Patrick Maynard, Sierra Lutheran High School’s new head of school, said educators generally are nervous to hear straight from students’ mouths about how they’re performing in the classroom.
If staff members embraced their pupils’ honest feedback openly, Maynard says they could be become more effective in helping young people achieve their dreams.
“Teachers expect to hear from me, but to actually value what the students are really feeling and thinking, if we really want to have the highest impact, I mean, kids don’t care about what you know until they know how much you care,” Maynard said.
Maynard is eager to find out what local students want out of their program at the private Christian high school. Relationships he built after college after injuring his knee playing football and returning to work, only then having to return to college, resulted in teaching in public schools for a time in Portland, Ore., before he would wind up as a principal of a Christian school in Austin, Texas.
He would then spend eight years as the head of school of Lutheran High School in San Antonio, but even through all his travels, Maynard said he is familiar with Northern Nevada’s curriculum and said throughout the years he had rejected several requests to interview with Sierra Lutheran’s board, feeling he wasn’t ready.
But in working with students specifically at SLHS, it’s a chance for him to encourage students and teachers to stretch their wings, he said, and his own. Maynard, who
“I’m ADD (attention deficit disorder),” he said. “I’m dyslexic, and my experience with private schools is sometimes private schools sometimes have a very elitist attitude. Helping those kids, we have a certain amount of resources, but if we have a kid that’s a diamond in the rough … it pushes you to make everything you can to be the best you can.”
Asked if he shares his own conditions openly with others, Maynard says absolutely.
“I want (my students) to know you’re not stuck where you’re at,” he said. “Most of the kids I get to work with are smarter than me, and that’s OK. We’re still going to take you. We’re still going to ask, what’s God going to do with your gift?’ ”
“How God has built me is I want to hear what kids are thinking,” Maynard said. “I don’t know if we value enough what young people are really thinking about.”
Maynard saying one of the best things he can do as a leader often is to stay out of the way, create safety barriers and allow others to explore and grow themselves.
“Let’s listen to them and what they’re dreaming about,” Maynard said. “At my old campus in San Antonio, we had an advanced engineering program, an arts program, we had a digital media program. Kids would say, ‘Hey, we’d love to do ‘blank’ or we’d love to do this, and I’d say, ‘We can make a program out of this because then more kids would want to come.’”
Maynard said his summer began somewhat “disjointed” after moving and completing a national program for 20 school administrators to hone their executive leadership skills. He traveled to Michigan to complete his capstone for the program and returned and gradually has begun meeting with Sierra Lutheran families before school begins in a few weeks, he said.
But the bulk of student and staff introductions begin this month. Maynard says Sierra Lutheran’s faculty and students have been invited to two separate overnight retreats at Zephyr Point Conference Center in Lake Tahoe to help build community for the 2022-23 year. The faculty retreat, which took place Monday and Tuesday, is an opportunity for the school’s administrators and teachers to bring their families and children to get to know each better, he said.
“All of our families – husbands, wives are supposed to, kids, they’ll see my crazy family,” he said smiling. “It’s important for us as a team to appreciate the specific challenges in our lives. My middle son is autistic, and so it’s important for people to get to see him and enjoy him but see why at times, ‘I get why Patrick has to leave early that day.’ There can be resentment or (we can) be able to support another teacher if you understand what’s going on in someone else’s life.”
Maynard said he looked forward to the school meeting his wife Trish and their three sons, Nathan, 10, Jackson, 8, and Travis, 4. He encourages others when talking about Jackson, who was diagnosed at about 4, to help raise awareness when possible and to seek help as early as possible for special needs. He said it took him and Trish about six months to get an appointment with a developmental pediatrician to determine Jackson had autism.
“(Age) 6 is around where the neurological pathways are set … but he has an amazing recall of things,” Maynard said. “When looking at airplanes, he can tell you, ‘That’s a (Boeing) 737-900’ or ‘That’s an A321neo,’ ” he said. “He’s not silent.”
The student retreat is an annual tradition he intends to keep and will make what he will call two “unschool” days to talk about relationships to help students open up and provide academic and social support for students, he said.
The student retreat takes place Aug. 22 and 23, also at Zephyr Point Conference Room.
“The support they need, the love they need is bigger,” he said. “The education of school is much bigger than the academics that happen. The men and women that these young people are going to become is highly, directly because of what happens on a campus on a day-to-day (basis), not just from the academic part.”
