Officially, the title Dr. Ann Renker carries now is Interim Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning.

Unofficially, her position could be better termed, “change agent.”

That’s the self-description Renker uses after years of changing the education culture on Clallam County’s West End for the better part of two decades.

After 20 years working the Cape Flattery School District and a year working as a leadership coach with Washington state’s Office of Student and School Success, Renker is the second-ranking administrator for Sequim schools behind superintendent Gary Neal.

Both — for now — have the term “interim” in front of their titles. That’s not fazing Renker in the least.

“The ‘interim’ term is in parentheses in my mind,” Renker says. “In public education, some things are out of our control.”

Renker’s path to her new office above Sequim Avenue is, in her own words, a serendipitous one. The native of Long Island, N.Y., attended Fordham University (Bronx campus) in the mid- and late 1970s for her undergraduate schoolwork. It was there that her studies in anthropology put her career on its unique course.

“It was a lightning bolt that hit me — I was very interested in linguistics,” she says. “I found American Indian languages fascinating.”

At the same time Renker was pursuing a doctorate in anthropology at American University in the 1980s, the Makah Indian tribe in west Clallam County was looking for someone to perform a household survey to find out how many continued to speak their native language. Renker completed the survey and gave her research findings to the tribe, and that led to a position as executive director at the Makah Cultural and Research Center, a museum that was developed from the tribe’s desire to curate and interpret the Ozette Archaeological Site collection.

In 1993, Renker joined the Cape Flattery School District as an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher and bilingual coordinator, making sure students had opportunities to study Makah language and culture. She spent the next 20 years with the district, the last nine as secondary school principal for Neah Bay’s Markistum Middle School and Neah Bay High School that serve the Makah Indian Reservation.

In Renker’s tenure, Neah Bay High’s student test scores rose across reading, writing, mathematics and science disciplines. Neah Bay began sending students to Ivy League schools and, she notes, was the single-largest provider of native students to the University of Washington.

While Neah Bay’s high school students saw growth, its middle school students for a time weren’t seeing the same initial success, Renker noted in a piece she wrote for mindsetworks.com (Growing a Growth Mindset to Boost Students’ Achievement: The Neah Bay Secondary Program Example, Feb. 2012). She details how she developed a mentoring program called the Catalyst Corps that matched struggling middle school students with successful high school students.

As a result, middle school test scores rose and more students felt they performed their best on state assessments. The Washington STEM Foundation awarded her the 2011 Inaugural Entrepreneur Award for developing the program.

Last year, Renker worked within a division of the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction as a leadership coach, including some time working with some staff and administrators at Sequim Middle School.

“I felt like I was an informed applicant; they got to interview me for a year,” Renker said.

Now, as one of the top administrators in Sequim’s schools, Renker is taking on the challenge of making sure Sequim students are meeting Washington learning standards.

“College- and career-ready” is the key term,” Renker says. “(I’m) helping students leaving Sequim have academic skills, social skills and behavioral skills to be college- and career-ready.”

She says she also wants to see Sequim increase opportunities in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields.

Renker and her husband Greig Arnold, vice chairman of the Makah Tribal Council, enjoy spending time with their children and have homes on the east and west ends of Clallam County.