After serving as Chautauqua Elementary School’s (CES) principal for seven years, Rebecca Goertzel will step down at the end of the 2022-23 school year to spend a year in Costa Rica with her family.

This summer, Goertzel and her family will head to Monteverde, Costa Rica, where they will stay until June of 2024.

In Costa Rica, Goertzel said, her family will be returning to friends and a community they know well — the Cloud Forest School, a kindergarten through sixth grade English immersion bilingual school, with a focus on environmental science education, serving primarily low-income, scholarship students.

Goertzel first discovered the school in 1998, on a family vacation to Costa Rica, when a taxi driver told her about it — a tip that has led to Goertzel’s decades-long connection to it.

Goertzel was previously Cloud Forest’s head of school and next year, she plans to work at the school again, doing part-time fundraising, instructional coaching, and possibly substitute teaching.

What’s more, Goertzel said, her daughter will attend the school as a sixth-grader.

The timing of Goertzel’s departure from CES, she said, was largely due to the fact that next year will be the last that her daughter can attend the school — an experience that she felt was important.

Long term, Goertzel plans to return to her home on Vashon after her family’s year in Costa Rica, and seek employment as a principal in the Tacoma school district.

Goertzel has many family members on Vashon and Tacoma, including her mother and her brother and his family — and a job in Tacoma would be an easy commute from her south-end home, she said.

Goertzel and her family have now lived on the island for a total of eight years — and during most of that time, she has worked at CES.

“Vashon seemed like a great fit because there is still a dedication to educating the whole kid,” she said. “There is a commitment to getting kids outside, having recess, the arts, and hands-on learning throughout the school. These things really appealed to me and matched my educational philosophy.”

Goertzel, who speaks Spanish fluently, has also been glad to put her bilingual skills to use at CES.

“It’s wonderful to be able to make connections with the Latino families on the island and I know having a bilingual principal has been important to them, so I’m sad to go for that reason,” she said. “I know they really appreciate having that communication and that contact has been pretty crucial.”

Although Goertzel thinks hiring a bilingual candidate to replace her would be beneficial, she also said the district will also consider other qualifications as well.

“… I know there are a lot of factors to take into account, and it has to be the right person,” she said. “We have put in a lot of strategies to help bilingual parents connect with the school, so they are not only relying on me.”

While at CES, Goertzel also led a Spanish-speaking internship program, bringing educators and students from other countries to work in the school. That program, she said, will continue beyond her tenure.

Looking back on her years at CES, Goertzel mentioned both the challenges she had faced as well as the partnerships that had brought her joy. These include programs with Vashon Artists in Schools, Vashon Nature Center and Vashon Wilderness Program.

“It’s a position where you’re constantly learning — constantly making mistakes and making it better,” she said. “I think I’ve learned a lot about working with staff and helping them help one another and working on teams,” she said.

Goertzel’s time at CES also included leading the school through the COVID-19 pandemic, a time of great challenge.

“Throughout the pandemic, we were constantly reinventing school and so I’ve had lots of opportunities to make things work as well as they can for our kids and teachers,” she said.

What does Goertzel hope for the future, at CES?

She cited cross-grade communication as something the school could choose to work on in the future.

“Sometimes we get siloed within the grade level at Chautauqua, and so helping [to create] those cross-grade level connections is something we’ve worked on,” she said. “Continuing to work on that would be a good thing.”

Goertzel believes that after her departure, the staff will continue to drive Chautauqua in the right direction.

“The school is in a great place,” she said. “We really have a wonderful teaching staff and that great staff is going to hold the school on a good path with a new person.”

Goertzel described CES as a place of expansive opportunities for students.

“As I’m walking around the school, I can find so many amazing things happening that don’t happen at other schools,” she said, noting that the school has a focus on arts and integration due to extensive community partnerships.

“We are just a regular public school, but there is so much beyond that. In addition to making sure kids are learning what they are needing to learn, we go so far beyond, it makes it a magical place.”

Goertzel is leaving CES with gratitude to the Vashon community.

“Being principal is a challenging, but rewarding job, and I never would have been successful without the collaboration of our amazing staff, the parents and our local community,” she wrote, in an email to the Chautauqua community. “It has been an honor to shepherd the school through the pandemic, to build partnerships with local environmental, outdoor education and arts groups and to support the adoption of new curriculums, ensuring the growth and learning of our students.”

Now, she said, she’s looking forward to new challenges, first in Costa Rica, and then, in her quest to become a school principal in Tacoma.

“You learn so much being somewhere different,” she said.

Tacoma Public Schools is the third largest school district in Washington state and includes 35 elementary schools.

“For myself as a professional, after about seven or eight years at a school I think it’s good … to have a change and learn from being in a different environment, and probably good for the school to have someone else come in and rethink processes and make things better,” she said. “Although I always see there is so much more to do, it would be good for someone to come in with fresh eyes.”