Major personnel changes mid-school year are always a challenge for any campus and Akins is no exception.

This year, Akins experienced the leadership turnover in the Social Services Academy two times as it started the school with an interim assistant principal and then after a new assistant principal hired in late December only lasted about a month before leaving Akins.

Carrie Carter-Walker is the new Assistant Principal (AP) for the Social Services Academy. In early February Green Tech Academy lost its Academy Coordinator and a replacement was not announced until late March. AVID teacher Christina Garcia-Mata, a long-time Akins teacher, was appointed to fill Green Tech Academy coordinator position.

Carrie Carter Walker was an assistant principal at LBJ Early College High School before transferring to Akins in late February. She said she loves it here.

“I tell people all the time this is like heaven for me because where I came from was a completely different culture,” Carter-Walker said.

Carter-Walker said she loves everything about the Social Services Academy, including the structure, the energy, and the students. However, she has goals on how it can be improved even more. She said she hopes to branch out to area hospitals to increase the number of students battling for internships provided by the academy.,“(I want to) continue to graduate even more students directly into the field with their certification is my main goal for them,” Carter-Walker said.

Even though Carter-Walker loves the Social Services Academy, she is not pleased with the condition the portable classrooms, where most of the academy is located. Carter-Walker is contacted with complaints every day about termite issues, water issues, and others. She has recently contacted people in the district office to fix the air conditioning in the portables, and plans to do many more things to the portables,

“(The) portables are just really not in good shape so I had to make a lot of different calls,” she said.

Former Green Tech Academy Coordinator Rachel Willey played many roles at this school, other than the academy coordinator. She was head cheerleading coach and coordinator of the student ambassador program Te cheerleaders still do not have a permanent head coach. Garcia-Mata, who has been the AVID coordinator and AVID teacher for almost 10 years at Akins, said she needed a new challenge to grow as an educator. Garcia-Mata is new to the Green Tech Academy but enjoys the people and students who are involved with the academy,

“(It’s a) solid group of people that I would be excited to work with outside of my own previous academy,” Garcia-Mata said.

Being a teacher is sometimes challenging and time-consuming, especially if a teacher just became the new coordinator for the academy. The hardest challenge Garcia-Mata is facing is time, and learning how to do her new role,“(I’m) still trying to learn and do some of the stuff that the academy coordinators are expected to do,” Garcia-Mata said.

Garcia-Mata does not feel the need to change anything at the moment, but she hopes to hear feedback from the academy.

“I don’t want to come in and try to change anything especially if it’s working, but I am going to be open to ideas,” she said.