How a Principal of the Year Builds It

Vicki Davis (00:00): Happy Motivational Monday, Episode 1006. Today, we’re talking about helping every kid feel like they belong and doing it with heart. Our guest today is Sonia Ruiz, NASSP’s 2026 National Middle Level Principal of the Year.

Announcer (00:17): This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:21): Today, we are talking with Sonia Ruiz, the 2026 National Middle Level Principal of the Year in the United States. Sonia leads Jane Addams Middle School in Bolingbrook, Illinois, recognized in part because her English learners and her students with IEPs are making real, measurable gains. She will tell you straight up why we’ve got to do it with love.

Sonia, congratulations for being named the 2026 National Middle Level Principal of the Year. Could you describe what went through your mind?

Sonia E. Ruiz (01:01): I was named in person. I won for my state, for Illinois, so I knew going out there was getting an award for that. In February, I was asked to be part of a webinar similar to this, but it was a panel. That is when I was informed that I was one of three finalists in Washington.

I was not prepared to hear that I was going to be the winner of 2026. It was pretty exciting, humbling. I just never imagined that a kid like me, where I never felt like the system was made for me, that I would be here now as the winner.

Vicki Davis (01:33): You are four years into Jane Addams. When you walked in that first year, what did the school feel like and what’s different now?

Sonia E. Ruiz (01:41): This school has always had a history of excellence. It is a very diverse school and a community that is very diverse. I remember coming to the interview and after meeting the staff feeling like whoever gets that principalship is going to have a great place to work at. So I’m going to tell you, there were some things already that were in place that made it great.

And the people are one of them. So I was excited to be here. This school in this district, their values match mine. And sometimes that’s difficult to find. We were coming out of COVID a couple years when I started here. So there were some things we needed to change. The demographics of our students has continually changed.

And that’s the thing with education. You have to make sure that everybody in the building is meeting the needs of the students that you have now. So you might have been doing something that worked fantastic a couple of years ago with the students you had before. You have to continually see where do I need to sharpen my skills to make sure that I’m helping the students that are here now.

Big thing for us was making sure students felt like they belong, that they were seen, heard. Most school improvement plans actually just have math and reading. For us, it was important to not just have the academic and learning portion, but also the environment and the equitable practices that we were having in the building.

So that’s where we started, because if we don’t have the mindset that all of our students can grow, then it’s hard for them. And if our kids don’t feel like they belong here, then it’s going to be difficult for them as well. So we wanted to make sure that kids from the minute they walked in knew that the people that were here are here because we care for them.

And in that same vein, it isn’t just about emotions. It’s also making sure that we have a high quality education for the students that come here. And then we have high expectations for them because I know that they can do it. So those were some of the things that I think made a difference.

I think the work that we’ve done moves beyond just certain students. Part of it was the belonging, creating an MTSS system to ensure that we had the intervention students need or support if we’re not getting it at universal level one. So we’ve just seen so much growth within our system, our staff and the interventions that we provide, even with that mindset still like, okay, so what are we going to do even better next year?

Vicki Davis (04:03): When you say we’ve got to do it with love, what does that look like?

Sonia E. Ruiz (04:06): The best way that I can say it is I’m a mom myself. And when you send your children to a school, you want to make sure that the people that are there care for your kids. So I care for every student that walks in our building. I care for who they are right now.

And I care for who they are going to be in the future. In Spanish, there is a term that says, con el corazón, like with heart. And that’s really what that kind of means.

Vicki Davis (04:30): When you stand up in front of new teachers that you hire and bring them on board with what your culture is going to look like, what do you say first?

Sonia E. Ruiz (04:38): Well, I do this even at our every institute just because our kids… They don’t get a choice what school they go to. The students that come in through that door, it’s because we’re in this neighborhood. So they get to come to us. We’re here to service them.

So regardless of their background, how they look, what languages they speak, we got to make sure that we make it a place where people feel like they belong, but also care enough to stay with the things that we know work and that we’re making sure students are learning and providing our staff with the strategies they need to make sure that they’re the best educators that they can be.

