Samantha Abate, an eighth grade special education teacher at Avonworth Middle School, has been named assistant principal at Deer Lakes Middle School.
Abate holds post-secondary degrees from Slippery Rock (Elementary and Special Education) and Robert Morris (Instructional Leadership).
While at Avonworth, Abate created and facilitated a professional learning community for primary level staff and facilitated book discussions on data driven decision making to improve student achievement. As a special education teacher, she organized the Extended School Year summer 2016 programming and created district-wide parent training survey to use as a tool to help create parent training sessions.
A natural leader, Abate knew very early on that she may one day make the move over to school administration. “I have always wondered why certain decisions were being made and I wanted to be a part of that process,” she said.
Abate (nee Kristoff) is a 2002 Deer Lakes alum and still lives in West Deer with her husband and two children. “I have very closely followed the transformation Deer Lakes has undergone in recent years as an educator, an alumnus and a mother of children in the district,” she said. “There are so many wonderful things happening at Deer Lakes and I am very excited to be a part of it going forward.”
Deer Lakes also hired Amy Sclight as the new school counselor at East Union Intermediate Center.