Today we bid farewell to our friend and fearless leader, Amanda Kuhnz.
Amanda has been an administrator at our school for the past six years. In her first five years with us, Amanda worked as an assistant director to three different directors. During each assignment, she assumed the role of Interim Director at the point when each leader left the Academy. This past year we hired Amanda as our Director of Operations.
As you might imagine, the times Amanda stepped up and served as our Interim Director were extremely stressful situations. However, she demonstrated such professionalism and confidence that the school moved forward with barely a pause. She never complained about the assignment, but willingly jumped in to do what was needed. This has been characteristic of everything she has accomplished at the school. We have been extremely impressed as we’ve watched her tackle new and challenging assignments with a determination to learn the job and perform her duties exceptionally. If Amanda accepts an assignment, it is guaranteed that it will be done, and it will be done well.
Amanda has tackled many challenging assignments. She’s worked closely with the Board of Trustees’ policy committee to co-write, review, and publish almost 50 policies in the span of eight months. She has revised the Academy’s employee handbook and authored coach’s and athlete’s handbooks. In addition to grant writing, Amanda has developed a system to sort and organize all of the many grants the Academy receives. The information needed to better write and use those grants has become available to us because of Amanda‘s efforts. She’s worked with the school’s finance committee to create a solvent budget and plan for our future. She oversaw the CTE program and assisted our CTE Director in completing a state review of our program. The results of the review produced no needed changes.
Amanda also worked in conjunction with the Board’s curriculum committee to review all of our teacher’s classroom scopes and sequences. She helped develop a teacher observation tool, used for informal teacher observations and then conducted many of those teacher observations throughout this year. Amanda also skillfully managed all of our outside agreements with many different vendors. Additionally, she has served for years as our Athletic Director and has had the opportunity to serve in leadership roles at the state level in that capacity as well.
On a personal note, Amanda loves to challenge herself and is always looking for ways to grow. She served on the Springville Chamber of Commerce Board this past year. Her service brought scholarship opportunities to our seniors, something we have never had before. Her efforts also truly helped to bring positive recognition within our community for our school.
We have loved working with Amanda. There are so many quality characteristics which describe her. We respect how gracefully she accepts feedback, and then in turn looks for opportunities to improve. Amanda doesn’t shy away from having hard conversations with others. She can hear hard things and she can share them with others. She’s principled, truthful, strong and empathetic. She is not intimidated by a challenge, but comes up with solutions and powers through. We have been so blessed to have her work for us and are a better organization because of her contributions. She truly will be remembered for her courageous leadership.
We take this opportunity to gratefully acknowledge all of the good that Amanda has brought to our school and our students. We appreciate her many qualities and attributes that have moved our school forward during challenging times. We are excited for the opportunities before her and wish her well in all her adventures ahead.
We invite everyone to leave a comment at the bottom of this page to join us in thanking Amanda for her extraordinary leadership at Merit.
We will miss you, Amanda! Thank you with all our hearts for your years of dedicated service!
Sincerely,
Merit Academy Board of Trustees
Angela Bunker
Jeanné Condie
Tyler Griffin
Rachel Jay
Rozelle Hansen
Brett Palmer