Mr. Lichte is a a fantastic steward of community money. He serves a dual role as principal and superintendent, and balances the sometimes competing interests of those roles well. He has maintained a high level of programming throughout the past few difficult fiscal years, and has attracted and developed high quality staff. He has a vision for the school to carry it through the challenges of a declining in-district student population.
Through independent measures the school is among the best in the state, and is large part due to his leadership, getting out of the way of his qualified staff, and ensuring that they have the technology and time to achieve their best for the students. The district has also attracted more open enrollment students that it is able to admit each year, a strong signal that something is going very right at this little school.

Rather than focus any attention on administrative redundancy or bloated overhead, Pat has decided to balance the district budget by cutting core academic teachers, requiring the remaining staff to cover more classes for only a modest increase in pay. The departments affected will be left with zero minute of preparation time, to meet with students, communicate with parents, collaborate with special ed or support staff, or coordinate club activities, yet all of these activities remain a part of their job description for teacher evaluation purposes. Her application of disruptive innovation in the education marketplace is simply disruptive, without paying heed to the innovation that is occurring in neighboring districts with far better student outcomes than her district can claim. Her district is already hemmoraging students through open enrollment to the better run Arrowhead schools.