Jerome Colonna
This is Jerome Colonna's 40th year in public education, so the superintendent of Beaverton, Ore., schools could easily exchange his busy schedule for a full-time retirement life of cycling and fly fishing, his favorite hobbies.
He's not going to do it, though. Retirement, he thinks, "wouldn't give me the compelling feeling of purpose in life that I feel now."
Colonna, the 62-year-old vice chair of the REL Northwest board, has deep roots in the Northwest and an understanding of the region's problems and challenges honed by those four decades in teaching and administration.
For two years in the early 1980's, Colonna was a science teacher and counselor at an Alaska island public school where most students were Native Americans. "That was a place," he says, "where the present wasn't good and the past was bad."
Today, Colonna believes the most pressing need in the Northwest Region is to close the achievement gap between Native Americans and whites. He lists other needs as improving the literacy skills of secondary students and building leadership in education, where he sees a "tremendous void." Colonna says half of the principals in the region have two or fewer years of experience in the job.
The holder of two master's and a bachelor of science degree from Oregon State University, Colonna has headed the 37,000-student Beaverton district since 2003. Prior to that, he was superintendent in Redmond, Ore., for nearly a decade and had teaching and administrative assignments in Corvallis, Ore., San Jose, Calif., and that junior-senior high school in Kake, Alaska.
There's a "cry from the field," Colonna told the REL directors at their biannual meeting in Washington earlier this year. As a practitioner, he said, "I know the need for help in implementing new systems." And as a REL board member, he said, he knows the usefulness of rigorous but practical research. "Researchers and practitioners need personal links," he said.