Towering above everyone as the principal of Harriton High School, Mr. Eveslage may seem a bit intimidating at first sight, but his quiet confidence and kind demeanor prove otherwise. He manages to balance himself, remaining just tough enough to lead our school while maintaining an approachable atmosphere for students and teachers. We hope this interview will reveal more to the people of Harriton about the powerful and caring man who leads our school.

Harriton Banner: What responsibilities are included in your job?

Mr. Eveslage: That’s a difficult question to answer because ultimately I am responsible for all aspects of the school, but I am in charge of hiring, staffing, budgeting, scheduling, and of course all the staff. That includes teaching staff, professional staff, support staff. So, you know, those are my technical responsibilities, but if you asked me what my primary responsibility was, I would say that it’s to establish a positive tone in the building within our organization, and create systems which allow our professionals to do the jobs in which they are very skilled at doing, and allowing students to do the job that they are skilled at doing, which is learning. I remind our staff regularly that our primary role here is to focus on learning and everything that has to do with learning.

HB: What do you think you add to Harriton? What qualities make you a good principal?

Eveslage: I take a lot of pride in seeing people as people and in valuing an organization and the strength of our school as being the people. So I hope I’m taking a humanistic approach to the position. I hope that I can allow us to not fall into the trap that unfortunately some school districts are falling into by looking at students through numbers and statistics. We have a lot of great people here – staff and students – so if I can remind us frequently that that’s the core of what we are as an organization, I take a lot of pride in that.

HB: How do you think that Harriton can be compared to other high schools around here?

Eveslage: I think that Harriton compares favorably to other high schools in the area. We have a student body that is extremely intellectual, curious, and I think it holds itself to a very high standard. And with that comes a level of academic pressure, which sometimes needs to be balanced and a little more healthy. But we have students that really aspire to great things and we have an outstanding teaching staff that helps students to accomplish those goals. So you could certainly put Harriton up against any school.

HB: What are you doing as principal to improve the school?

Eveslage: There are a lot of things that we’re doing. We try to keep a focus on how do we build capacity in our staff. In other words, how do we put our staff in situations where they improve one another’s teaching? And to do that, our staff is challenged to compare and create a lot of assessments together, to analyze student results together, to strategize ways to support students together. They are challenged in a lot of ways to really use their professional colleagues and use the resources within to improve our school. One of the things that we have been focusing on this year, which we will carry into next year, is a focus on literature and literacy across the curriculum, how every teacher can promote a sense of literacy in our students.

HB: Did you have other jobs before becoming a principal?

Eveslage: I did teach. I was a special education and a math teacher, and I enjoyed that. I also spent a couple years as an athletic and activities director and then I was an assistant principal. But I really enjoyed teaching and I spent a long time coaching as well. While I was teaching, I coached for fifteen years, and I always consider there to be a strong bond between coaching and teaching. And I would hope that with the job that I have now, I am still doing those things: coaching and teaching.

HB: And you were also the principal at Welsh Valley.

Eveslage: I was principal at Welsh Valley for three years prior to coming to Harriton, so the current tenth graders are students that I’ve been with for five years. So we started together at Welsh Valley and we worked our way here, so that’s a pretty neat thing.

HB: What is your favorite thing about Harriton?

Eveslage: Well, there are so many good things about Harriton, so it’s hard to find one favorite thing, but the part of my day that is most energizing for me is just walking around the school and interacting with the people. I love going into the classes and seeing what students are doing, hearing about their projects. I was in a class today and the students were showing me their research project that they had worked on and the passion that they had to do so and just seeing the students help each other to do that is just really energizing. So that’s my favorite part of the job.

After speaking to Mr. Eveslage about his responsibilities in our school, we learned about his own school days and his current life.

HB: What was your high school experience like?

Eveslage: *Chuckles* My high school experience was a little bit different than what school is now. School is one of those things that hasn’t changed too much over time. It probably hasn’t changed enough. I went to a very diverse school. I graduated from Cheltenham High School in the eighties, so that’s how long ago it was! We actually had a diversity that had the racial diversity ratio of the United States at that time, so President Bush, the first one, actually spoke at my high school graduation, which was kind of neat. One of the reasons he did was because our school was a nice representative of what schools should be like in the United States. My school was a good school, very well thought out… I was involved in activities and athletics, and I had a good high school experience.

HB: What athletics and clubs did you do?

Eveslage: I was a three-sport captain in high school. I was the captain of the cross-country team, the basketball team, and the track team. I was involved in some student writing activities and I had a role in the school newspaper and the student government. I didn’t have as big a role [in newspaper and government] as I went on in high school, and I played an instrument earlier in my high school career: I was a trombone player.

HB: How do you think your friends would describe you?

Eveslage: I hope that my friends would describe me as a good friend and as someone that will listen to them and be empathetic towards others; someone that cares about other people and cares about the betterment of society. If my friends said that about me, I would feel very honored.

HB: What do you like to do in your free time?

Eveslage: In my free time, I like to read. I read a lot about education. I’m actually working on my doctoral dissertation now, so I am doing a lot of educational research and reading. And that’s somewhat fun, somewhat interesting, but I wouldn’t say I do that for fun. I’m a sports fan. I love movies; I love spending time with my kids. I have two kids, [Donovan and Mikayla], so I love spending time with my family. I live a pretty simple lifestyle.

HB: What is a fun or interesting fact about you?

Eveslage: One of the things that I will share that some people think is funny, but I don’t know how funny it is, is that I was really small growing up. Like, I was really little. When I was in ninth grade, I was 5’5” and only weighed about eighty pounds. And now I have grown into a relatively tall person, but I was really shy, quiet, and a small person in high school. So people change! At one time I was very uncomfortable speaking publicly because I was very, very shy, and now I feel comfortable speaking and presenting in front of groups. You change; people change a lot as they grow up.

People do change as they grow up, but we hope that Mr. Eveslage stays the same for now. His creation of a human-centric workplace and learning environment, his belief in Harriton’s potential, and his friendly personality are things that the school will continue to benefit from year after year.