Last month, Arizona Health and Physical Education (AHPE) recognized Sherry Towns, principal at Faith Mather Sossaman Elementary School in Queen Creek, by presenting her with its Administrator of the Year award during the group's state convention in downtown Phoenix.
This award was part of the evening's Honor and Recognition Awards ceremony Oct. 25 at the Children’s Museum of Phoenix. Towns was nominated and presented the award by Lara Cox, Faith Mather Sossaman Elementary health and physical education teacher and AHPE president.
"As we all know, health and physical education often gets overlooked. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find administrators who understand the value of physical activity but, more importantly, see and include us, health and PE teachers, as educators. Sherry not only recognizes physical education as an important subject, but she supports us and our program at Faith Mather Sossaman Elementary," Cox said. "She encourages us to continue to learn and grow by allowing us to attend things like this convention, she includes us in the yearly school budget so we are able to purchase equipment for our students, she lets us help plan the specials schedule because she understands that we know best about those little PE and music things (like teaching when lunch is going on on the other side of a curtain, traveling with all of the equipment from one field to another, to another, or the gym/classroom to another space), she listens to our ideas for including more physical activity at school (like annual jingle jog, staff morning yoga, running club, inviting parents into our PE classrooms, etc.), she allows us to help lead staff activities and we are included in school leadership roles and being on the team lead team. Whether she realizes it or not, she has built a culture with the staff as well that values physical education."
Cox added, Towns "also supported us and AZHPE by attending our state convention with our Queen Creek Unified School District superintendent this year and we wanted thank her for everything she does. We appreciate her so much."
This award comes on the heels of Cox being a finalists for this year's Queen Creek Chamber of Commerce Educator of the Year award in September.
