KANNAPOLIS — Retired A.L. Brown High teacher Delinda Rodgers admits being surprised when she found her new boss scrubbing bathrooms at school a couple of summers ago.

“She and her administrative staff were on their hands and knees,” Rodgers said. “She wanted us as a faculty to see she had our house in order and clean when we came in that first time.”

After working with Janice Carty and getting to know her for the past two years, though, Rodgers said it’s not surprising, in retrospect, that the principal took that task upon herself.

“That is a reflection of what she’s willing to do,”Rodgers, who worked under five principals in 32 years, said. “There is no task too small, no task too large, or no task too dirty for her to undertake.”

Carty is about to begin her third year as A.L. Brown principal. Last fall, after just her first year as principal there — or anywhere, for that matter — Carty’s peers voted her Kannapolis City Schools’ principal of the year.

Team effort

“It was overwhelming,”Carty said of receiving the honor after her rookie year. “I’m not sure Ideserved it, because there are a lot of people who have worked very hard.”

Sitting in an office filled with gifts from teachers and students, Carty deflects credit for the school’s successes, saying that although it’s given to one person, it is “a team effort.”

And she credits that team, including assistant principals and teachers, with making key changes in A.L. Brown’s academic focus and helping her guide the school for two years.

“Some days you don’t know what direction to go,” she said, under the watchful eye and pointing index finger of an angel figurine named Miss Bossy. “But that’s the good thing about teaming, because somebody always does.”

Carty graduated from Appalachian State University with a degree in education. She holds a master’s degree in education from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte with certifications in administration and counseling.

Career path

Carty began her career in education by leaving her home state of North Carolina with her husband and spending three years in Alaska, where she taught from 1973 to 1976.

She said that experience exposed her to a diverse group of people, which would later benefit her as she worked as an administrator with young teachers from all over the country.

A move in 1976 brought Carty home to Richmond County, and she taught there for two years. From 1978 until 1992, she worked in Cabarrus County Schools as a teacher, counselor and curriculum coordinator.

For six years beginning in 1992, she worked as an assistant principal at Kannapolis Middle School. In 1998, school system officials tapped her to fill the open principal’s job at A.L. Brown.

“I had never thought about being a high school principal,” Carty said. Kannapolis City Schools Superintendent Dr. Ed Tyson “said I would like for you to consider this. And Isaid ‘Ooohh.’ ”

Tyson said he had no reservations about offering Carty the job, even though she hadn’t worked as a principal or at a high school.

“Janice had a lot of really good experience prior to coming to Brown,” he said.”And she had a lot of maturity and good judgment you could use in a leadership position anywhere.”

Being able to continue working with some of the same students she knew from the middle school, as well as her desire “to be of assistance,” enticed Carty to take the job.

“I see my role in life as a helping person; that’s what I do best,” she said. “I saw (becoming A.L. Brown principal) as a way to continue to help in a bigger way.”

And Carty got others involved in helping. In addition to the cleaner bathrooms, nearly every room at the school has been painted, some by volunteers, including teachers.

She has also worked on giving staff, teachers and students a sense of “emotional safety” and a feeling that they can come to her and voice their feelings and opinions.

“My counseling habits are hard to put away,”she said. “So I see a lot of students, by their request.”

And that extends to everyone else in the school as well, Rodgers said. She remembers when one young teacher from Buffalo, N.Y. was worried about her sick mother.

“She came into school one morning and Mrs. Carty saw her and saw she was upset, and she said ‘Come in my office and call your mom,’ ” Rodgers said. “That speaks volumes.”

Meeting ABC challenges

The road hasn’t been without bumps.

In Carty’s first year, the school earned exemplary growth status in the state’s ABCs plan, and student test scores improved in nine of 11 subjects tested.

This year, the numbers weren’t as good, and while school system officials expect A.L. Brown to meet the state’s expected growth, they say it likely won’t reach exemplary status for the first time in three years.

Carty and staff are making plans to get scores back up, including putting teachers where they’ll be most effective, scheduling complementary classes in the same semester and spacing out the tests more.

She’s used four new positions to decrease class sizes in math, social studies, science and English classes. And the school is adding a new class this year, called Success, for some freshmen who might otherwise “get lost in the crowd.”

Carty can point to some novice mistakes and laugh, such as her trials with school pep rallies.

When she came to the school, not all faculty and staff attended the rallies. She thought they should be more involved, so she required homeroom teachers to sit with their students during a pep rally in the gym.

“That pep rally was kind of a dud,” she said. “The kids wouldn’t do anything or say anything because their teachers were there.”

Last year, she moved a pep rally outside to the school’s football stadium. The big stadium dwarfed the student body and they could barely hear the band, she said.

“Every day is a learning experience,” she said.

Seven-day-a-week job

One thing Carty has learned is that she wasn’t as prepared for her job as she initially thought she would be.

“Being on an administrative team, I though I understood probably 75 percent of the job,” she said. “I didn’t realize being a high school principal is a seven-day-a- week, 24-hour-a-day job — at least it is for me.”

She maintains a visible presence in the school’s hallways, and spends her time after hours and on weekends returning phone calls, catching up on paperwork and writing letters and reports.

The payoff, she says, comes at unexpected times, like recently when a student ran up to Carty and assistant principals at a restaurant and wanted to introduce them to her parents.

And Carty didn’t expect to be named principal of the year, though Tyson said it was a deserved reward for and the culmination of her work.

“Our administrators knew Janice’s qualities beforehand,”he said. “So they knew what a good job she’d done at the middle school, then they saw her step into a new role and do the same kind of job.”

Central office summons

But when Carty learned one day last fall that she was wanted in the school’s administrative offices, next door to A.L. Brown, she didn’t know what to expect.

“It’s like being a first-year teacher or a freshman in high school,” she said. “When you get called to the office ... your heart pounds.”

Entering the board room at the administrative offices compounded her anxiety. Several administrators sat together on one side of the table, leaving her a seat on the other side.

“Usually, if things are going well, they make room for you in the group,”she said.

Dr. Jo Anne Byerly, associate superintendent, told Carty the group had “something really serious we need to talk about.”

Tyson told her what it was —she had been chosen as Kannapolis’ principal of the year.

“Then I couldn’t think of a thing to say,” Carty said. “I had my speech prepared in another direction.”