Rodriguez To Get New Assistant Principal

's newly-appointed assistant principal will begin as early as this week.

That is when John Pizzo, a current special education teacher from Fairfield High School, expects to be stepping into his new role. The decision came after approval from the school board at a regular meeting earlier this month.

Pizzo grew up attending school within the district. He went to Jones Elementary, Green Valley Middle School and graduated high school from Armijo. After high school, he worked on an undergraduate degree at Chico State. He decided to pursue a Master’s Degree in Special Education at Chapman University after discovering he was interested in working with kids with special needs.

“I just liked working with students that have needs,” said Pizzo. “I like to find out a lot about them. They really need somebody that cares about them and that has high expectations of them, as well.”

His 10th year as an educator in the district, Pizzo has spent nine of them at Fairfield as a teacher and seven as the school’s soccer coach.  Though he is still working with the school to find out just what his responsibilities will be, he plans to take his passion for education and encouraging others to work harder into his new position.

“Right now I am transitioning to find out,” he said. “We’re going to work as a team to kind of break the duties up at the school and I don’t have a for sure role yet of what I’m going to do. I’m going to kind of be involved in all aspects of running the school but we haven’t broken it down.”

Still, Pizzo is confident he will help contribute to more success to Rodriguez in the coming school year and beyond.

“I think Rodriguez is a great school and I think it can be even better,” said Pizzo. “They achieve at a high level but I think they can make even more progress. So I just want to get there, meet people and work on taking it to the next level.”