Menchville High School has a new addition to their administrative staff, Mrs. Kelly Smith, the new assistant principal. Our former assistant principal, Mrs. Banks, left over the summer for an opportunity at a school in Williamsburg.

This isn’t Mrs. Smith’s first year at Menchville; she worked here before. “I’m enjoying this year at Menchville very much, it’s good to be back and in a different position, so that’s a good challenge”. I know you all are thinking why come back to Menchville if you’ve already done your time? Well, Mrs. Smith is actually a graduate of Menchville High School. “I graduated from Menchville in 1995 and I love the school spirit. There’s no high school I’d rather be at then Menchville.”

Before Menchville, Mrs. Smith worked at the Central Office in curriculum and development with the secondary English team. “I left because this opportunity to come back to Menchville opened up and it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up”. Mrs. Smith didn’t just work with the big dogs, before her Central Office job she started her teaching career at another Newport News high school. “I started my teaching career at Denbigh and I taught there for a number of years and went to Menchville as my first assistant principal job. Then I went to Hines Middle School, Central Office, and now I’m back at Menchville”.

“My grandmother was a teacher all her life. She taught Sunday school and she taught English, so she inspired me and like a lot of little girls I played teacher in school. I had a principal at Denbigh, Mr. Evans, who was great about cultivating leaders. I went for my masters degree in administration and thought it was great because I could help more students. I’d get to reach out to more instead of those just in my classroom”.

If you’re interested in an administration job like Mrs. Smiths, and are wondering what school she went to, she went to Old Dominion for her masters’ degree. Here’s some teaching advice from Mrs. Smith for all the aspiring teachers out there: “My biggest piece of advice, well its twofold: you have to love teaching and you have to love kids. If you don’t love either one of those, don’t do it because part of this is the passion you have for teaching and the passion you have for children whether you’re in an assistant principal job or you’re teaching. Whatever it is you’re doing you have to love what you do”.

“I’ve done what every high school kid has done. I worked at Busch Gardens, I worked at the Chick-Fil-A in the mall for many years, probably about ten years through college and I worked at Kroger over in Kiln Creek”. Believe it or not Busch Gardens wasn’t her favorite job, Chick-Fil-A was. “I liked it because we had a great team, we were always busy, and I became a team leader. So I got a lot of leadership skills and lessons from that job which I actually still use here and have used in other places. I liked it minus smelling like chicken and grease,” she laughs.

Since Mrs. Smith was an English teacher I had to ask her some questions about books. “One of my personal favorite recent reads is Defending Jacob; excellent book. I couldn’t put it down. I stayed up way too late trying to finish reading it and I recommend it to everyone”. Books lately have been becoming movies so I asked the golden question: Are you a person that reads the book then sees the movie or sees the movie before reading the book? “I always read the book first because, like I always told my students, the movie is never going to be like the book and the book has richer detail, I think, than the movies do. But I still go see the movie to compare”.

If you see Mrs. Smith walking down the hallways, say hi. Give her a re-welcome to Menchville because it is her favorite high school and we’d like to keep it that way.