With a new school year comes new beginnings, and at some Guam Department of Education schools, some changes.

KUAM sat down with the principals of John F. Kennedy High School, Simon Sanchez High School, and Tamuning Elementary to discuss how they plan to use tools from GDOE’s ongoing leadership academy to support these updates.

“What we’ve done through this leadership academy is just to allow us to collaborate further to ensure that the processes and the planning that we’re doing are going to work for both schools and both students,” said JFK Principal Asherdee Rosete. 

For principal Dr. Asheree Rosete at JFK and Principal Carla Masnayon at Simon Sanchez, that means continuing a double session schedule, now with a focus on combatting learning loss, adding 50 more minutes of instructional time, along with other schools on the same schedule.

 “For Simon Sanchez, we will be ending our school day at 5:50 pm–so that’s a change our community will be going through. Of course, we’re gonna use the first two weeks to kind of observe the impact of that change,” said Masnayon. 

The principals say this also means a tighter transition process as islanders leave campus and sharks come on, a new change they hope to monitor during the first two weeks with leeway to adjust.

Meanwhile, Tamuning Elementary School Principal Dr. Carla Aguon is also preparing for change, as this year marks the official merger between her school and the now decommissioned Lyndon B. Johnson Elementary.

She says the leadership seminar offers a chance to gain new insights as a principal and refresh on policies and other key priorities.

“For us, the big part of it is that we are excited to be coming together as one whole community–not having to run things separately under two different campuses–just being able to become unified as one and to share one common idea, one common practice, and now, the teachers actually get to collaborate together,” said Dr. Carla Aguon, Tamuning Elementary Principal. 

The five-day training is expected to wrap up on the 29th.