VOLUME 35 • NUMBER 7 • JANUARY 5. 2017
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The Villager’s Man and Woman of the Year
Cherry Creek Schools’ Harry Bull and Tustin Amole
The management and the messenger: Superintendent Harry Bull and Tustin Amole, Cherry Creek Schools’ communications director Photo by Peter Jones
Harry Bull puts the ‘super’ in ‘intendent’
With a name like Harry Bull, the Cherry Creeks Schools superintendent may have been destined for a career in K-12 education—just imagine what fun middle-schoolers have had with that one during his nearly 40 years in public schools. “There’s a whole lot of different names people call me,” the “no-bull” official said with a self-deprecating smile. “While I would tell you that Harry Bull is a very English name, there’s a lot you can do with both ends of that.” Lately, Harry Bull—the name he inherited from his father—has been called the Colorado Superintendent of the Year, in large part for his lead-
ership role in ongoing efforts to increase school funding for the cash-strapped public-school system. His other titles have included Administrator of the Year from the Colorado High School Press Association, Honor Administrator of the Year from the Colorado Music Educators Association and School Library Journal’s Administrator of the Year. “Excellence is a moving target,” Bull said. “Whenever you get really close, it moves up.” This week, Bull gets another designation as The Villager’s Man of the Year, an honor he shares with the accompanying Woman of the Year, Tustin Amole, the longtime communications director for Cherry Creek Schools who will retire at the end of this schoolyear. Continued on page 6
On the record with Tustin Amole
Tustin Amole remembers the day when then-Superintendent Monte Moses hired her as his workaday public-information officer. In the early days of the internet, Amole’s nascent twoperson department’s job was to oversee Cherry Creek Schools’ publications. And there was something else. “He said, ‘I want you to keep us out of the media,’” Amole recalled with a smile. “Well, we both laughed at that one. But I was very successful for getting the right things into the media that told our story. At some point, we got onto this narrative that public education is failing, when in fact we are doing more
than we ever have before.” Like any “story,” there are good parts and bad parts, as well as the boring and even the ugly. From winning test scores and mill levy victories to lunchroom “scandals” and teachers behaving badly, Amole has strived for nearly two decades to tell the Cherry Creek story in full, even in the face of death threats and only a few obnoxious journalists. “As a former reporter, I was very familiar with the openrecords law so I knew what had to be given up,” Amole said. “There’s no point in stalling. People who try to stonewall the media—it always ends badly for them.” Fortunately, the director of the seven-person communications department for one of the largest, most diverse and highest-achieving school districts in Continued on page 6