DiPaolo named as principal of Gallup Catholic School

Long time Gallup educator and administrator Angelo DePaulo has taken on another challenge with his new position as principal at Gallup Catholic High School. (Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent)

By Bill Donovan
Staff Writer

GALLUP — When the local Catholic Diocese began looking for a replacement for the principal of its high school, it had to look no further than its math department.

So at the end of this school year, Angelo DiPaolo will replace Don Sparks as the school's new principal.

While DiPaolo has never been a principal, he brings to the jobs decades of experience in educational administration, after serving for several years as assistant principal of Gallup High School and then as an assistant superintendent for the Gallup-McKinley County Public School District.

It was after retiring from the public school system three years ago that DiPaolo decided to go back to teaching and accepted a job at Gallup Catholic High School teaching math and serving as the school's athletic director.

Being athletic director for a school with only 82 students presents a number of challenges, with probably the most daunting being getting enough students to come out to make up a team.

"We're helped a little that we can go down to the 8th grade to get players," he said, adding, however, that this gives the school only another 20 students to draw from.

So you have about 100 students and you need players for everything from cross country and soccer in the fall, basketball in the winter and baseball and track in the spring. What do you do?

You hope, said DiPaolo, that there are enough students that year who are interested in athletics to field a team. And you urge the good athletes to come out each season for both sports.

But this will be good training for DiPaolo since being head of such a small school with a very limited budget will require him to go outside the box when he becomes principal if he wants to make improvements to the school's curriculum.

He said that he feels that Sparks has done a superb job of doing just that for the past 10 years as principal, managing to get the school accredited and getting enough teachers to staff the program.

Since it pays less than the public school, getting teachers is still one of the biggest challenges DiPaolo may face since the days when Catholic schools relied heavily on nuns and other religious to staff the school are over.

But the Catholic Diocese has found another solution to that problem getting retired public school teachers, like DiPaolo, to consider a second career working in the Catholic schools.

The school, said DiPaolo, is looking at recruiting three teachers who are retiring this year from the public school system which will bring the number next year at the school to seven.

He said the diocese is also talking to a religious brother from St. Joseph, Missouri, who has also expressed an interest in coming here.

DiPaolo said another question he hopes to get answered when he becomes principal is just how well does the high school do its job.

"I'd like to see if our graduates are succeeding and if they're not, why not," he said.