Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Discipline is an opportunity to teach, according to new Sweet Home High School Assistant Principal Brad Sperry.
Sperry’s primary duties as assistant principal are to deal with discipline now that Dave Goetz has moved from the assistant principal position to athletic director this year.
Sperry, 51, said he has eight years of experience dealing with discipline, most recently at Central Linn Elementary School, where he was principal.
It’s “absolutely nothing new to me, and I prefer it.”
“I see discipline as an opportunity to teach kids,” he said. “I don’t believe schools should be in the punishment business. I believe schools should be in the changing behavior business.”
Schools should teach children to make right choices, he said. Children will make poor choices, and they should be held accountable for them, but they also need guidance to change their behavior.
Sperry hangs tassels from every year he has been in education, 1986 through 2007, in his office.
He asks students who come to his office what they are, he said. They’ll tell him it’s a tassel. He’ll ask again, and then explain what they are.
The tassels represent 12 long years of hard work, he said. It tells “the world you graduated from high school, which is something not easy to do.”
School District 55 appears to agree with that philosophy, he said. One of the signs showing a district has the right perspective is in the number of alternatives to out-of-school suspensions.
Sweet Home has many different programs and options it uses instead of suspending students, he said.
Sperry was raised in Arizona on the Navajo Indian Reservation, graduating with 950 Navajo, 15 African Americans and eight whites.
“So I was a minority,” he said. “But growing up on the Indian reservation was one of the best experiences of my life.”
He attended college in Utah, playing football for Snow Junior College, where he met his wife, Melanie.
“She said, ‘Brad, you’re not good enough to play professionally, so you need to buckle down and get your education and get a job,'” Sperry said. He went on to graduate from Utah State and then earn his master’s degree at Linfield College in McMinnville. He also has taken classes at Oregon State University.
His wife is from Washington, he said, so they split the difference and settled in Oregon.
“I’ve been in education in Oregon for 22 years,” Sperry said. “I taught secondary social studies for 15 years,” he said. “I’ve been an administrator for nine.”
He spent a year at Central Linn. Before that he was assistant principal at Coquille, where he was among several laid off in budget cuts, so he applied for the position at Central Linn.
“I enjoyed my year as an elementary principal, but it wasn’t for me,” Sperry said. “I wanted to get back into secondary.
“I hope to stay at Sweet Home for the remainder of my career. I really like Sweet Home. I’ve been in four districts throughout my career, and I find Sweet Home as one of the most professional districts that I’ve seen.
“And the people are wonderful. I look forward to working with Pat (Stineff, principal). She has a great grasp of what education is all about.
“I’m just really glad to be here. I’m impressed with the staff we have. They’re interested in how we can best serve kids.”
Sperry has three children, including two daughters, one just graduating from Eastern Oregon University and another freshman at Brigham Young University. He also has a 22-year-old son with physical and mental disabilities living at home in Brownsville.
Melanie Sperry is an accounts payable clerk at Central Linn School District.