Ashley Harris appointed as the new Riverlea High School principal
"We going to make Riverlea High one of the top schools again, we working towards over 90% pass rate and then we going into the 100% pass rate.” - Ashley Harris.
Lennett Louw, Chairperson of the Riverlea High School Governing Body (SGB) is pleased to announce the appointment of Ashley Harris as principal of Riverlea High School.
The official announcement to school management was on July 10 but the learners only received the news on July 12 where it was announced at the assembly.
Louw said: “we will support him with increasing our matric stats this year, we are very happy to have Mr Harris as our head master. This was a very long process, after discussions with our institutional development and support official (IDSO), we as SGB were a bit impatient but we understand that we had to follow the correct procedures.”
According to Louw, Harris was the only one who applied for the position at the school but there were other teachers from other schools who applied too. “I am very happy because now we can move forward with a new vision for the school,” said Louw.
Harris who is originally from Westbury started teaching here at Riverlea High in 1989 and has been at the school for almost thirty years.
“I basically spent most of my life at this school, the community knows me very well because I’ve been here so long. I’ve been through the ranks, started off as teacher, became Head of Department (HOD), became deputy principal for eight to nine years, then this year I was acting principal until Tuesday (July 10) when I was officially announced as principal of Riverlea High.”
When asked how does it feel being the principal of the school after so many years, Harris said that it has not hit home yet.
“For me its never been about the position, its about these learners and the community, I think I’ve become very attached to the community because I understand the problems that people are facing. I know for a fact that it is not going to be easy running the school.”
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When it comes to sharing his vision, Harris added: “The first thing that I would like to do is change the infrastructure of the school, this is my long term goals but I believe that when learners and teachers come to the school and there is resources and the building itself looks good, then that alone changes the perception of learning and teaching. I spoke to the SGB and we will be going into projects to start with this vision.”
“When it comes to discipline, we do have our challenges like any other school, we working on the late coming and it’s getting better, I also spoke to the teachers to change their mentality, if our teachers have a positive mindset, we will be able to change our learners too.
“We going to make Riverlea High one of the top schools again, we working towards over 90% pass rate and then we going into the 100% pass rate.”
Harris concluded with a message to the community:
“parents need to please pay the donation of R250 for the year, even if they pay R20 every month it will be helpful because this is a no fees school, we understand the unemployment in our community but we are in need of finances.
We always say that we need the community’s assistance, discipline starts at home so we need involvement of parents.
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