If there are students who need additional help or things of that nature, then we’re here to do that. Our school, when I said it’s very diverse, it’s also diverse in the programs that we have within our schools. We have students with different abilities. They may have like wheelchairs or they may have like Down syndrome, things of that nature.

So that program has continually grown since I’ve been here. This next upcoming year, we’re going to have six classrooms of multi-need students at the middle level. I’m really proud of what our staff and our students do is making sure our school is inclusive of everybody. If I was talking to new teachers or our staff, we’d look at our system and say, hey, when we make this decision, who is it affecting?

What’s the impact? And is it inclusive of everybody? Even things people may think are little, but to us, we’ve seen that it make a difference, like an assembly. What are the games they’re playing? Will there be opportunities for different students of different abilities to play? Where is everybody seated? Who’s seated with them?

That’s what kind of looking at inclusivity. If we have a dance, is that open to everybody? Does everybody like noise? Some don’t. So with the dance, we might also have our library open where kids can go and play board games for those that don’t want to be around the music, but still want the social aspect of it.

So just different ways that you can look at your daily practices and seeing, are we being inclusive within our buildings so that it is a place for everybody? The other thing that we did four years ago when we started, a lot of times schools give different surveys to see what the culture is like.

But many of those are like Likert scale. So like you either agree, disagree, those types. You don’t really get the information of when those kids say, no, I don’t think this is a great place or I don’t feel like I belong. What does that mean? We created our own form that we’ve been giving in the last four years to get their voice.

It’s what things make you feel like they belong and list them out. And if there was one thing you wish people in this building knew about you, what would that be? And you’d be amazed how much they share through that. That’s another way of making sure that we’re being open and changing things through student voice.

Vicki Davis (07:25): You say these are small things, but these are actually huge things. Now, you are known for your gains with English learners and students with IEPs. When you look at your numbers, what do you see?

Sonia E. Ruiz (07:36): We’ve been exemplary for the last three years in a row. So exemplary, our state measures many things, the proficiency in ELA, in math, but also the growth of when students come here. So one of the things that we’ve been able to show is regardless of what level our students start in sixth grade, by the time they leave in eighth grade, we were at 80 something percentage proficiency, which is unbelievable.

Vicki Davis (08:03): Wow.

Sonia E. Ruiz (08:03): Regardless of where they started. So we know that when they’re here, they’re going to grow. But we also know we can’t do it alone. It takes everybody. It takes every staff member. It takes all our counselors. It takes every single person to do specific things. This last year, yes, our focus was EL and our students with IEPs.

And we were very strategic. We partnered up with our district office and they came and gave PD along with our coach to our staff when we were have our monthly meetings. So we would not just teach them, but actually go through the strategy with them. Then part of me and my assistant principal is we’re visible in the classrooms.

So then we would go and do learning walks based on the things we said, hey, we just learned this strategy. We want to see, for example, academic discourse in the classrooms. Are those things happening? Then we would give our entire instructional team, would come together after semester and look at, well, we’re really good at this, but we still need to get better at this.

It’s like a continuous cycle of improvement. What are we doing? How is it working? So when I think about students, I can think of our students have been affected for like our MTSS, where we had one student that just graduated. When he was here, he was chronically absent when he started in sixth grade.

I remember him being with our counselor and we had to basically create these systems to just try to get him to class that sixth grade year. And by eighth grade, because of the interventions, because he did need additional help in reading, He needed additional help in math. He was getting that intervention within the school day.

Along with what we call a lead advisory. So we had advisories, this particular one took students who also had behavior issues and really turned the mindset of like them taking ownership for their goals and what they were going to do for school and their academics and their behaviors at school and started giving them the skills to become mentors to the younger generation.

That particular student graduated and he was no longer chronically absent. He was passing his classes. He was being successful. It isn’t a one thing because I think of all the different things that different teachers did to help him throughout. His last ELA and ESL and special education teacher, I remember going in because he was super proud of me coming to hear him read.

