Retiring Valley High principal Montoya fostered success

"The school is just a building," says Principal Ron Montoya while clearing out his Valley High School office on Wednesday.

The retiring principal has rarely sat secluded in his office since the district sent him in 12 years ago to improve test scores at the second poorest school in the country's fifth-largest district. Like a true-life version of Morgan Freeman in "Lean on Me," he roamed the halls determined to pick up and dust off the school near Sahara and Eastern avenues.

Once a predominately middle-class neighborhood, Valley was surrounded by barred-window homes and dogged by poor student performance. The previously Caucasian school had become 86 percent minority with half the students living under the poverty line, he says.

LIKE A MOVIE, IT TURNED AROUND

Students' annual test scores shifted from failing to high achieving in 2008-09, making it the first school in the country to demonstrate such growth under the federal No Child Left Behind law. About 90 percent of students were proficient in reading and writing in 2009-10, a tall hurdle in the highly Hispanic school where about 150 new students each year can't read, he says. The dropout rate has fallen from 13 percent of the students in 2003-04 to 4 percent in 2009-10.

But the white walls won't remember. They've already forgotten, wiped clean of his every knick-knack , waiting for the next principal.

In education, successes are fleeting, same as the students always leaving, being replaced. Like Montoya's office walls, the slate is swept clean.

The principal doesn't need a plaque on the wall or a schoolwide assembly to make his mark.

"The school is just a building," Montoya repeats on his last day, standing inside his empty office within an empty school, classrooms waiting for the summer's end. "When the kids come here, it comes to life."

He'll be gone by then but not forgotten, says Karen Jones, secretary to the assistant principal, who fondly remembers Montoya as her counselor at Las Vegas High School in the 1980s.

Not long ago, she was in Walmart when a man in his 30s noticed her Valley High School shirt. He asked whether Principal Montoya was still there.

"When I said yes, he uttered those words: 'You are the best.' "

"You remember that?" she replied.

Since 1999, Montoya has started every day on the intercom telling students, "You are the best."

"At first, I thought that's corny," Jones says. "But they really think about it."

"I shake everyone's hands in the halls and tell them that one thing essentially," Montoya says. "Nobody I know of tells their students they're smart."

His grandma, a migrant farm worker who had just a third-grade education, told him that constantly.

"It wasn't that I was necessarily smart but a mindset," he says of his grandma, who died in June at age 103.

SUPPORTIVE WORDS ARE A START

Telling someone they're smart won't make them an A student. But that's where it starts -- support -- knowing someone cares if you don't show up, says Andrea Liebl, a Valley High School special education teacher since 1983 and a 1975 Valley graduate.

"I honestly don't think many kids at Valley are told that, ever" before hearing it from Montoya, she says. "They start to believe it."

From there, Montoya and his teachers have developed a slew of programs to meet students' individual needs, from online credit recovery classes (used by 150 students a semester) to individual interventions with struggling students (providing specific guidance for each student and a mentor to constantly follow up with them) to after-school tutoring and bootcamps preparing for standardized tests.

"You're doggone right we teach to the test," he says. "That's how you ensure that they graduate."

The principal isn't just an educator, but also a supplemental parent.

"A lot of these kids don't have that parent," he says. "I become that."

The school used to have a medical clinic but received criticism for overstepping its bounds as a school, Montoya says.

"Kids are getting poorer," he says. "They need more services."

The clinic has closed because of recession cutbacks, but Montoya hopes it will reopen.

CAN THE MANTRA CONTINUE WITHOUT HIM?

"When you succeed, there's a lot of resistance to do what you're doing," Montoya says.

But that's not the case at Clark High School, the only other school to shift from failing No Child Left Behind to high achieving. The principal, Jillyn Pendleton, was Montoya's curriculum administrator for four years before taking over Clark High, near Decatur Boulevard and Desert Inn Road.

The school has many of the same problems as Valley High School: high transiency, many limited-English speakers and 30 percent of students in poverty. And it also has seen substantial improvement in its proficiency rate.

Pendleton brought many of Montoya's principles and programs with her, such as online credit recovery, Saturday and after-school tutoring, and individual interventions for struggling students.

"This is most important," she says of students' custom plans for digging out of their holes. "It gives them hope. They can see the light at the end of the tunnel."

Pendleton has even looked back to Montoya's "You are the best " mantra and developed one of her own, taking pride in her school's success as a "high achieving -- exemplary turnaround" school in No Child Left Behind.

"Who are we?" Pendleton will ask at assemblies.

"Clark Chargers!"

"What are we?"

"High achievers!"

Contact reporter Trevon Milliard at tmilliard@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0279.