Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Charter school principal uses ‘power hour’ to teach
The closer you get to the Pinecrest Academy Inspirada charter school in southern Henderson, the more you sense you’re in the middle of a construction zone.
No matter which direction you look work crews are building homes, parks and roads and installing utilities and landscaping on what had been large swaths of open desert.
While that construction can be carried out on an exacting timetable and its results are easy to see, what Michael O’Dowd is building at the K-8 charter school — a learning environment which prepares students for college and a career — isn’t so simple to comprehend, nor does it lend itself to a definitive timeline.
Still, the reason the school wanted the 50-year-old O’Dowd to become its principal — he took over in April after the school’s first principal resigned — is that he’s been able to do what few administrators can: Quickly turn a school into a high achieving academic performer.
In the 2011-2012 school year, for instance, he and his staff turned Wallin Elementary in the Clark County School District into what the state classified as a high-achieving school — then the state’s top rating — in its second year of existence.
Most experts say it takes three years for a new school’s staff to even work in concert on defined instructional strategies, let alone