Interview with Walgrove's New Principal Olivia Adams

Olivia Adams has a bright yellow coffee cup with a big happy face that she carries around with her. Adams herself can be seen smiling, if often hurrying, around Walgrove Elementary where she became principal in September.  Adams says the job has her “working harder than she ever has” but also receiving “almost daily reminders of why she does it” and validation for her work.

According to Adams Walgrove is “the most complex school environment I’ve ever experienced.” With a charter co-location () on the site and the “political environment around the campus RFP”  [] Adams has had her share of contentious issues in her first few months at the school.

Despite that, Adams is happy to be heading up a school which is “truly one of the most diverse” she’s worked at in terms of “the variety of backgrounds and “socio-economic status of students’ families.” She believes the diversity presents “a lot of challenges and rewards.” Students on the campus have a wide variety of needs and Adams says, “that the parent support is amazing while also sometimes being challenging.”

One of pleasures of Adams’ new job is that she’s shortened her commute from almost an hour to just a few minutes. Adams is a Mar Vista resident, with one child in a local public elementary school and another still in preschool. She’s been an administrator with the Los Angeles Unified School District of the last 9 years, the last 3 as a principal.

For Adams it used to be difficult to as much a part of her school communities as she would have liked to be, living so far away. But now, she finds she is “spending more time at work but I’m now able to integrate my family into that.” At Walgrove, she says, community workdays and parent booster club meetings all have childcare options and it’s easy to bring her children along and include them. And, says Adams, “I am here to stay.”

Asked what makes Walgrove unique as a school, Adams says the community has “made a commitment to trying really new and innovative things.” These include the “studio program,” a class all students participate in at least weekly where they work with materials to extend their classroom learning.

Last month, Adams related, she hosted a group of principals for a meeting at the school and took them to observe a studio class where they saw fourth graders building models of creatures from the Monterrey Bay Aquarium, which they were studying in class. “ The principals saw the students totally engaged,” Adams said.

Adams also pointed to the “Council in Schools” program that Walgrove instituted with help from the Ojai Foundation last year as an innovative model for teaching better interpersonal skills to students and staff alike. Using Council, Adams says, the school is “working on a paradigm shift for a traditional public school to incorporate a positive discipline approach to behavior.

Building on programs like studio and Council, Adams would like to “be able to take well thought-out risks to create a space that is best for students at the school.” This, she cautions, “is not an overnight process” but is one that she believes will help Walgrove to meet its students diverse needs. 

Yet another new initiative Adams is excited about at the school is the newly created “differentiation specialist,” a position funded by the school’s booster club to help target instruction for students who need either “intervention or extension.” Adams says the specialist is helping the whole staff to better collaborate as professionals.

The focus, Adams says in on “learning, not teaching” She hopes to help shape the school going forward by working closely with her staff, who she says, “are all here for the right reasons” to enrich students’ learning experience.