School Board to Name Ben Dale as Costa's New Principal

Mira Costa's Mustangs have a new leader in the saddle. At tonight's school board meeting, MBUSD staff will recommend the appointment of Ben Dale as principal of Mira Costa High School.

Dale, 43, will replace at the end of the 2009-10 school year to take a position in a school district near Austin, Texas.

"I'm very excited; I really am," Dale said Tuesday. "I moved to the South Bay six years ago and you can't help but be an educator in the South Bay and want to be at Mira Costa. It's the best school here. So it's a natural thing for an educator to say, 'Wouldn't it be really great to be part of the best?' "

Still, the application process was nerve-racking, said Dale, who acknowledged being a "wreck" right up until he received word of his selection. He was one of 23 original applicants for the position, before joining a short list of six candidates, each of whom was interviewed by a panel made up of MBUSD teachers, students and parents.

"It was typical of Mira Costa," Dale said of the interview process. "It was very rigorous and they had high expectations. It looked to me like they'd done a very good job of tailoring the questions to their perceived needs."

His interviewers grilled him on his "philosophy of the teacher evaluation process" and what he looks for when he walks into a classroom.

"The teachers are the experts in the classroom," he remembers answering, "and [principals are] there to be resourceful."

A graduate of Texas A&M University, where he majored in Spanish, Dale earned his teaching credential from Chapman University and his master's degree in education from Cal State Bakersfield. He is in the doctoral program at Cal State Long Beach.

Dale has served as assistant principal at Marina High School in Huntington Beach for the last three years and held the same position at Redondo Union High School from 2004 to 2007. He lives in Redondo Beach with his wife Michelle and their four kids, ages 4 to 17. The Dales are also expecting another child and have an adopted daughter in college.

"Ben Dale emerged from a very competitive group of applicants," said Dr. Mike Matthews, district superintendent, in a news release Monday. "His experiences will serve him well as he enters the principalship at Mira Costa. He has a reputation as a highly visible, energetic, collaborative and student-centered leader."

Marina ninth-grade science and health teacher Robert Marshall echoed Matthews' characterization of Dale.

"He brings people together," Marshall said of Dale. "He has kids' best interest in mind and he loves to be around them. He's very energetic; he brought dodgeball to campus." Marshall added that Dale is "well liked by a lot of people."

In all, there were 20 district employees, parents and students who formed two panels that interviewed the six short-listed applicants. From those interviews, four of the applicants moved on in the process. Those four were interviewed by Matthews and four senior district administrators. Matthews then conducted even further interviews.

"They asked me to name a time where I had to stick my neck out," Dale said of a particularly challenging portion of an interview. "And that was very hard because in this business if you have too many of those stories, it's probably not a good thing. Because if you do the process correctly, then everybody comes along together."

Pending his appointment at Wednesday's school board meeting, Dale will get to work the following morning.

"I'm going to start on Thursday and I'm going to start meeting with everyone who will meet with me," he said. "And I want to ask as many questions as they'll answer."

Meanwhile, perhaps the biggest question on many people's minds is "whether I'm any good," he acknowledged. "I mean Mira Costa is so successful the only really different thing now is they have a new principal. Is the new principal going to be a good fit for their school? I think that's what everybody is looking at right now."