Photo by Erin Nelson.
Lauren Dressback, the new principal at Vestavia Hills Elementary Cahaba Heights, in her office at the school June 21.
Lauren Dressback went from growing up in the Vestavia Hills school system to working in it for the bulk of her teaching career.
After 19 years of teaching and administration, 16 of them being in Vestavia Hills City Schools, Dressback has officially been named principal at Vestavia Hills Elementary Cahaba Heights. She served as interim principal for half of last school year.
“I walked into a beautiful situation,” Dressback said. “This school is unique in its sense of community. I think oftentimes Cahaba Heights will identify themselves as Cahaba Heights before Vestavia Hills. It’s very community oriented and it just creates a very special atmosphere in this building. I was blessed to walk in this atmosphere and with a phenomenal staff.”
Dressback said when she was a teacher, she never imagined that administration would be harder than teaching.
Teachers “take home the baggage” their students bring to class everyday, she said. She remembers going home at night worrying about students not eating or breakups they were upset about.
Since she’s become principal, she’s concerned about students as well as teachers, faculty, the safety of the building and the culture within the school.
She said she had the luxury of learning about school administration through being an assistant principal at the middle school and high school levels, which helped her adapt to her current role.
“It was really just time,” Dressback said. “I took my time. It took me five years before moving up to principal, and there are still things I’m learning.”
Dressback moved to Vestavia Hills in the middle of her fifth-grade year, from her hometown of Opelika, she said.
She said she didn’t like Vestavia Hills when she first moved because it was hard for her to make friends, since she moved in the middle of the school year.
“I got involved in middle school and made some good friends,” Dressback said. “By the time I got to high school, I loved this place. I loved Birmingham and Vestavia. I kind of always knew I wanted to go into education and I always dreamed of the opportunity to get to come back one day. Now, it’s amazing. I’ve been in the system for 16 years. One of my children just graduated and I’ve got another at the high school. They’ve gone all the way through the system. It’s home for me.”
The challenge of being the new principal at Cahaba Heights, she said, is keeping the momentum going with a “great product” while “pushing to go further.”
One thing she wants for the school is for students to have more of a voice and for their opinions to be heard more, she said.
She thinks teachers and administrators do a great job of asking students what they think about how things are done at the school and certain issues at higher levels of education, but not so much at the elementary level because they’re so young, Dressback said.
She also wants the students at Cahaba Heights to take part in community service projects based on the school’s core values: kindness, responsibility, integrity, service, grit and empathy.
She said the goal is to turn those values into “tangible community service projects” for the community, so they are not “just talking about them but living them.”
“We want our students to learn what service is,” Dressback said. “It’s not just ‘I brought some money to give to somebody or I brought this can in;’ it’s about how to live that out. It’s about what happens, what the other half of that looks like and that’s what we want students to get immersed in and learn here.”
