eDragon News reporter Lilly Chang recently sat down with Principal Dale Keldrauk to talk about his 10 years at Pennekamp and to give us an inside view of his job here as the 'Dragon-in-Chief'.

Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself?

This is my 11^th year at Pennekamp, and prior to that I was principal for six years in Palos Verdes. My daughter Andrea, 25, is now teaching there as of this year, in Palos Verdes at Ridgecrest Intermediate School. She’s an English teacher teaching 6^th and 7^th grade. My younger son Eric is 22 and just graduated this last May from UC Berkeley with a degree in engineering, and now is back there doing his masters degree on a scholarship. This is kind of a big summer for my wife, a sort of emancipation from our financial obligations to our children, not fully but for the most part they’re on their own! At home we’ve got a couple of very spoiled cats and fish. My wife manages the credit union for El Camino College and has been in that position for many many years. We’ve lived in Manhattan Beach for over 30 years, so being at Pennekamp is truly a homecoming for me. My heart is in Manhattan Beach. Both my kids went all the way through Manhattan Beach schools from PEP all the way through 12^th grade at Mira Costa. It’s really great to be back home.  I really like working in the community where I live. I can’t go anywhere without running into people I know.  That’s a positive thing!  Whether at the mall or at restaurants I run into families, and it’s always kind of a nice thing.

What do you enjoy the most about being Principal?

I’m a people person. I like being around the kids, the parents, the teachers, and the staff. I guess just the whole feeling of being part of the community and doing a job that’s appreciated.  We do well with the staff working as a team.  That is what’s the most satisfying for me. Just the feeling that we’re all working towards the same common goal and that the people get along here. There’s a real atmosphere of family here at Pennekamp.  The parents and the kids and the staff all believe that it’s not just a place where you send your children off to school for six hours a day, but that Pennekamp is a hub of the community. We still have a real strong, rigorous academic push, but also at Pennekamp people care about people and we care not only about the kids but also about the whole family. The parents here are very intimately involved with the school, even if some parents don’t have the time to come and volunteer and do things of that nature.  School’s still a big deal to them, and one of the best pieces of evidence to support that would be Back to School Night. It was virtually standing room only in every classroom. Almost all the parents come out to that kind of thing here and it sends a very very strong and clear message to kids that parents value education, that education is an important part of your life, that it’s an important part of what we believe in as a family, and that we want you to be education oriented. I mean, this is a community where I would imagine that just about every parent fully expects their child is going to go off to college someday.

What are your biggest successes in your career?

Really the biggest successes for me are when I see kids come back and I see what they’ve done for themselves. Ten years ago or so, I got an invitation to a graduation from a child that I had as an elementary school student and it was for getting her master’s degree! I love seeing these kinds of things, seeing kids grow up and become successful. I had a really interesting thing that happened at the end of last year. I was going to a school board meeting and part of the meeting was recognition for our classified personnel, but the very first thing on the agenda was that the school district was receiving, from American Honda, a grant for a goodly chunk of money to go towards technology.  I recognized the name of the person doing the presenting! He was a young man who I’d had as a 4^th grade student many, many years ago, and to see how he’s done very well and gotten himself into a really top position in a company, that to me is how I measure my success. Probably the greatest measurement of success for me is just to see how these kids go on and do well later in life. That’s what gives me the greatest satisfaction!

What does the Staff do on Staff Development Days?

Staff development varies from year to year, depending on the focus and what’s happening. In the last couple years we’ve spent a lot of time coordinating the ROAR (Reading Organized Around Results) program. Writing has been a huge focus for us.  We’ve adopted a program that started with Mrs. Curry in the 5^th grade.  It’s a great program called Step Up to Writing and we’re carrying it down to other grade levels too. When we have our next staff development day, which is going to be the 20^th of October, we’re going to be having some time in the morning where some representatives are coming out from our new textbook companies, one from Harcourt and one from Houghton Mifflin. They will be coming in and provide in-service training for the teachers on the use of the textbooks in the morning.  We’ll be focusing on writing in the afternoon. So staff development applies to curricula areas, but oftentimes things that are kind of our current focal areas are the things we try to concentrate on, such as our adoption of new social studies textbooks.

What does a typical day look like for you?

What would a typical day look like? Usually I arrive around 7:30 am and the first thing I’m going to do is see if there any hot spots, so to speak. I like to be visible, so I like to get out on the playground. I like to be out and around the classrooms.  It’s good management and it’s good public relations. Getting to know the kids and their parents is one of the best things that I do to really connect myself to our community. I like to, whenever possible and at least a couple of times a week, go through the classrooms even if it’s only spending a minute or two in the classrooms, just so I can have a finger on the pulse of what’s happening curriculum wise, to see what’s going on at the school. I certainly have a certain degree of paperwork, emails, all that kind of thing that I need to take care on any given day.  One of the interesting things about being an educational manager as opposed to being a manager in other areas, is that we have more things that probably impact our day that you don’t necessarily expect. It’s hard for me to put on a calendar and say I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that, sometimes I can. Sometimes I can have a list of things and I can just go right through them, and some days I won’t get to any of those because management always has to take precedence. I can have a situation where a child is having a problem.  This morning we had a kindergartener that was having a really tough morning and I went to go to help that child and helped get him back on track.

On any given day it can be a variety of different things. It’s middle management completely and I really like what I do! I like the contact with the people. I like being able to make an organization run and feel like things are getting done and that you’re orchestrating all of the things that are happening and bringing them into a cohesive working endeavor where the kids are happy, the teachers are doing well and are happy, where we’re keeping the kids learning, and the parents are satisfied with what’s going on! And I like that, I mean it’s a challenge but it’s a good challenge, particularly when things go well and we receive reinforcement like getting high API scores.

So the day can have all manners of things, from taking care of just even the little things, like making sure the clocks are working, planning for meetings, periodic meetings with parents. As an example today, we had a new student that came in, so I took some time just to get to know the child and to sit down with the parents and tell them a little bit about the school. I’ll be planning for our staff meeting tomorrow, making sure that things are in line, getting the agenda taken care of and planning an activity that we’re going to be doing tomorrow night. Several of us are going to the City Council meeting where we’re going to be giving the City Council an award because they helped us finance our 50^th anniversary garden. The City really put in a lot of money to do some of the infrastructural work and we wanted to thank them for that.  Just lots and lots of things you know, and it’s kind of like running a household. You do what you have to do to make it work, at a lot of different levels. There’s nothing that I would ask anybody else to do here that I wouldn’t do myself.

Would you like to communicate anything else to our readers?

I know I say it a lot, but I really want to make sure that everybody knows just how much we do appreciate what our community does and I think that that is just an absolutely critical ingredient to what the personality and the culture of this school really are. The parent involvement and what the parents do, the fact that we do so well on things like state testing, and that Pennekamp does enjoy a good reputation. A lot of that goes towards the parents. It’s an incredible group of people that put a lot of time and effort in, and they put their money where their mouth is, so to speak. I mean they not only donate in terms of dollars, but donate their time to make the school what it is, and that’s the thing that I think really makes PENNEKAMP an outstanding school. Our parents make the difference!