Leadership Profile: Emmy Murphy - Trailblazing administrator aims to refocus Community Schools

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Emerald Murphy is no stranger to challenging the norm, after all, it is something she has done most of her career. For this reason, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the former French teacher, turned groundbreaking high school athletic director, is now taking on a new challenge, leading Community Schools.

Community Schools programs: supporting our schools, families and community
As you may know, the Community Schools department plays an important role, providing services to students, which wrap-around the normal school day, helping to meet the needs of parents and our community.

“In BVSD, schools are the most important thing, without question. However, 1,200 students also took supplemental classes through BVSD Online this past summer, about 1,300 students are currently in SAC because parents rely on after-school care every evening, and many in our community benefit from using our buildings after hours through our facility rentals,” Murphy said. “We do it all without taking a dollar from our classrooms. These programs are revenue generating, with the goal of covering expenses and providing additional financial support to the district.”

Community Schools is made up of six departments:

• School Age Care (SAC) provides licensed child care for students at our elementary and K-8 schools.
   
• Lifelong Learning (LLL) offers a variety of enrichment courses for students and adults. 
   
• Community Use provides groups, organizations, and businesses access to our facilities through a variety of rental options. Community Use also coordinates intergovernmental agreements that benefit community members and student athletes across the Boulder Valley region.
   
• Community Connections offers a digital space for tutors, counselors, artists, organizations, and businesses to advertise their services to our families.
   
• BVSD Online offers credit-bearing courses in a flexible and fully digital learning environment for students looking to take additional courses beyond their typical full-time course load.
   
• BVSD Print Shop provides high-quality printed products from business cards to copies and posters to newsletters for our schools, departments and community members.

Murphy admits that it is a diverse and somewhat eclectic portfolio of roles.

“I sometimes joke that [Community Schools] is a bit like the Land of Misfit Toys,” Murphy said with a laugh, referencing the Christamas classic, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

An educator to the core
As a former high school French teacher, Murphy understands the importance of the educational mission at the center of it all.

“My passion remains pedagogy and how to be a good teacher. I think teaching is my gift and my literal reason to be on this earth is teaching kids. I really believe that. I still say that today even though I'm doing this work and I'm sitting in this office,” explained Murphy, motioning to the Community Schools director office she was sitting in. “I still really pine to be a classroom teacher, and I believe I'll finish my career in the classroom for sure.”

After graduating from Colorado State University with a degree in International Studies and French she decided to become fluent in the language, so she applied for a job in the U.S. State Department, teaching English at an embassy in a French-speaking nation.

“They assigned me to the island of Martinique in the French Caribbean,” Murphy recalled. “I spent almost four years there, and it completely changed my life. It was the best.”

“My French improved. It helped having a French boyfriend,” Murphy said with a laugh. “Working with the kids was amazing. I realized that I had a passion for teaching and working with the children.”

So, when she returned home to Lyons, Colorado, to earn her master’s degree in Educational Leadership, she found out that her high school French teacher, at Lyons High School, was retiring. 

There was only one catch: she didn’t have a teaching license, because it wasn’t required in Martinique.

“I got the job after Mike Gradoz (Former BVSD Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources, who was working at St. Vrain Valley Schools at the time) gave me an emergency license,” Murphy said.

That, notably, set her on her path of being a trailblazer.

“I was the first alumna to ever go back and teach at the school,” Murphy recalled warmly.

Unfortunately, a few years later Lyons High cut back World Language FTE, so Murphy made the leap to District 27-J and Brighton High School. 

The leap to the “good ol’ boys” club
After eight years teaching, she became a Dean/Assistant Principal at Brighton High School.

I evaluated teachers, helped organize professional development and did discipline all day long. It was really informative, and very challenging. Honestly, the work of a building administrator is a good fit for my personality.” Murphy said.

As a female administrator, Murphy sometimes felt like a bit of an outsider in the “good old boys club.” That only intensified when she was hired at Nederland Middle/Senior High School in 2015 as the athletic director. 

“I was the only female athletic director in my league of 10 or so schools. There's only 2% of us [women athletic directors] in the state of Colorado,” Murphy said. “I think it's definitely still a male oriented kind of place, and that's because men traditionally lead in this jock environment. Talk about the good ol’ boys club, man, but I loved it.”

She says being raised by a single father prepared her for that type of role.

“I'm used to it because I grew up with my dad. I'm an only child of a reconnaissance Marine. I can hang with that environment,” Murphy said proudly. “As a female leader, I had to have high levels of self awareness and emotional intelligence to be successful in a men's world. You have to be able to do that. You have to read a room. You have to know what people expect of you and navigate that.”

As a woman, she felt pressure to be more athletically-minded than her male colleagues, even though her background was a natural fit to lead high school athletics and activities. 

