WARDEN — Now entering her third year as Warden High School Principal, Katie Phipps said she finally feels like she has found her footing. Phipps moved to Warden High in 2021 from the Moses Lake School District.

Phipps explained how she came into the position, transitioning from Moses Lake, where she taught at Frontier Middle School and then Moses Lake High School. Phipps said she has been in education for twenty years.

“Warden had an opening for a principal, and it was high school and I absolutely love the high school age,” Phipps said. “I had always heard such great things about Warden. I love a small school setting and it’s close to Moses Lake, so I applied and they graciously allowed me to take the position.”

Phipps said she stepped in when the High School had gone without a principal for an entire year. 

“It's so nice to be in the third year. Whereas years one and two are a bit of a whirlwind, I finally feel like my feet are finally underneath me and we can really start to see some change happening,” she said. “Your first couple of years, everything's coming at you a million miles a minute. Now, I feel like we've got that foundation and can finally start to see where we're going.”

    An aerial photograph of Warden High School, where former Moses Lake teacher Katie Phipps has started her third year as the school’s principal.
  

Academic focus

Phipps said her focus as Warden High’s principal is on academics and workforce training, such as Warden’s recently instituted workplace learning program that gives students credit for work experience.

“Our students here, I’ll be honest, they're really, really amazing young men and women. So really having that hard academic focus, that's why the workplace learning credits were so important for me, because I always say, ‘we're not raising boys and girls here, we're raising men and women,” Phipps said. “We want them to know how to shake hands. We want them to know how to do a job interview.”

Phipps said Warden High offers various options at the school.

“When they graduate from us, they know how to do a job interview because they've been through one, they have letters of recommendation, they have their resumes, cover letters, they have 26 credits instead of the state-required 24, so we are a very heavily academically focused school. We have tons of college in the high school, so they can go to Big Bend for Running Start but we also offer multiple classes here in math, science, English, electives, history.”

Phipps said during her time at Warden, one major focus has been pushing ninth graders back on track academically, meaning keeping track of their attendance and performance, which Phipps said takes a lot of manpower. The results are showing, however. 

“In the 2020-2021 school year, 34.1% of our freshmen were on track to graduate. In 2021-22, 49.4%,” Phipps said “(The Office of Superintendent for Public Instruction) has to do the final math on this, but we are projecting right now that we have 66.7% on track ... It's a tricky number because it's how many ninth grade students passed all of their classes. So if they fail a semester, they're dinged, but that's the projected from OSPI.”

    Warden High School Principal Katie Phipps, center, walks behind Warden School District Superintendent Scott West, left, and Warden School Board Chairperson Bryce Cox, right, during the 2023 graduation ceremony.
  

Applications

Warden High also focuses on real-world skills, Phipps said.

“Last year we brought back financial literacy and it was just one class and then this year, we actually had to expand it to two, and it's one of the few classes we actually offer multiple times a day,” Phipps said. “There was a high need for financial literacy.”

The financial literacy course has students learning about credit scores, purchasing cars, home loans and more.

“It's like that applicable stuff, because when you're young…when you’re 16, being an adult seems like its eons away and it really isn't,” Phipps said. “These skills that they're getting now are going to be the ones that they're going to use immediately.”

Phipps said she wants to keep Warden students’ post-high-school options open.

“We've expanded our CTE offerings to offer more of the animal science, more plant science, food science, you know, offer more woods and metals, so ideally I want a Warden High School graduate to be prepared for either direction they want to go,” Phipps said. “Do you want to go technical school? Do you want to go four-year university? As long as they're prepared for something, that's a big focus here, just to make sure they have both avenues that they can explore, because oftentimes when they're young, they're not really sure yet. They might write off college before they've even turned 16 years old, and they turn 18 and they’re like ‘Oh, maybe I do want to go to college.’ I just don't ever, ever want to shut those doors.”

Motivations

Phipps said her favorite part of her job is interacting with the students.

“The students here, they're incredibly, incredibly polite…and that was from day one. They didn't know who I was,” she said. “There was summer school going on when I started and I would come out at the end of the day and I'd see kids, and of course, I'd say hi and they’d say ‘Hi Miss, how are you?’ They didn’t know that I was the high school principal, they're just polite young men and women…and they make me laugh. They pick on me a bit, but that’s okay.”

With a smaller school, Phipps said it is nice to be able to know more of the students personally. However, Phipps said one of the challenges of her job is managing the school’s resources, which are sometimes limited, as well as getting to know the staff.

“A big challenge has just been getting my feet underneath me and understanding my staff and how my staff works,” she said. “Because I'm coming in as the outsider here and I finally feel like we all know where each other stands and I can just kind of get out of their way and let them do their job.”

Phipps elaborated on what motivated her to become a principal and what drives her in that role. 

“It felt like the right time to do something new with my career and then the more that I stepped into (the role), going from exploring the administration role to doing my internship and being a part of it, it kind of just snowballed from there,” Phipps said. “Every single day I miss the classroom. But you get to help kids academically, and you get to watch staff and help guide staff, so it's kind of the best of both worlds.”

    Warden High School Principal Katie Phipps, center, works on spirit week theme ideas with students. Phipps said her favorite part of her job is interacting with students.
  

Gabriel Davis may be reached at gdavis@columbiabasinherald.com. Download the Columbia Basin Herald app on iOS and Android.