Summer has officially ended and the new school year has begun. However, there is one major difference from last year. CLHS has acquired a new principal, Mrs. Raska, who will be leading the way this year.

Mrs. Raska has been involved in the academic community for quite some time now and has experience being in leadership positions. After Raska moved to CCISD, she was chosen to work her first job as a principal at Clear Springs High School. She worked there for a few years and eventually made her way to Clear Lake, where she worked as an AP and has now been promoted to principal.

Mrs. Raska claims she plans to continue as well as evolve the nature of the community, students, and staff. She claims that character and safety are her top priorities and she will enforce them as much as she can.

Mrs. Raska is beyond excited to be titled principle this year and has many feelings regarding her new superiority position.

“It’s nice to come into a school that I’ve already been for a few years and I’m already part of the culture and community,” Mrs. Raska said. “I’m really excited to keep the momentum going.”

As new principal, there are aspects of the academic world at Lake in which she wants to continue upbringing, such as the character journey of the students and staff.

“I wholeheartedly believe that good character makes you much more successful than anything else and it’s going to help our kids walk out with academics, Lake has that reputation,” Mrs. Raska said. “To me what’s more important as a parent is that I would want my kid going to a school that builds them up as a person opposed to just making sure they’re academically sound.”

Mrs. Raska claims that safety of the campus, students, and staff is very important to her and she wants to continue to enforce rules to keep everyone protected from any harm.

“Everything that we will do this year, safety is our main priority,” Mrs. Raska said. “We never want to talk about the scary elephant in the room but we all know what’s happened on more school campuses than it ever should have happened, some close to home.”

Throughout the year, Mrs. Raska claims she has many goals. However, her main intention for the campus, students, and staff, are to grow as a community and provide assistance to all different groups of people who need a non-traditional pathway when learning.

“We want to grow, we want to improve, we want to be bigger and better than we were the year before and we have a very successful academic program which is not something all campuses can say,” Mrs. Raska said. “We tend to think of college bound consistently, and that’s the majority of our kids, but there still is a very large population interested in other things like going straight into the work force where they need different types of programs.”

Following that mindset, Mrs. Raska has a goal to work on the non-traditional population of students and open a new CTE building here at Lake.

“Right now, our big vocational program here at Lake is biomedical science, which is fantastic, but a lot of those classes are advanced academic classes and we need a program that serves all of our students, not just the ones that are pre-med,” Mrs. Raska said. “We need something that serves a larger population.”

Mrs. Raska has opened up about her feelings towards this new title and claims she is ready to improve the community at lake as each year goes by. She wants to stay focused on safety this year and prioritize that aspect of the community, however she has her goals for the campus set and is determined to reach them.