“When I was in high school, I was a three-sport athlete, student body president, and involved in every extracurricular activity the school offered. As a teacher, I was also a volleyball coach and a girls golf coach, but still I had imposter syndrome about being a female athletic director, and it was super hard to overcome,” Murphy admitted.

Eventually she came to terms that she didn’t have to be a super-athlete in order to make sports, activities and other programming strong for kids.

“The job [of athletic director] has so little to do with sports, really. I hire people who know about sports and care about kids. I hire the head basketball coach who knows about basketball. I hire the marching band director who knows about instruments. I can't know all those things,” Murphy reflected. “I can provide a space where students can thrive under the leadership of their coaching staff.”

And she also had no interest in living up to the idea that women can do it all. 

“Women have been sold this myth that they could be everything – be a domestic goddess, be a career woman, be in perfect shape, have kids, do it all. I don't believe in that,” Murphy said. “[To be a leader] you have to sacrifice and that's what I did. I don't have kids, by choice, in large part because of my career. I also have a full time house cleaner.”

While the hours were out of control, she says that she really enjoyed the autonomy the position (both at NED and then Centaurus) provided her, and it felt like a family.

“You get to kind of run your own environment, as you can imagine. You get to help the programs be successful,” Murphy said. “It's so good to see kids involved in pro-social activities because children who are more connected to the schoolhouse do better academically.”

Not only did she trailblaze a path for herself, but also for others.

“So we hired the first female football head coach in the state of Colorado,” Murphy recalled. “That felt significant.”

Denver Post: Nederland’s Beth Buglione, the first female head football coach in Colorado high school history, ready to wade through adversity this fall

While Nederland eventually decided to discontinue its football program, in favor of boys soccer, that coach – Beth Buglione has continued her successful career as a high school football coach, now at Cherry Creek High School.

Denver Post: Beth Buglione, Colorado’s first female high school head football coach, lands at Cherry Creek
 

9NEWS: Beth Buglione breaks barriers as Cherry Creek football's freshman head coach

Turning her sights to Community Schools
As an athletic director/assistant principal, she was the primary liaison with Community Schools, so when the opportunity to lead the department came around, it didn’t seem like a huge leap.

“When I told Dan Ryan [BVSD Executive Director of the East Network and former Centaurus High School principal] he joked, ‘well, you already pretty much work for Community School, so you might as well go work there.’”

Conversely, in her new role she understands deeply how important it is that whatever Community Schools does mesh neatly with our schools. 

“We have to be very school focused,” Murphy said. “ I often remind folks, ‘we can’t put this on the schools.  As a classroom educator, building leader, I have a very unique perspective. I want to make a difference, but I know what decisions will land badly at the school-level and what office managers will be upset about. That is the true reason why I think I'm a good fit.”

And while there have been some big changes, since she arrived last October, she says the Community Schools team has done an excellent job navigating it all. 

“We have such talented people,” Murphy said. 

Moving forward she is dedicated to continuous improvement in all six of Community Schools’ programs. “I want to do a needs assessment,” Murphy said. “It is important that we set a baseline and do some exploration and discovery about how we can better meet the needs of the district, our families and our community.”

“Let's pick it up and look at it differently,” Murphy added. It doesn’t have to be run the way it has been before.”

Getting to Know Emmy

Here are a few more details, so you can get to know our new Director of Community Schools.

A story straight out of Dateline NBC
If you love a good crime drama, pull up a chair.

“I was actually born on an 88,000 acre sheep ranch in Wyoming and the doctor who delivered me, murdered his wife after I was born,” Emmy said. “I was the last baby he ever delivered.”

I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain
When Emmy was very young, her family moved to Colorado and she grew up in Lyons.

“I went to school in Lyons from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and my family still lives there,” Emmy said.

In that time the family has been forced to endure a number of natural disasters. In fact, the Stone Canyon Fire came very close to her father’s home.

“[My father] wouldn't evacuate. He was very stubborn about it, but it was very, very close,” Emmy said. “And the [2013] floods impacted them all. It has been never-ending.”

A mandatory report meet cute
If you’re a fan of romantic comedies, you know about the “meet cute” – that moment in a movie or television show when two people meet for the first time – often in a funny or unusual way.

Well, for Emmy that moment was during a Centaurus Homecoming dance. As an administrator she was helping to chaperone and Lafayette Police Sergeant Jonathan Bomba was assigned to work the same area and hit it off while keeping an eye on the students.

“We were making sure kids weren’t being naughty,” she said with a laugh.

He happened to stop by the school about a week later to take a mandatory report and Emmy asked for his number.

“The rest is history,” Emmy said with a laugh. “He proposed to me at the next homecoming football game, so Centaurus will always have a very special place in my heart.”

Her husband, Jon Bomba, is pretty well known in Lafayette, where he grew up. 

“He graduated from Centaurus (Class of ‘94), becoming the first men's basketball player from CHS to receive a Division I College basketball scholarship- for the University of Texas at El Paso,” Emmy said.