Bridget O’Connor, assistant principal, recently made her way up the school ladder to the administrative department for her very first time. This is O’Connor’s first year as an assistant principal and will spend it at her former school of Lewis-Palmer High School. She highly enjoys the new position she is in and is loving every memory she is making as it being her first year and making new relationships with the faculty and even the students.

Growing up around the Lewis-Palmer District her whole life, her career was set on being a teacher. She continued to pursue her dream to becoming a teacher by going off to graduate from Grand Canyon University, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, University of Northern Colorado and Arizona State University. Nevertheless, O’Connor has been pretty consistently local, in which she spent her life in Monument, Colorado area from her kindergarten years to her senior year at Lewis-Palmer High School.

Just out of college, O’Connor started her teacher career as a history teacher in Arizona and taught there her first three years. From there, she came back to Colorado and got a teaching job at Manitou Springs High school, in which she spent most of her career at spending 16 years teaching American history, Psychology, and Social Studies. Her teaching position was nowhere near an end, where she got a job offer to become a leadership counselor at Pine Creek High School where she really developed her personality in focusing on creating strong relationships with the students and everyone she is around. Unexpectedly, O’Connor got another job offer in which she never expected, to become apart of the administrative department and become the assistant principal at her graduating high school, Lewis-Palmer.

“I really enjoyed teaching, however, being around students my whole life I can really see how everything works and what needs to be done, inspiring me to take the step in becoming of higher authority,” O’Connor said. “I really wanted to be apart of making the school a better place for everyone and I feel the only way to do that would be to approach the school at a bigger position in order to help work with what needs to be done.”

O’Connor has always had a kind and passionate heart for teaching and helping people become  better them. She finds the most enjoyable part of what she does is making the relationships with the students and faculty and creating that special bond of trust and respect. O’Connor finds the best part of creating the strong bondage is that it keeps the tradition going.

“I always thought of Lewis-Palmer as being my second family. And because of that it makes me feel happy to be back at the school and to help continue a tradition of excellence,” O’Connor said.

In the past years she never saw herself being in the position she is in today. If anything, she always saw herself going into education as her career. O’Connor is highly pleased with the path she has taken and is very satisfied in being back at Lewis-Palmer and helping the students and creating the best for everyone as an individual and preparing them to continue as the best they can be in their lives.

“No matter what anyone says, every single adult and faculty member in the school cares about the students so dearly,” O’Connor said. “As hard as it may seem in some cases, the only thing that they want to achieve for the students is to have created them to be the best they can be and to lead them to a better future.”