A new school year means Leslie Alexander ’95 is on the road again with her spreadsheet riding shotgun. On the road to schools like Cove Creek and Blowing Rock, Green Valley and Bethel, Valle Crucis and Mabel. There are eight elementary/middle schools and one high school in Watauga County, whose postcard-worthy towns are found on the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina.

The mission for Leslie, Watauga County Schools’ second-year superintendent, is daunting. It’s not enough to visit all nine county schools and memorize all of the school system’s teachers by name. She wants to know a little about the educators who will be teaching and forging relationships with students over the next nine months.

“I can’t tell you that I can walk up to every single teacher and tell you their name,” Leslie confesses, “but I knew a vast majority of them last year and this year I’m going to know even more.”

Getting to know over 400 teachers is not unlike a third-grader learning his multiplication tables. It takes effort, but the payoff to both is immeasurable. Leslie knows the importance of building a rapport. She saw it up close and personal growing up in Kentucky, where her mother, Linda, was a first grade and special-education teacher. She experienced it herself when she made the leap into education as a substitute teacher the year her oldest daughter started kindergarten and, later, when she became a lateral-entry teacher herself.

“Education is so dependent on the relationships you build,” Leslie says. “Obviously between the teacher and student, but I really think it’s important from an administrative level, too. When you can’t be everywhere at once you need to really know your school principals and teachers. They’re the ones on the front line.”

Even now, all these years later, Leslie’s journey from substitute teacher to school superintendent is a bit unconventional. She came to Guilford as a Continuing Education student and, with her husband and two toddler children in attendance for Commencement, graduated with an English degree.

Next stop law school – or so she thought. “After having kids your life route changes,” says Leslie, who worked in her children’s schools all the way through middle school as a lateral entry teacher, a media coordinator and a curriculum coordinator.

“It was great being around my kids and doing a job I loved and was very good at,” she says. “I thought that’s what I’d keep on doing but when it came time for the girls to go to high school, they put their foot down. They said, ‘Sorry, Mom, you’re not coming with us.’ ”

Leslie took her daughter’s words less as a rejection and more as a sign. Now was her chance to pursue that law degree she’d been putting off. Only something in her told her to pause. “I really loved teaching and was good at it,” she says. “I guess I wanted to see what else I could be good at in education and maybe that was in administration.”

She worked administrative roles in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools and earned her Principal’s License through a program at High Point University. She was the principal at Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem, N.C., where she stayed for six years before serving as the county’s Chief Human Resource Officer.

When the Watauga superintendent’s position opened last year, Leslie was intrigued. She earned her doctorate in Educational Leadership from Appalachian State University in Boone, the county’s largest town. She and her husband Cantey, a fan of ASU’s football team, made many trips to Boone in the fall. But those trips were mostly limited to the campus at the expense of the rest of the county.

Before applying for the position last year, Leslie had some exploring to do. She woke up one Saturday morning at 4 for a different kind of road trip. She drove 90 minutes from her home in Winston-Salem to the mountains to visit Watauga’s nine schools. Not just the schools, the people, too.

Leslie remembers dropping by a general store across the street from one of the rural elementary schools and chatting up residents in overalls drinking their morning coffee. “The more I talked to them the more I realized this was such a perfect fit for me,” she says. “Watauga has so many wonderful communities and they’re very proud of their schools. I knew if I got this job I’d be home.”

There were more than 30 public school superintendent openings in North Carolina last year. Watauga’s opening was the only one Leslie was interested in. She says Guilford helped her realize what she was looking for in running a school system. “I think the size of Guilford and the types of relationships and depth of relationships I was able to have with my teachers really influenced me,” says Leslie. “I wanted (to be a superintendent) in a place where I could have those types of relationships.”

This summer she spent a morning delivering books to children with the county’s school board chairman. “Not a lot of superintendents can do that with their school board chairman,” she says.  “And we both knew all the families we took books to. I really think I was led to this job because of the environment and relationships I was able to build at a school like Guilford.”