And they were doing reading in a theater style format where you take one of the characters and you’re reading those parts. When he first started reading in that class, he took like the shortest passages. By the end, he was presenting on things. That’s what we want to see. So regardless of where they are, we know they’re going to grow with us. And I think that that motivates us as well because we know something’s happening.

Vicki Davis (10:51): If you could go back to Sonia’s first day. And give her advice, what would you tell her?

Sonia E. Ruiz (10:58): I would tell her, don’t waver. Continue and persevere. The things that you think are going to be great are going to be great. So just keep working with that.

Vicki Davis (11:09): Why do you think that you had success so quickly?

Sonia E. Ruiz (11:12): It’s important to be somewhere where your ideals match the school that you’re at. I’m a very collaborative type of leader. I’m also the same way that I feel that students need to get a new chance every day. Every day is a new opportunity for them to. I have that same type of mentality with my staff.

Every day is a new day. If you maybe missed it one day, we’re going to do better the next day. I think we have to support each other and believe in each other because it would be hard to move an entire staff or students if you’re coming in with an attitude already defeated or being negative about the work.

So as a leader anywhere, you need to come believing that the people that you have are the right people in the right spots to make the change they need to. And if they’re not, then what are you doing to help them? I can’t just make decisions by myself. I also have to value because of the school and what they were doing really well.

Many of the things that we started new, we first analyze and assess. It wasn’t like, oh, you’re doing this wrong. Let’s just change it. It would be like, okay, we’re going to look at what are we doing as an MTSS when we first started. And there were little things that they were doing as a school, but we used a rubric and that takes it away from the people, right?

Because you don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings about anything if they were used to doing something. You also, again, want to change with the times and the students that you have. So being open to those changes. And then it was making sure that we were equipping the staff with the things that they needed to do and then finding the strengths of different people.

There’s many leaders within the school, but I think together we come together and make it even better. We have to continue to grow and every year is different. This year, for example, we had many students who were newcomers or where Spanish speaking was their first language. Normally, we have students who need that program.

They go to a different school. Some parents within the community talk and then they’ll be like, oh, I want her in your program. It’ll be like, well, I speak Spanish, but my staff does not. But again, I think it’s partnering and partnering with our district office, we’re able to provide our students with different supports than normally we were not doing before.

So they provided us with iPads that translated the material and did different things. And one particular student, I just can’t believe her growth from when she started last summer to this year, and she’s only been here one year. And I think that’s what makes it great.

Vicki Davis (13:48): Sonia, could you give us one small little doable thing to make one more kid feel like they belong in that classroom?

Sonia E. Ruiz (13:55): I think the number one thing is stopping and really finding out about that student, like have a conversation with them. Some of the kids in that Google form that we’ve asked, when we ask what makes you feel like they belong is… They asked me beyond what’s going on in school. They asked me about things outside of here.

And I think they noticed that and they call me by name because then you’re just not another face. They know that you’ve taken the time to get to know them, who they are, and what they do outside of school also matters. So then you start feeling like a regular person, right? Like when you say I belong here, you’re really saying me, Sonia, not some other student, you know?

So taking the time to get to know the students by name and asking them questions beyond what’s going on in school.

Vicki Davis (14:45): What is one thing that you wish that adults outside of schools understood about what middle school teachers are actually walking into every day?

Sonia E. Ruiz (14:56): I’m going to say of all the different age groups, middle school is the hardest. When you get to junior high, you get the part of your brain that starts now analyzing and questioning things. So they’re just figuring it out. So it’s really hard to find your voice and advocate for yourself as a student, along with all the hormones that are coming, and I may react a certain way when they hurt my feelings.

Social media doesn’t help, right? Because things don’t disappear. And although as adults, we might think, oh, that’s nothing, to them it’s the whole world. So I think as an educator in the middle school level, you really have to learn how to navigate through that, help students how to navigate through that, and be a support through them so they can get through that.

Vicki Davis (15:44): We’ve been talking with Sonia Ruiz, a 2026 National Middle Level Principal of the Year. Thanks, Sonia.

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