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Kelly Trudeau: The Heart of Compass
By Alan Gottlieb
Kelly Trudeau joined a group of parents trying to open a K-12 charter school called Compass in Meridian, Idaho more than 20 years ago, with no intention of ever becoming an administrator.
She was a school counselor whose own children attended a charter school in nearby Nampa, and she joined the group to help rewrite parts of the charter application that the local school district kept rejecting.
“I’d never thought about being an administrator,” Trudeau said. “I was a school counselor. I didn’t want to be a school administrator.”
But the group’s board chair saw something in her and encouraged her to apply for the principal job. Trudeau looked into the certification requirements, discovered she needed only six more classes beyond her master’s degree, and figured she had nothing to lose.
She got the position.
That was 2005. Now, as Trudeau prepares to retire from Compass Public Charter School at the end of this school year, she leaves behind a school that has grown from a handful of students in a leased church building to more than 1,300 students on a purpose-built, K-12 campus. Compass consistently ranks among the top five schools in Idaho.
Her nameplate on her desk doesn’t say Kelly Trudeau. It says Boss Lady. And according to those who have worked alongside her for years, that’s exactly what she has been – a boss lady with a gentle hand.
“She’s just a visionary,” said Matt Trudeau, her son and the school’s dean of students. “She’s always been so good at thinking outside the box and just making things work, even when financially we weren’t doing well, or if there were different state policy challenges interfering.”
The school’s origin story reads like a case study in persistence. The founding parent group had been stonewalled repeatedly by the Meridian school district. Kelly Trudeau said district officials would tell them if they changed one element of their charter, approval might follow. They would make the change. Approval would not follow.
After nearly two years of this, the group appealed to the State Board of Education. There they learned that then-Governor Dirk Kempthorne was establishing a new charter school commission to serve as an independent authorizer. Some of the original founders dropped out, exhausted by the fight. Those who remained, including Trudeau and Susan Luke, who was then the board chair, pressed on. Compass became one of the first schools approved through the new Idaho Public Charter School Commission.
Luke resigned from the board after approval and became the school’s part-time kindergarten teacher. She has been there ever since, eventually moving into administration as the school grew, and now serves as co-administrator for grades K-5.
She will take over as the school’s leader when Trudeau retires next spring.
“Kelly and I have had the same vision from the start, and it’s been a really positive experience for us to work together,” Luke said.
That continuity, Luke and others said, has been central to the school’s success. Charter schools that cycle through leaders struggle. Compass has had the same founding administrator for two decades.
Norm Varin has served as board chair for a decade. His three daughters all graduated from Compass, and he joined the board shortly after his youngest finished. He thought a school board would be easy compared to the business and community boards he had served on. He learned otherwise.
But he also learned what made Compass different.
“What’s really funny is, I’ve seen a number of charter schools that spend a lot of time trying to gear the students to do well on standardized tests,” Varin said. “We haven’t done that. What we’ve done is set out to raise good citizens. Here’s the funny part: when you raise good citizens, guess what happens to your test scores?”
That culture-first philosophy has been Trudeau’s signature. The school explicitly teaches conflict resolution, self-advocacy, and soft skills through dedicated class time at every grade level. High school students are organized into cross-grade “houses” based on the eight pillars of Sources of Strength, a national program focused on building protective factors in young people.
Teachers never tell students to just ignore a problem. Instead, they coach them through solving it.
“We address the small things before the big things can happen,” Trudeau said. “While that does make our deans of students and our vice principals very busy throughout the day because they address really small issues, that is intentional, because they are protecting the culture of the school.”
The results show up in unexpected ways. Varin described how students from the school’s National Honor Society regularly present to the board. They stand in front of a room of adults they have never met, deliver a polished report, answer questions, and ask if there are any more. Varin said he has asked these 16- and 17-year-olds how they developed such confidence.
“They say, ‘It’s the school. The teachers taught us how to do that,'” Varin said. “We know how to advocate for ourselves. It’s a strong cultural aspect.”
Both of Trudeau’s sons now work at Compass. Her eldest, Jake, teaches elementary PE and serves as athletic director. Matt, the younger son, left a career as a police officer in Meridian because he felt he was encountering people too late to make a difference.
“I was always told by the police department, ‘Don’t say that you’re getting into it because you want to help people. That’s what everyone says,'” Matt Trudeau said. “But I do really feel like that was my goal. I wanted to make a difference in my community. And I found myself feeling like I wasn’t doing that. Arresting someone for a petty charge and introducing them to the criminal justice system, I’m like, am I really making a positive impact?”
He talked it over with his mother. She suggested he come work at the school. Now he handles discipline and school safety, drawing on the same investigative and interpersonal skills he developed as a cop, just applying them earlier in young people’s lives.
As for Trudeau’s leadership style, Varin said she can come across as imposing. But he has learned that beneath the exterior, she leads with her heart. She is relentlessly honest, sometimes to a fault.
“She doesn’t just sit in her chair in her office and direct everybody,” Varin said. “She is out there. She is in the playground. She is managing buses. When COVID was happening, she was taking temperature readings on kids’ foreheads as they were coming in the door. She will not tell somebody to do something she’s not willing to do herself.”
Luke described the approach as servant leadership. “I think that’s part of her legacy,” Luke said. “Teachers feel safe, seen, and heard. That goes a long way for making staff feel like they matter.”
That commitment to teachers, Luke said, cascades into everything else. “A commitment to a teaching team makes for happy students, and happy students make for happy parents.”
When asked to describe the school’s culture in her own words, Luke paused. “It might be a feeling of calm excitement,” she said. “It’s clear that there is business going on, but people are excited about fulfilling their part in the learning experience. It’s a busyness, but it’s also a calmness at the same time.”
Matt Trudeau said his mother has positioned the school to continue its success once she is gone. “The Compass model is her legacy,” he said. “The leaders that we have at the school now will continue to lead the same way she did. All of us would hope that we’re even half as good of leaders as she is.”
He expects she will have a hard time letting go completely. But there are consolations. She has a granddaughter who will turn two in July, Matt and his wife are expecting their first child in March, and her eldest son is expecting another baby in the spring. Trudeau has already been trading her Monday administrative work for Wednesday babysitting duty.
“She is just as happy as she’s ever been with the grandbaby, and with two more on the way,” Matt Trudeau said. “She’s in her element as a grandma.”
At graduation each year, some students walk across the stage wearing a special medallion. It signifies that they entered Compass as kindergartners and stayed through 12th grade. Varin said those medallions represent something important.
“That’s a show of success, because that means the family saw what the school did to develop their children,” he said. “They wanted them to stay here, even though this is a small charter school and it’s not going to have all the bells and whistles of the bigger schools. They know the value. And that’s in great part due to Kelly.”
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Alan Gottlieb is a Colorado-based writer, editor, journalist, communications consultant, and nonprofit entrepreneur who owns Write.Edit.Think, LLC. He founded EdNews Colorado, which later merged with Gotham Schools to form Chalkbeat. He does consulting work for Bluum, an Idaho-based non-profit education group.
