It has now been two months since Anna Rodriguez stepped into her “personal whirlwind windstorm.”

    Rodriguez was named the new principal at Miami Springs Senior High School in early November and with it came a significant milestone. During the first 45 years of the school’s existence never had a female occupied the principal’s desk at the high school.

    “It’s nice, but it’s not something I’m really dwelling on too much,” said Rodriguez. “There are way too many other things, important things, that need to get done and I’ve really had to hit the ground running.”

    Running would be putting it mildly. A full-out sprint might be a better analogy.

    Here is a woman who, during her first week on the job, actually counted discarded pieces of gum on the two sidewalks leading up to the school.

    “I counted 927 and immediately ordered a pressure cleaner to get the sidewalks and other things cleaned up,” said Rodriguez.

    We actually thought she was making the 927 number up.

    “No,” said Rodriguez. “I counted every single one. That’s the way I am. Every single detail.”

    Talk about leaving no stone unturned! Or for that matter — gum.

    Not that anyone broadcast it openly before but whispers around the school among many faculty members was that there were many issues with the previous administration under former principal Tom Ennis (who left for Killian Senior High School in late October) and that morale was low in a school that had slipped back from a B to a C rating.

    But Rodriguez’s arrival, aside from getting the gum cleaned up, has invigorated the school. Administrators and certain faculty now talk of a “new attitude” and “things getting straightened out.”

    “Make no mistake about it, I was not assigned this school, I put in for it because I looked at it as a new challenge for me,” said Rodriguez. “I have a lot of big plans and a lot of major goals in store for this school, so it’s time to jump on board.”

    This coming from a principal who is beginning her first stint in “the big leagues” — that is, becoming a principal for the first time on the senior high school level.

    But success is something Rodriguez is familiar with. After starting off as an assistant principal at JFK Middle school for five years and Krop Senior High School for one, she took over as principal at Ponce De Leon Middle School in Coral Gables in September 2006 and, through lots of motivation and organization, raised the school 49 points in the FCAT scale over those five years. With that, Ponce De Leon became the fifth-ranked middle school in the county.

    Now Rodriguez, a 1990 graduate of Hialeah High School who went on to attend the University of Miami before getting a Master’s in Education at FIU, hopes to work the same magic and beyond at MSSH.

    “It’s still a little bit of a process,” Rodriguez said when asked to describe her first two months. “The school is so large that I actually got lost a few times and was kind of like a deer in headlights.”