearden told the NEWS that he would be interviewing a candidate for the position on Friday, Feb. 28. Another possibility Dearden said he was looking into was reaching out to Yavapai College to see if there were any current or retired teachers from the college who could fill in.
Although two staff members leaving in just a little over a week apart in the middle of the school year might seem alarming, Dearden said that it is not unusual for a few teachers to leave the district most years, in Sedona and elsewhere.
“In a big district it goes unnoticed; in a small district three to four [teachers leaving] tends to be a big deal,” he said.
In fall, a government teacher at SRRHS resigned, citing issues with finding affordable housing in the area as his reason. Dearden noted that teachers who resign mid-school year without having an investigation against them are fined $1,000 for breaking their contracts.
As was the case with the teacher who resigned in fall, Dearden said some teachers “decided to move on knowing that they were going to be penalized, but the burden of the cost of living here outweighed the penalty and they left.”
Alexandra Wittenberg can be reached at 282-7795 ext 126 or at awittenberg@larsonnewspapers.com
