Peter Boyle, nominated by the Center for the Future of Arizona, received the Amazing Educator Award from the Children’s Action Alliance earlier this month

In 2014, Peter Boyle founded Western School of Science and Technology in Maryvale, a West Phoenix neighborhood, with the goal of creating opportunities for low-income students through quality high school education.

 “We’ve got 75,000 kids out here in West Phoenix and not a single A-rated public high school to serve them,” Boyle said.

In the short time since Western first opened, Boyle’s vision for his school and community has taken shape. Western is currently B-rated, and the highest rated public high school in Maryvale. For his role in the schools’ continued success, Boyle received the Amazing Educator Award from the Children’s Action Alliance on Friday, Nov. 2.

Boyle participated in Beat the Odds School Leadership Academy, a Center for the Future of Arizona program designed to provide leadership training for school leaders to help them create the foundation for sustained and improved student performance within their schools.

“We were really drawn towards the transformational aspect of their programming,” Boyle said. “Which is really, being innovative and thinking laterally about our problems within education here in Arizona.”

BTO SLA partnered with the National Institute for School Leadership (NISL) to design a program for traditional public school districts and charter school networks focused on providing principals and school leaders with executive leadership training. The program aims to create better schools and better school outcomes for students in every community throughout Arizona.

“The key to success is ensuring that there is alignment between the vision of governance, leadership and the teaching staff, in order to move forward together,” Boyle said. “The BTO program really focuses on that middle portion, which is the school leadership.”

He continues to use the BTO experience that he gained and implemented at Western by supporting school leaders with partner districts as they work to undergo sustained leadership transformations at their own campuses.

Boyle and his efforts in developing Western into the successful school that it now exemplifies the BTO ethos by using strong school leadership as a foundation for educational stability and success for its students.

“We really credit that program with bringing a common transformative language to our campus,” Boyle said.