Scott Dalton has taken on the role of principal as Jonathan Paschal into a new role as Assistant Superintendent for Brunswick County Schools. While everyone may wonder what changes are coming about, they might also wonder who is coming about.
Dalton has been in the NC school system for twenty-seven years and moved to Brunswick County to serve as South Brunswick Middle School principal last year.
“Leadership knew that Mr. Paschal could be moving into his new role and that there was an opening here,” said Dalton. “With my previous high school experience, my prior 26 years before last year at the high school level, I think district leadership felt that with that experience and the things that we were doing last year at South Middle that were going very well would benefit here.”
Dalton is not at all new to the high school experience; he worked in many high schools, including Ledford High School, Central Davidson High School, West Davidson High School, and East Davidson, and opened up a brand new high school, Oak Grove, before relocating to the Brunswick Islands area.
“I love working with high school age kids,” said Dalton. “Just everything that comes with high school, among the important stuff during the day with the classes and the instruction and those sorts of things, but all the other stuff: the homecoming, the ball games, the extracurriculars that makes high school kind of special. I missed that last year, and this year I’m very excited.”
Dalton was a teacher and coach for fourteen years before moving into administration, teaching mainly civics and US History and coaching boys basketball and girls and boys soccer over his career. He then spent four years as an assistant principal for four years before moving into a principal position.
Becoming a principal comes with many responsibilities, like managing staff, evaluating performances, maintaining curriculum standards, overseeing school events, and even dealing with student consequences. With all this responsibility, it takes a mentally strong person to carry out all these tasks.
“I thought I would probably teach and coach for my whole career,” said Dalton. “I was very passionate about it, but I had someone that I had a tremendous amount of respect for–someone who encouraged me. They saw something in me that they thought I would do a good job in. I respected them enough to listen and I got my masters, didn’t know if I would ever use it. But then that same person who encouraged me to get my masters was a principal at another school in my district, and he offered me a job and I thought if I’m going to do this, this is the one person I would leave teaching and coaching to go work with and learn from. It took a while, but I figured out this is something I enjoy and thought I was pretty good at, so I stuck with it.”
It’s essential to have the role of teaching before administration; the principal’s leadership role should be someone who can empathize and understand what teachers and other staff are dealing with teaching the future while still keeping it exciting and engaging students. While West is a highly supported school, everyone, especially teachers, always needs extra support, and Dalton has expressed he has every plan to do so.
“Anytime you go somewhere new you want to leave it better than you found it,” said Dalton. “So I hope that we can grow in the classroom. I would like to see our achievement scores get better in areas that we test. I’d like to see our graduation rate improve. I just want to help our kids grow and improve academically in their achievements, but I also want to help hopefully have a role in growing things outside of the classroom, hopefully with more extracurricular opportunities and more things that make the high school experience more well-rounded and fun.”
While West has a reasonable graduation rate of about eighty-two percent, growth is definitely possible, and recently released test scores show some areas for improvement as well. While we exceed many expectations–taking a variety of courses, completing various certifications, performing in sports and in the arts–there will always be room to grow.
“I take a great deal of pride in what I do,” said Dalton. “I want to make sure when we do something, it’s done at the very highest level, I take it very personally. I think it just helps us be better committed to ourselves and to our students and staff and make sure we provide them with the best environment to be successful and I don’t take it lightly. I’m gonna work as hard as anybody to help things get better. So when I talk about things that need to improve, it’s because you always want to improve. I don’t think we have problems, but there are always things we need to do better. I think we have the right people in place to do that.”
