BY ANDREA TORTORA
The Cincinnati Enquirer
UNION -- Think how you can instead of why you can't.
Joy Sallee lives by that principle. And when students start school this August at the new Erpenbeck Elementary School, that will be their motto, too.
Mrs. Sallee is a principal with staunch principles.
She's spent the past year planning, producing and putting together a school that didn't exist when she was appointed to the job.
"If something's going to affect my life or what I'm going to be doing or how I'll work with my kids then I want to be involved when that happens," Mrs. Sallee said from behind the desk in her tiny office at the Boone County Board of Education in Florence.
Between phone calls from parents and the construction crew and visits from Superintendent Bryan Blavatt and Erpenbeck's future personnel, Mrs. Sallee is pushing to make sure her school is ready for the Aug. 24 opening day.
For those working and attending Erpenbeck, the new school year will be a succession of firsts. The first kindergarten class; the first fifth-graders to graduate to the middle school.
Mrs. Sallee can't wait. For one, she'll finally get to work in the building she's done so much to bring to life.
Erpenbeck Elementary sits atop a hill on U.S. 42. The land was donated to the school district by the Erpenbeck family, well-known for its residential housing developments.
The new school is right in the middle of a new neighborhood. New homes in various stages of construction ring the school building. It's a definite sign that the 750 students who start school here in August will soon have more classmates.
But there's still plenty of work to be done before teachers can prepare their classrooms and students can give the building an identity.
The roads are still dirt. It's been too wet to pour the concrete and spread the asphalt. The office is missing furniture and floor tiles. Uniforms must be ordered for the maintenance crew. Desks are absent from classrooms. And the front doors are made of cardboard until the new ones arrive.
But that's not stopping Mrs. Sallee.
She's involved with the building's transformation just as much as the people putting it together. She picked out the bricks. She chose the paint colors. And she debated with maintenance workers on how to print their name badges. Just first names or courtesy titles? They settled on the courtesy titles so children would learn the respectful way to address adults.
She chose textbooks and then had dreams about them.
Mrs. Sallee wanted a "lock-down school" and she got it. After students enter each morning, all doors will remain locked. Visitors must enter a door that puts them right in the middle of the office. It's a safety feature Mrs. Sallee wouldn't do without.
But it takes time creating a new school.
A 25-year education veteran, Mrs. Sallee applied to be Erpenbeck's principal two years ago, when the district considered making the school the first to conduct year-round classes.
She was principal at Collins Elementary at the time and was nearing retirement age. "It's so traumatic for a teacher to leave and I felt myself getting attached at Collins," Mrs. Sallee said. "I thought this could be a transition."
The woman who still considers herself a teacher found it wasn't easy to leave Collins Elementary. She misses the daily interaction with the children and often visits them for an ego boost.
"I always prepared to be a teacher," Mrs. Sallee said. "I get wonderful feelings of gratification when I see what my former students are doing. I loved being a teacher."
As principal of a brand-new school, Mrs. Sallee had to teach herself a few things about blueprints, the quality of bricks, attendance zones and starting from scratch.
"I had to start back at the very basics," Mrs. Sallee said. Her first task was to create a student database and draw the boundary lines to figure out which residents would attend Erpenbeck.
Many students will be moved from the schools they now attend. Some parents were angry. Mrs. Sallee worked hard to convince them that Erpenbeck will be good for their children.
"First of all I told (the parents) that I understand," Mrs. Sallee said. "They have a commitment to where they were and they have a unison and a relationship with the teachers there.
"It's good for students to experience adversity. It helps them grow."
Once Mrs. Sallee calmed parents' fears she made sure they got involved in planning the school. A PTA was formed and a site-based council was elected. The building includes an office for the site-based council as well as a meeting and work room for parents.
"I really feel that parents are vital to the success of a school," she said. "Give me parental involvement and good teachers and I don't care where the school is."
Mr. Blavatt said parents have been an integral part of Erpenbeck's birth. He said the school took shape from parents' opinions and suggestions and Mrs. Sallee's tireless ability to carry everything out.
In February, Mrs. Sallee started hiring her staff. Every teacher except the music teacher was already working in the district. To get a job at Erpenbeck, each teacher had to have a teaching philosophy in line with Mrs. Sallee's.
In August, Mrs. Sallee started attending regular meetings of the Monarch Construction Co. The builders gave her a hard hat and they all call her by name when she tours the building.
"Talking to people is major," Mrs. Sallee said as she gave a tour of the school.
The building contains 33 classrooms, and seven smaller rooms. Two computer labs, a library, a cafeteria and gymnasium, an activity courtyard and a science courtyard make up the interior.
Each classroom is outfitted for computers but there won't be any when the school opens. Parents are already planning fund raisers to buy additional computers and to add to the 2,500 library books already purchased.
Every classroom will also have playground equipment such as balls and jump ropes but there won't be a playground on school grounds come opening day. That's another project for parents and the PTA. There will be art, Spanish, band and chorus classes. Fourth- and fifth-grade girls and boys can participate in an intramural basketball league as well as competitive academic teams.
Mrs. Sallee hopes the students and teachers in the classrooms that open into the science courtyard will plant gardens and flowering trees to attract birds.
In the weeks before school starts, the woman who took the Erpenbeck principalship to make the transition to retirement easier finds she's already more involved and attached to this school than others she worked at -- and the students have yet to arrive.
"A principal has about 3,000 bosses," Mrs. Sallee said. "It's made me hyperactive. But I love it."
