CdA schools chief says he’ll retire next year

This will be the final year for Coeur d’Alene School District Superintendent Harry Amend, who announced his retirement Thursday morning at the district’s welcome back assembly.

Assistant Superintendent Hazel Bauman will replace Amend on July 1. The Coeur d’Alene School Board plans to vote on her promotion at its meeting Tuesday, board Chairwoman Edie Brooks said. The board held a “consensus vote” at a recent meeting and all members supported the move, Brooks said. Had they not, the board would have started a formal search for a new superintendent and involved the public, she said.

“Because of our knowledge of Hazel, we felt very comfortable,” Brooks said. “We have been able to observe her as a leader and felt that the public would be very supportive of this choice.”

Bauman was a finalist for the superintendent’s position that Amend was awarded in May 2002, and Brooks said deciding between the two then was difficult. Bauman said her years working with Amend, whose career in education spans 39 years, including 16 as a superintendent, leave her well prepared for the district’s top leadership role.

“He’s a great leader and a great man. It’s been a privilege, Harry. A privilege,” Bauman said at the assembly. District employees gather at the beginning of each school year for a breakfast and pep talk.

Before announcing his retirement, Amend spoke about the challenges the district faced last year and waxed optimistic about the year ahead. After budget cuts “that directly impacted your quality of life as a teacher” last year and the rejection by voters of a school construction levy, Amend said he felt what many others in the district did.

“My timbers were shaking. As a person and as a leader, I didn’t know what to expect for the coming year,” he said.

But something happened. A controversial proposal to close Sorensen Elementary School turned into an exciting idea for the district’s first magnet school, which begins its first year Tuesday. And a supplemental levy considered by educators to be the lifeline of the district passed by a wide margin – a sharp contrast to the defeat of the construction levy.

“What passed the levy is what happens in that school district every day of the school year, from September to June,” Amend told teachers, administrators and classified staff packed into the Lake City High School gymnasium.

“It’s a culture here. And our community knows it. … I want you to fully soak that in. Suck it up and realize it, because that is the truth – that is what happened.”

Amend said he and his wife of 38 years, Sandy, plan to stay in Coeur d’Alene. Their three grown children and four grandchildren – the fifth is due in November – live in the Spokane area.

The longtime educator and coach said there are a number of activities to which the couple could devote their time.

“One of them is church. One of them is, of course, baseball. And one of them is working with people,” said Amend, a veteran youth baseball and softball coach and a former scout for the Philadelphia Phillies. “We look forward to seeing how some of them unfold.”

Amend, 61, said he’s known this will be his last year since January.

“It’s been processed for over a year and a half,” he said. “I think Hazel Bauman’s readiness, where she is in her career, played a big part in it. It’s a very, very opportune time for a strong transition.”

A district news release said Bauman was Amend’s “heir apparent.” School district attorney Charlie Dodson said the district isn’t required to conduct an outside search for a new leader. Bauman has been Coeur d’Alene’s assistant superintendent for six years and previously served as director of elementary education and curriculum director. Before that, she was an assistant director at the University of Idaho and held positions in special education.

Amend moved to Spokane Valley as a fifth-grader and graduated from Central Valley High School in 1964. The son of former Spokane County coroner Dexter Amend, Harry Amend said as a boy he wanted to be a doctor. He spent two years playing baseball and studying at Whitman College before transferring to the University of Washington. But his grades weren’t good enough for medical school. He credits Bill Ames, the former principal of Central Valley High School, with getting him into education.

It was 1968, the year Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy – men Amend said he believed “could make a difference in our country” – were murdered. War protests filled the university district where he lived. Then a fifth-grade boy he’d mentored for two years told him his older brother had died after inhaling toxic glue. Amend returned to Spokane Valley with his bachelor’s degree, confused and disillusioned.

He spent the summer coaching his younger brother’s baseball team, which practiced at Central Valley. When Ames asked what he planned to do next, Amend said he wanted to attend graduate school and try to get into medical school.

“He said: ‘I’ll tell you what. If you’ll bag the medical school and come back here and be a teacher, I’ll make you a baseball coach,’ ” Amend said. “It took me about two seconds to change my mind about becoming a doctor.”

He earned his teaching certificate from Eastern Washington University and spent 18 years at Central Valley – six as a classroom teacher and 12 as a counselor.

Thirty-six of his 39 years as an educator have been spent in the Coeur d’Alene and Spokane Valley area. He left his job as superintendent of the Freeman School District for the superintendent’s spot in the Kalispell School District in Montana in 1999.

“I’ve been here for 22 years, and he’s the best I’ve ever seen. That’s a fact,” said Henry Hamill, a physical education teacher and assistant football coach at Lake City High School.

Amend said his life as an educator has fit well with his passion to help the underdog. “It’s one of those jobs that every day when you back out of the driveway you know you’re going to make a positive impact on some kid’s life,” he said. “I feel like a guy that worked on the pyramids or the Sistine Chapel. That’s the way it is with education – you’re building a beautiful chapel, but the job never gets done.”