Staff at Auburn’s Pioneer Elementary have a mantra— teach ’em until they don’t just get it right, teach ’em until they can’t get it wrong.

Judging by how high their chicks fly each year, Principal Debra Gary and her hardworking crew must be onto something.

Have a look.

In the years 2010, 2011 and 2013, respectively, Pioneer student marks earned the Title I Distinguished School Award, the Title I Academic Achievement/Improvement Award and the Washington State Innovative School Designation. In the years 2012-2014, students garnered the school the Washington State Achievement Award, in 2011 and 2012 the Washington School of Distinction Award, and in 2011 and 2012 Pioneer was designated a Washington State Reward School.

Pioneer consistently outperforms not only state averages but much more affluent Eastside schools in its demographic in math and reading.

For a school in the 80th percentile of poverty, for a school with a student population that is almost 50 percent composed of ELL kids who need specialized instruction in English, that is almost unheard of.

Gary explains the Pioneer Way, thus: break it down, make it simple, repeat, repeat, repeat until the kids never forget it.

“We always feel an urgency with every kid because we have about a 40-percent turnover rate,” Gary explained. “Sometimes we only have them for a couple of months, so we have to reach into the child’s psyche and show them that they can succeed. If they stay here, they’ll succeed, they’ll meet all the benchmarks, the math benchmarks, the reading benchmarks. They’ll pass their state tests.

“If they leave us and go somewhere else, we want them to know that all along the way, if they just keep trying, if they put in the tremendous effort, they will succeed. If they don’t meet success in elementary school, they’ll be that much more at risk for not meeting it in middle school and high school and beyond,” Gary said.

For what she does, the Auburn Reporter is pleased to flabbergast this soft-spoken principal by naming her its Person of the Year.

“It’s always wonderful to be honored, but I just wanted to say I’m the lucky one for being here. Coming to Auburn and to Pioneer Elementary has been the opportunity of a lifetime, really. Every day there are so many challenges, and part of my personality is problem solving. It’s really the organization that’s given me this opportunity,” Gary said.

Every child has ‘tremendous potential’

As she speaks, a line of student carolers passes by her office door, and she laughs with obvious delight at the sheer joy of being where she is, doing what she is doing with the little ones in her charge.

“Every child who comes through this door here has tremendous potential, just like every other child in the world, but it falls on our shoulders once they come into our school, and our staff knows that. It’s a calling for us. It’s really about my staff. We’re dedicated to using every minute. Time is our greatest resource, so we’re very well organized around the use of time, and very much on the lookout for anything that might take that time away from us because it adds up over the year,” Gary said.

For Gary, in her 13th year as principal at the south-end school, education is a calling bred in the bone.

By age 7, Gary was writing curriculum for her neighbors, playing school, writing up text books, making her younger neighbors play school back in her native Ohio.

“I love kids, I have always loved kids. I had like 41 cousins, and I was the little girl who carried around the babies all the time,” Gary said.

“I started as a paraprofessional in Seattle when my kids were little, but even before that, I taught in a Montessori school in California where we’d lived. I already had my BA. The paraprofessional job looked good to me because I was raising my kids, I could still get in there and teach students, and it didn’t take all my time.”

From there, it was a natural transition to teaching, and five years after that into administration. She lauds the technological advances that allow a school to put special applications on tablets, applications catered to the individual student and to his or her needs.

“It’s always been my view ever since I was a paraeducator to look at the individual students within a class as my customers and ask the question, ‘How do we serve this individual person?’ There are students who come with individual pieces missing, there are students who come with a lot more knowledge.

“…The taxpayers are also my customers. I feel like we’re entrusted with public money, and we’re supposed to be doing good for the public,” Gary said.

Even after all these years in education, she said, she’s more excited now than she has ever been about the possibilities for kids to learn.

“It’s kind of a new dawn. They love to come in. And to have everybody here on board that way is really where the power is,” Gary said.

“You often hear the old adage, ‘If you can help just one child ….’ I don’t let anybody here voice that because no, one student is not good enough. We can’t leave anybody behind,” Gary said.