Amber Tos

I attribute a lot of my success to growing up with parents who pushed me to be independent. I've always been really independent - I even lived abroad and taught in Austen, Germany for a year and a half. There were things I just wanted to make sure I did before I had my own kids so I didn't miss out on those experiences. Through those experiences and seeing other parts of the world, you realize kind of how lucky you are and the things you want to do here in the United States. I also attribute my ability to do everything that I'm doing now to my husband, honestly. Without the husband that I have, I wouldn't be able to work the hours that I work, even doing things on the weekends. And I would say the very first principal that I had - I was with her for 4 years, and when I left and went to a new building just because of growth opportunities, I still reach out. She really showed me what a really well-run system, set of protocols, procedures looks like, and that's kind of what has made the building that I'm at now thrive and improve over the last 3 years.

I think the biggest piece of advice I just gave to somebody moving into leadership is that you have to keep the focus on whatever department you're in. Every decision that you make needs to be and should be in the best interest of your students and staff. You may not always please everybody 100% of the time, but it's okay to make a decision and it may not go as well as you planned. I think everything within leadership, especially when you're first starting out, is all about experience, and being able to be transparent and honest, and say, you know what, that didn't go as well as it should have, or maybe we need to tweak it to make it better. All feedback to me is good feedback. I kind of take pride in the fact that I feel like my staff can come and even if they think that it might hurt my feelings, I'm okay with that. I may not agree, and we may not agree on everything, but the way that you're feeling, I always try to reflect on that and decide, okay, did I make... do I need to look at this a little closer, or am I still okay with it? That doesn't mean you change it, but I think that it's okay to admit when maybe I should've... maybe we should have taken a different road with that. In general, people will respect you more for being human as a leader.

I would say the biggest challenge right now is funding. It really is huge. It's not district funding, it's federal funding. We don't know from one year to the next lately what we're going to see, what we're going to get, and in order to really make the biggest impact with our students, it's people. It's not programs - I mean, programs are great, you have to have them - but it's the people you have, and your ability to pay them what they're worth. Delaware is a very good-paying state for teachers, and the district I'm in is a very good-paying district. But that doesn't necessarily mean... I mean, some states are horrible. They're just bad. And should one teacher's worth be less in a state that maybe the pricing isn't as high? No, it shouldn't. Everyone deserves the same amount of money for the work that they do. I mean, we're literally raising children every day. We're no longer just teaching math. We're teaching the whole child, everything. We're teaching them how to be upstanding citizens, and how to work through social issues, things like that. We're doing all of that. Basic things that should matter, those are the ones that are really not getting the funding - asking parents to buy their kids pencils, things like that.