- September 9, 2024
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There's no other job Kevin Berry said he'd rather have.
As Pathways Elementary's new principal, and his very first job with Volusia County Schools, Berry started his role on Monday, Aug. 5.
"We have such an incredible team here," Berry said. "I could not have asked for a better group of people to work with."
Berry has been in education for 27 years, much of which was spent in Alachua County, where he previously worked as a district administrator, substitute principal, assistant principal and teacher over the years.
However, he's had a connection to Volusia County since he was young — his parents were both big race fans. He's also owned a home in Ormond-by-the-Sea for seven years, and spent every weekend there since.
And as he spent more time in the community, Berry said he wanted to be a part of it.
"This is a gold mine of a school, and it's because of the people that make up the building," Berry said.
The Ormond Beach Observer recently spoke with Berry about his first few days on the job, his goals for the upcoming school year and the Pathways Patriot spirit. Here's what he had to say.
What are you most looking forward to in your role as principal?
I'm really excited about helping our teachers really share their expertise with one another, because I think that's going to be the next level in helping our students grow. We're really excited. This year, we have a theme. It's called "Building leaders one Patriot at a time," because of course, we're the Patriots, and one of the things we're going to really try to work on this year is asking students, "How have you led today and who have you served today?" Because leadership is all about service and we really want to instill that in our students.
I'm excited about having them here, so that we can start that process and getting them excited and passionate about all the things — with reading and math and others — but also about serving others and sharing the gifts they have with others. Our teachers are doing that so we want our students to be able to do that too.
Any goals for the upcoming school year?
We have lots of goals obviously, because there's numerical goals that we set and we made a lot of improvements academically last year. There's more that we want to do, so we're setting the bar high. For every metric we have, we want to go higher.
We also want to continue to partner with our families to ensure our students are in school every day on time, and so we're going to work on that because that helps us to be in better service of them.
We are so lucky at Pathways, and we have other schools in our area that are lucky in the same way. We have such incredible dedicated staff, from our teachers to our support staff — everyone here is just so committed to students.
But we've been really busy sometimes, and we don't always share what we know with everybody else. So our biggest goal is to provide more opportunities to celebrate what each other knows and to give them the platform to be able to help others. We have experts in just about everything here. So it's up to us as school leaders to be able to provide people the opportunity and the time to be able to learn from one another.
What are some challenges you're looking forward to tackling in the next school year?
One of the things we want to continue to do is, when we have students with special needs, being very creative and making sure that we're addressing those needs while also trying to get them caught up.
There are new regulations we have from the state related to security and safety, and we want to make sure we adhere to all of those, but we want to do it in a way that is not impacting instruction.
We also want to make sure that we're continuing to make learning fun. I don't know if that's a challenge or if that's an opportunity that we have because I think sometimes in today's world, when we are so focused on numbers and things, we can lose those intangible factors. I don't know that we've ever lost that here at Pathways, but I don't want us to. I want us to make more of that. I want to enjoy what we're doing every day and I want us to enjoy this time with each other every day.
If you had to describe the Pathways Patriot spirit in one word, what word would you use?
Pride. I think we all are just proud of who we are, but not who we are as individuals — who we are as a team and as a family, and I think we have a lot to be proud of.
I think the biggest thing to be proud of is the camaraderie, the teamwork and the kindness that we do provide.
