Sarah Henderson

Five minutes after the bell rings on a Friday afternoon in May, principal Jacqueline McEvoy’s office at Palo Alto High School is still rumbling with activity. The office in the Tower Building is chaotic with murmurs of multiple conversations and the sight of students rushing by administrators and faculty. At the end of the hallway, past two secretaries, a meeting ends and McEvoy is left in her office examining the different possibilities for the new bell schedule. By this time next year, students at Paly will still be in school because of a later, 8:15 a.m. start.

Reaching this point in the decision-making process for schedule change has not been easy. It has been a tumultuous path of three years for McEvoy to improve the decision-making process at a school that, she says, has not made a major decision in many years.

“This bell schedule is the first big decision that we’ve made in 15 or 20 years,” she says during a discussion which is likely to be her last major student publication interview in her time at Paly. “So when you don’t make major decisions sometimes you lose the process. In the last three years, we really had

to reinvent how we make decisions, who should be included, who makes the final decision.”

Student input has been especially important to her, despite the negative critique she has received of avoiding student opinions.

“We actually do listen to students,” she heartily laughs. “We actually do.”

Concerns over the avoidance of student opinions have ignited multiple accusations that McEvoy was changing the Paly identity, to the point where students organized a sit-in and posted posters with the words, “Doesn’t feel like Paly anymore, does it?” in protest of Egg Wars suspensions. In her first year, her decision to use Breathalyzers at dances pitted her against students right off the bat. Then came the drama about social studies teacher Mike McGovern’s reenactments, the replacement of limos with prom buses and more recently, the Egg Wars and suspensions that caused Palo Alto Weekly to choose McEvoy as School Newsmaker of the Year for 2009. The media and community have both voiced negative opinions of her, but to her, the criticisms are just part of the job.

Now, with her January resignation notice about to take effect, McEvoy has announced this will be her last school year at Paly. With a resume of being a physics and calculus teacher, principal for seven years at San Mateo High School, principal for seven years at a continuation school and now three years at Paly, McEvoy says she is ready for her next challenge in the world of education.

“Part of me would like to work with coaching principals. I really love working with curricular instruction, and seeing how to have the best curricular instruction for kids,” she says. “I could also teach at the college level. It [my future] is going to be in education whatever it is; I just don’t know what it’s going to be yet.”

Ironically, while McEvoy says her job at Paly has been a dream job, she feels her own high school teachers would be surprised to see her choice of profession.

“I think that if you were to go into my high school and say, ‘Jacquie is now the principal of Palo Alto High School,’ there would be teachers and administrators who would be stunned that I went into teaching and became a high school principal,” she says. “Academically, I was challenging to teachers. I was pretty bored in high school. I don’t think I was there half my senior year.”

Besides wanting to conquer something new in the world of education, McEvoy feels she has reached a milestone in her life. At the end of this summer, all three of her sons will have graduated from college.

“My last son graduates from college this summer and all of sudden I’m in a situation in my life where I have supported three sons through college as a single parent,” she says. “I can live wherever I want, and do anything that I want now.”

She adds that her sons have always remained her most important priority. Therefore, her role as a mother has had the greatest impact over her controversial decisions in the last three years.

“For decisions I make around the school as principal, I always ask myself what would I want if my sons were students here,” McEvoy says. “That I’m leading a school where I would want my sons to attend is really important to me.”

Specifically, McEvoy defends her 2008 decision to Breathalyze every school-dance attendee, defining it as a matter of student safety. She says that Paly went from dozens of suspensions of students for alcohol use to zero at the dances.

“That [decision] protects students,” McEvoy says. “You always make the decision that you know is best for students, even if it’s an unpopular decision.”

Since the disputes of her first year at Paly, McEvoy has gradually learned the importance of communication in describing the reasoning behind her decisions. According to McEvoy, her first year was difficult, as she felt that people were often critical instead of willing to meet her halfway.

“As the year progressed, I really tried to reach out so that people could feel that they could come talk to me,” she says. “I learned to communicate so that people know where I’m coming from.”

Her favorite form of collecting student opinions is visiting classrooms to talk to students. While she enjoys hearing the students’ opinions face-to-face, this strategy has also proven to be incredibly time-consuming.

Her greatest struggle in finalizing decisions has therefore been finding the best way to gather student input.

“I can go around to classrooms and present, but then how many classrooms are enough?” she says. “If we do voluntary surveys, we maybe get 100 to 200 kids. If we require a survey, then people misinterpret it as a vote, and it’s not.”

