After a full year on the job as Akins ECHS’s top leader, Principal Michael Herbin, is sharing his vision and priorities with the school community ahead of the start of classes on Aug. 14.
The Eagle’s Eye staff interviewed Herbin on Aug. 9 to ask about what he has learned and what he hopes to accomplish this year, including new policies for students to always wear ID badges on campus.
The Eagle’s Eye: After a year at Akins, what have you enjoyed the most?
Micheal Herbin: “I think I would say just relationships with people. Just getting to know the staff, getting to know the kids, the parents, the community. You know, we have a great community obviously. It’s really big you know. It’s a huge school, huge community. But everybody really is awesome. And it’s just been really good to get to know all the teachers and everybody and to build relationships with them. I think for me, that’s probably the number one thing.”
EE: Compared to what you already knew about Akins. Were you surprised about anything that you experienced as a principal last year?
MH: “It was hard to grasp the size, the sheer amount [of students] at Akins. You know, it’s tough to kind of understand what it’s like to have 2,700 kids in a school, all moving at the same time. And just the amount of teachers, teaching staff, teacher assistants, front office staff, and all of that. You can see the numbers on paper, but really until you experience it, and have to try to manage it. It’s kind of like it was a little surprise.”
EE: What has given you the most stress as the principal?
MH: “Maybe staffing. That’s another thing that comes along with just a really large school. So we always have a large number of positions that we have to fill every single year. Last year that was really stressful. We started the school year off with a few vacancies. So we had some long-term subs that started right off the bat. So this school year we wanted to make sure like really 100% make sure that we are not in that same situation.”
EE: What do you think needs to change Akins?
MH: “It’s really more about continuing to improve. I think that there’s always areas where we continue to look for opportunities to do better. For instance, we meet all the time. We talk through academics, we talk through students systems, we talk through human behavior management, we talk through just the building and what needs to happen there and we talked through all these pieces, and we’re not in a bad spot. But we just want to make sure that we focus on, always focus on continuing to improve and improve all of our systems and structures on campus.”
EE: Will there be any new initiatives students should know about this year?
MH: “One of the things we’re really trying to push this year is going to be IDs. We didn’t have IDs printed until six weeks or something like that, and so we really want to try to have IDs ready for kids on the first day of school. So we can use a picture from last year and then we can replace that picture once we get the new IDs so we can kind of have the expectation for kids to be required to carry them every day.”
EE: What is going to be addressed about safety and security issues this year?
MH: “With safety and security, it’s really about monitoring, so it’s about eyes. It’s about having people out in places, and so for us it’s just making sure that as an entire staff we all kind of chip in and make sure that we’re monitoring, right. It’s thinking about how can we get more adults out in hallways, make sure more adults are out in common areas, during passing periods. We’re such a big school with so much ground to cover that can be kind of tough sometimes.”
