Outstanding educator

When the Association of Washington School Principals gets together to vote on who wins the Principal of the Year Award, East Valley High School Principal Jeff Miller said the group usually doesn’t get too worked up about it. They usually toss around a few names and agree on who wins.

But when it is time for them to nominate an assistant principal, they get pretty worked up about it.

“It’s very, very competitive,” Miller said. Usually, the vote has to go to a secret ballot to figure out who wins.

This year, the winner was EV’s John Savage, the assistant principal for career and technical education.

Miller said he nominated Savage for his work in setting up the school’s culminating project for seniors. The project has grown into one that starts preparing students in their freshman year with career classes. When they move on to their sophomore year, they take a class focused on computer skills. As juniors, they take another career class exploring different careers in which they might be interested. They find people who do these jobs and spend time participating in job shadows.

“Any career, that’s the idea,” Savage said.

As seniors they present their culminating project to local business people for judging. Miller said most of the judges are so impressed with the students they bring some of their colleagues back the next year to judge. He added that many students have found jobs after they presented their project.

“He made the culminating project meaningful to our kids,” Miller said.

Savage has been at EV since 1986. He started by teaching marketing and DECA classes, business law and computers back when the school still had Apple IIe technology. He said he was inspired by Miller to move into administration and has been doing that for the last 10 or 11 years.

Miller said that when Savage was in charge of discipline at the school, if there was a problem, many parents, teachers and even students would thank Savage for being fair. Miller chalks that up to Savage’s understanding that it’s the relationships between people that are important to a school.

Some of the programs Savage has been involved with over the last few years make for a long list.

He’s been involved with the Farm and School partnership resulting in a large community garden on the northwest corner of Wellesley and Sullivan. Many of the district schools now have green tomatoes sitting in the windows that were grown in the garden and the high school will try to set a world record later this month to see how fast they can turn wheat into bread.

He headed up the robotics program, brought American Sign Language into the schools for a foreign language credit, started up the Future Business Leaders of America program and the Key Club and more.

But Savage is fairly modest about these programs.

“I didn’t do any of them,” he said. “I just lead them.”

An avid bicyclist, Savage rode his bike to work every day of the school year last year. He even found studded snow tires for his bike. Last spring, Savage was injured in an accident involving a car, but he said he is doing fine now. The accident hasn’t kept him from riding his bike to school – he’s just sticking to the trails now.

He’s also an avid fan of the Canadian rock band Rush. He and his wife take vacations around the world to see the band in concert.

Savage received his award last week at the fall principals’ conference. Miller said Savage has been pretty modest about receiving it and accidently left it in his room. Miller found it and presented it to him again this week.

“I don’t do well with that kind of stuff,” Savage said.