Instead, McEvoy hopes to someday see a “rep” system put in place, where every fourth period class has two representatives that would attend student leadership meetings. The representatives could then discuss with their classes and report back.

The results of the changing bell schedule can also be attributed to the work of the bell schedule action team. Action teams began last year and McEvoy says the organization of action teams has been incredibly successful. According to McEvoy, each action team has approximately 30 teachers working on specific topics, including instructional strategy and curricular alignment.

“The teachers self-select what group they’re on, so they’re working on a project that they want to work on and with the teachers they want to work with,” she says. 

The action teams, McEvoy believes, will help create future leaders, because to her, the teachers are the ones who will be carrying on the school culture after students graduate.

Another goal for McEvoy in the last three years has been preparing every single student at Paly for college. She takes pride in leading the faculty to focus on this common goal.

“We talk about college readiness for all students, but at the end of four years, not all students are college ready,” she says. “It means that we shouldn’t have science courses that are not college-recommending or graduation requirements that are so low that you can’t possibly get into college.”

While McEvoy and her team of administrators have had overall success, the local media and community have been unremorseful with McEvoy. Comments on Palo Alto Online and The Paly Voice often attacked her. Although she accepts that the published opinions come with the job of being principal, she found the untrue comments hurtful.

“There is a tendency for people to make really quick judgments,” she says. “There were times when I felt like if you would just sit down and have a conversation with me, we could talk about what that looks like or why I made that decision. A lot of times people say things publicly in the local paper about me and I’ll think, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met that person or I don’t think that person has ever come to talk to me.’”

McEvoy also found comments about students and parents difficult to read.

“One of the things that came up during Egg Wars were mean-spirited things said about the students and the parents of students that were involved, and that was also very hard for me because students make mistakes,” she says. “It upsets me the most when individuals in the community make judgments about me, the school and especially about the students that just aren’t true. I’m very protective of the students at Paly.”

Despite the negative comments and opposing opinions, McEvoy has always stuck to her values and beliefs, while trying to show a positive face.

“I think people think that there’s been this real negative side of my job because of [the comments] but that just goes with the territory,” she says. “In the end, if I think that it’s in the best interest of students in the long run, then I’m going to make that decision regardless of how I get portrayed in the local press.”

However, McEvoy still respects the student publications on campus, even to the point where her first advice to the incoming principal was to open up to the publications. After the announcement of Phil Winston as the new principal, Winston soon called McEvoy, asking how The Campanile had already found the way to contact him and ask for an interview.

“Mr. Winston called me last night,” she says. “He said that students had already contacted him from The Campanile. I said, ‘Welcome to my world. ‘He said, ‘How did they know how to get in touch with me?” I said, ‘The Campanile has their ways.”

McEvoy then told Winston her rule has always been to give the students the scoop, despite the fact that this has not always made her popular with the regular press. Besides advice on the media, McEvoy also gave Winston other advice.

“The second piece of advice is you communicate, you communicate, and when you think you’re done, you communicate some more,” she says. “And whenever you’re stuck and you don’t know what to do, you always make a decision based on what you think is in the best interest of the students.”

After being hired during the summer, and not having an opportunity to get to know the school during the school year, McEvoy wanted to make sure that Winston would have a different experience, so that the community could get to know Winston and welcome him to the school.

“I came in on July 1, and there was no one here,” she says. “We really need to, as a school, set up a way for him [Winston] to meet as many people as possible, because as a school you really do have to reach out. It’s harder for one person to reach out to 5,000 people than the other way around. Communication goes both ways.”

As the end nears, McEvoy looks forward to graduation.

“What really defines you as principal is when you’re standing on stage at graduation,” she says. “When I’m standing on that stage and shaking every students’ hand that’s getting that diploma, it’s kind of the highlight of that year, because you realize that every one of those students has a history about how they got to that stage. A graduation ceremony at a high school is when it all comes together and symbolizes that it’s all been worth it.”

At Paly, McEvoy has found a strong sense of community and identity, rich in history. There have been ups and downs to her career here, yet McEvoy has still accomplished many of her goals. In her parting words to seniors, she sums up the beliefs she has carried with her through all the controversy and drama of the last three years.

“For the seniors, the best advice I can give is that you need to be true to yourself; you need to follow your heart; and you need to do what’s right. When people do that, everything else falls into place.”