Just days into her new role as executive principal principal, Sofia Roth makes it a point to visit every classroom each morning.
It’s a daily routine she’s kept up no matter what school she was in. Now at Richard Yoakley, it’s helped her to quickly get to know everyone at the school during her mid-year transition from Fulton.
“I’m a people person, and I like to make relationships wherever I go,” Roth said. “I want the students and teachers to see me everyday and have the opportunity to chat if they need to.”
The relationships she’s built throughout her 20+ year career in education have created a strong network that’s been helpful to her every step of the way. She still calls on the principals she’s had over time for advice and guidance.
As the first Latina executive principal at KCS, Roth also hopes to be that role model for those teachers like her who want to explore what they think is out of reach.
“There’s a handful of Latino teachers in the county, and my door is always open for those who might want to visit and shadow me,” Roth said. “You don’t know what life as an administrator could look like until you see it for yourself.”
She also connects with a lot of the students at her schools because, like many of them, she is the product of an ELL education.
“I hope some of them will see that there’s a world out there where they can do whatever they want to,” she said. “The other day I had a student ask if I thought she could do what I’m doing. I said, ‘Absolutely!’”
It’s her passion for building relationships that made her realize that she works really well with the at-risk populations in Knox County.
“I quickly discovered that a lot of those children don’t have people they can rely on,” Roth said. For this reason, she’s trying to change the perception of her new school placement. She continued: “I think that people hear ‘Richard Yoakley,’ and they run the other way; they think it’s a bad school, and it’s not. We have really good kids that made a mistake.”