About to retire: Schools chief Barbara Grohe looks back at her time in Kent

(Story follows event listing below)

Event will honor Grohe: The Kent School District Board of Directors will host a public program at 4 p.m. June 11 at Kent-Meridian High School Performing Arts Center to honor outgoing Superintendent Barbara Grohe for her 10 years of service to the district and 41-year career.

For more information, call the Kent School District’s Community Connections Department at 253-373-7524.

Barbara Grohe had always known that her place would be in schools. Even as a child growing up outside Pittsburgh, Penn., Grohe knew where her future lay.

“I was one of those children that played school all the time,” she said, “and I played teacher.”

Grohe, 63, has been playing teacher ever since, first in a classroom in her hometown school district and then as superintendent of three different districts, including the past 10 years in Kent, where her 41-year career will finally come to an end this month.

Seated in her office of the past decade, Grohe said that 10 years is enough time at the head of a district (her prior two stints as a superintendent also lasted 10 years) and that she was looking forward to retirement, though not to slowing down.

“Sixty-three is the new 40!” she said, a devilish grin spreading across her face.

Before she was the superintendent in Kent or Iowa City or Shorewood, Wisc., before she was even a teacher in her home district of Arnold, Penn., Grohe’s parents insisted she study hard and get her high school diploma.

As immigrants themselves, Grohe’s parents never graduated high school and they wanted a better life for Grohe and her six siblings and to them, a diploma was the key.

“Their goal was ‘you can be anything you want but first you have to have a high-school education,’” she said. “From very early on, that was the key.

“I think it was instrumental in how I approach decision making,” she added.

After graduation, Grohe became the first of her family to attend college without the help of the G.I. Bill, pursuing her childhood dream of becoming a teacher at Clarion State College in Clarion, Penn.

Her first job led her right back to Arnold, where she taught in her home district before heading off to Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, where she earned her master’s in education with a speciality in reading.

Soon after, Grohe moved to Wisconsin with her new husband, Joe, and started working on her Ph.D. in urban education with a minor in political science. She also got a job as an assistant superintendent before taking over the top schools job in Shorewood, Wisc.

After 10 years in Shorewood, Grohe moved to the superintendent role in Iowa City, Iowa, where she spent another 10 years before applying for the top spot in Kent.

During her time in Iowa City, Grohe won the 1998 National Superintendent of the Year honor, something she describes as “the most humbling experience of my life.”

While Grohe was happy in Iowa, she and her husband had vacationed in the Puget Sound area and she recalls thinking how nice it would be to live somewhere this beautiful.

She was also looking for new challenges, one a larger district could provide.

“What I really wanted to do was work my way to a big-city school district,” she said. When she was contacted by a consultant about the opening in Kent, Grohe said she was intrigued, and the more the consultant described the district, the more interested she became, especially hearing about the ethnic and economic diverwsity that was slowly building in the south King County city.

“That diversity was a draw for me too because that’s where I was heading,” she said, adding that Kent was literally twice the size of her district in Iowa. “It was kind of a go-to-the-kids-who-really-need-you thing.”

Upon her arrival, Grohe said she was impressed with the district’s reputation and how well it seemed to be regarded within the community.

“People would talk with great pride about their schools,” she said. “They would go on with great length about the quality of their schools.”

Grohe even recalls a prescient statement about what she in the district, telling the board during her interview “it’s pretty clear that within 10 years this will be a majority-minority school district.”

Ten years later, Grohe’s statement proved true.

When she was offered the gig, Grohe and her husband moved across the country.

I really enjoyed the board,” she said. “And there were good people here.

“The people make the school district.”

Looking back on her decade in Kent, Grohe admits getting nostalgic, but is quick to reel off a series of the highlights.

First on her mind is the opening of the Kent Phoenix Academy, the district’s first non-traditional high school.

“I loved the opportunity to get that school in place,” she said, reiterating her belief that a diploma is an “entry ticket” and adding that the qcademy allows more students to get that ticket.

Another highlight for Grohe was moving the ninth grades to the high school, as well as moving from a junior high to a middle school model, which focuses on smaller groups of students, instead of functioning simply as a “mini high school.”

Grohe is also proud of work with technology, the seeds of which she said were sown before her arrival. During her years at the helm, the district passed a technology levy which allowed for the one-to-one laptop program as well as making sure there are smartboards in every classroom and money to ensure the technology is updated when need be.

But Grohe is most proud of the district’s technology academies because of the new opportunities it creates for students.

“What really impresses me about KTA (Kent Technology Academy) is the depth and scope of the learning available to these

young people,” she said.

But despite much of the focus on the individual computers, Grohe insists it is not the machinery, but what it allows the teachers and students to do.

“It’s never been about the stuff,” she said. “It’s always been about what else does that provide for a student, how does it change their learning experience and does it make it better?”

Grohe is also proud of helping the district develop its motto: “Successfully prepare all students for their future.”

“Some school district did that for me,” she said. “I was prepared for my future.”

But her years in Kent have not been without challenges, among the top of which she said was helping the community understand the vast ethnic and economic diversity within the district and the challenges that come with it.

Grohe said it is difficult to make people understand that as the district becomes poorer, the implications of “relatively wide-spread poverty” takes a “new understanding” for teachers, students and parents.

“It has taken us a while for everyone to understand that all of the children are OUR children,” she said. “That’s been an ongoing challenge over the years.”

However, the most significant challenge all along has been the district’s budget. Even before this year, keeping the budget in check had been a “balancing act,” she said, because despite being one of the largest districts in the state, Grohe said it is one of the lowest-funded.

“Each year we get millions less than the districts around us,” she said, adding that it is difficult to provide the services needed in such a diverse community.

This year’s national and statewide recession has only made things more difficult.

“When the budget hit this year, there were just no more ways to balance it,” she said, adding that while residents may not see it, cuts were made to administration for the past several years.

“We’ve cut everything except teachers,” she said.

Unfortunately, this year that streak came to an end and reduction in force notifications went out in May.

“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” Grohe said, adding that while she hoped to spend her last few weeks in the schools, she has spent them trying to find ways to hire back teachers.

“I was a young teacher with a ton of student loans,” she said. “I know what that’s like.”

Despite the budget crisis, Grohe said she is proud of the district she is leaving for her replacement, Dr. Edward Vargas, who begins in July. She hopes her legacy will be that “children’s lives were changed because I was here.”

Despite retirement, Grohe does not plan too much lighter of a schedule and said she sees retirement as “payback time.” She is looking to spend more time with her husband, Joe, but is also the incoming president of the Kent Rotary club and will keep busy.

“I see it as an opportunity to do a lot of volunteer work,” she said.

But when the final bell rings and chalk dust settles on her long career in education, Grohe said the thing she will miss most will be what drew her into teaching in the first place: watching teachers do “that magic thing.”

“Watching a math teacher at work and the kids are involved with her, that’s my idea of a good time,” she said. “I don’t want to see a production, I want to see education live.

“It’s been a great ride.”