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Photo by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
Kim Hauser, the principal at Vestavia Hills Elementary West, listens as third grader Manar Baroody reads a Mother’s Day poem on May 9. Hauser is retiring after 19 years as an administrator at West, with 28 years in the Vestavia Hills school system.
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Photos by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
Tonya Rozell, principal at Vestavia Hills High School, talks with sophomore Paolo Aban. Rozell is retiring this summer and has served as a principal for Aban since his sixth grade year at Liberty Park Middle School.
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Photos by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
Mark Richardson, principal at Vestavia Hills Elementary East, talks with a group of fifth graders and their reading buddies as they play a game of spoons. Richardson is retiring this summer.
Kim Hauser said the day she talked with Becky Patton in 2005, she didn’t think it was a job interview — not really, anyway.
“We just ended up talking a lot,” Hauser said.
So she was surprised when Patton, the principal at Vestavia Hills Elementary West at the time, offered her a job as the assistant principal. Hauser had been a teacher at Vestavia Hills Elementary Central for nine years at the time.
“She was from Mountain Brook, and she said she needed a Vestavia person with Vestavia experience in that role,” Hauser said.
Fast forward to 2013, and she found herself stepping into Patton’s shoes as principal. And now Hauser and two other principals — Mark Richardson and Tonya Rozell — are all retiring after years as “Vestavia people.”
Richardson, who has served as principal at Vestavia Hills Elementary East for 25 years, said he believes the schools are one of the biggest reasons people choose to live in Vestavia, and he’s grateful to have been a part of that.
“People here in this school and community love their children, and they realize the importance of education. Those are the ingredients for school success,” he said. “If all school districts in America had the love for kids and valued their education as highly as ours does, you would have much more successful schools, because parents would do whatever they needed to do to support the schools.”
Photos by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
Tonya Rozell, principal at Vestavia Hills High School, talks with sophomore Paolo Aban. Rozell is retiring this summer and has served as a principal for Aban since his sixth grade year at Liberty Park Middle School.
Richardson said for him, education wasn’t his initial choice as a career path — he dabbled in computer science in college, then majored in journalism. But by his senior year at the University of Alabama, he was leaning more toward the classroom than the newspaper business.
His older brother, Wayne, was his “guiding star” as he figured out his path.
“He was the one who became the first teacher in our immediate family, and I was able to watch him and learn how to do it right,” Richardson said. “I learned so much from him as a teacher, and then he became an administrator, and I learned from him about that, too. He’s a fantastic role model for me.”
Richardson taught fifth grade for seven years at Vestavia Hills Elementary Central, then went to Chelsea Elementary for two years to serve as assistant principal. In 1999, he came back to Vestavia as principal at East and never left.
“I always wanted our school to be the school that people find to be warm, the school that people find to be easily approachable, with an open door to parents,” he said.
Photos by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
Mark Richardson, principal at Vestavia Hills Elementary East, talks with a group of fifth graders and their reading buddies as they play a game of spoons. Richardson is retiring this summer.
CHARACTER, LEADERSHIP
For the past 25 years, Richardson has led his school in focusing on the Golden Rule: treating others as you would want to be treated. Twice — in 2013 and 2022 — East has been named a state and national School of Character.
“We’ve established our EAGLE core values — Empathy, Acceptance, Grit, Love and Excellence — all defined in simple kid terms,” Richardson said. “We talk about meeting the needs of others despite differences, and we’re able to set the table so parents can do a deeper dive on character at home.”
Hauser said at West, they’ve also worked hard at instilling the character traits that they call the West Way: courtesy, respect and responsibility. West was also named a national School of Character in 2021.
“Those three core values are melded into everything we do,” Hauser said.
In 2016, the school was among 328 schools given The National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence.
Like Richardson, Hauser is grateful for the involvement of parents at her school.
“When I think of West, I think of the culture and the family feeling. It’s such a family place, and that includes our wonderful, fabulous PTO,” she said. “They are a part of our school and do so much.”
She said she also loves the way the culture in the school is shifting toward leadership development among teachers.
“There’s been a shift from ‘What can I do for my classroom?’ to ‘What can I do for the school at large?’ We have a lot of people who have been getting their leadership degrees so they can step into other roles, such as reading coach or instructional partner,” Hauser said.
She said when she started 19 years ago, that wasn’t the case.
“At that time, the culture was to take care of your babies and share on your team well, which is great. But now it’s ‘I want to grow professionally and help the entire school,’” Hauser said. “Our whole faculty and staff believe in nurturing the whole child and loving deeply, and I’m so grateful to have been a part of that culture.”
Rozell, who is retiring as principal of Vestavia Hills High School, said she’s also going to miss her “work family” as she moves into the next season of life.
“You spend so many hours at school and in the extracurricular events,” she said. “I’m going to miss my students and my colleagues, whom I have such a deep level of respect for.”
She said she’s also grateful for the “constant support from the community … and I’m humbled that they would entrust me with a school of this caliber.”
PERSEVERANCE
Rozell has worked in different roles in education since 1992, including as principal of Liberty Park Middle School just before coming to Vestavia Hills High School. She took on the role at Vestavia Hills High School in summer 2020, just in time to help the school navigate its way into a new school year amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’m proud of how we were able to hold on and have some grit and perseverance,” she said. “When a lot of places around us were not having school, we were having school. We were doing our very best to provide as much structure and camaraderie and a place for students to come, to provide as much normalcy as possible.”
They saw that impact in a quantitative way through high test scores in the midst of “one of the most difficult things in families’ lives and students’ lives.”
“I had teachers around me who — even though it would’ve been easy to cave or fall under all the pressure that was on them — they kept us going,” Rozell said. “They were the lifeline, and I think for a lot of these families and kids, we were the lifeline that got us out of that season.”
She said one of the things she will miss the most about being principal at Vestavia Hills High School is the relationships that she’s built with students over the years.
“That is where I get my energy. It’s not a job; it’s more like a life calling,” Rozell said.
She realized she enjoyed helping people learn back when she was in high school and was asked to be a teacher’s assistant.
“I had a Latin teacher who was on an extended leave, and I was approached to kind of teach alongside a substitute Latin 1 teacher,” Rozell said. “That really kind of began to shape my mindset; I realized I enjoy trying to help people understand concepts and ideas.”
That was the first of many seeds people planted in her life along the way that grew into her passion for and calling to the field of education. That hasn’t wavered over her 32 years in teaching and administration.
“There’s just pure joy in watching people come from point A to point B or to partner with them in some way to help them make decisions about their next steps in life,” she said.
Hauser said she would also miss the students. One of the factors that initially dissuaded her from retiring was to think about how she wouldn’t see the next class of fourth graders become fifth graders, and so on.
But with that mentality, “I’ll be 89 by the time I retire,” she joked.
Richardson said he will also miss the people but is grateful for the opportunity to serve as a principal mentor for a little while. “I’ll miss the day to day, but I’ll still get to be around and stay connected,” he said.
