Colony High principal, assistant principal honored

A funny thing came in the email for Colony High School Principal Kristy Johnston. She received an informal email at her work.

“It just looked like with was a phishing email, or spam,” she said, adding that she stared at it off and on for a good half hour and only when she and Assistant Principal Peter Olson, who received the same email, reached out to the Alaska Principals’ Council Board for verification did it sink in that Johnson and Olson had been named 2025 Principal of the Year and Assistant Principal of the Year for Region VII.

“I left for days not thinking it was real,” laughs Olson.

Both were recognized for their achievements recently at a Principals’ Conference.

For Johnston, who is in her third year as principal at Colony High School, she says the honor validated her work at CHS. Johnston started teaching at Colony in 1999, and was named the school's activities director in 2019. Even though she started at the school more than 25 years ago, Johnston said she still feels very new in a field she was destined to be in.

“My parents always said from the time I was in kindergarten that I was always going to be a leader,” Johnston recalls.

Her original goal was to be an activities director at a college.

“I started college at North Idaho College in Coeur d’Alene, and I loved our activities director. He just had the most amazing job, and his connection with kids, the impact he made on them was phenomenal.”

In 2019, she got her opportunity when longtime Colony activities director Mike Boyd retired, and she jumped right in. Not long after, the position changed, becoming an assistant principal. Johnson became the principal of CHS before the start of the 2023.

“I just have always loved the community here and have just wanted the school to thrive.”

For Olson, education is a family thing.

“I come from a family of educators. My dad was the first principal of Su Valley High School, where I grew up…so it was always a goal of mine to work in education and work as a school principal.”

After completing his leadership program in Juneau, he became an assistant principal at Academy Charter School. He was a longtime coach at CHS and four years ago got the call to become an assistant principal, fulfilling a goal to be at a big high school.

For Johnston and Olson, a big part of the recognition goes to the staff at CHS, who they both praise for the successes of the staff, and more importantly the continued success of the students.

“We are really lucky that we have a really dynamic team here. Everybody has been a contributing factor into the success at Colony High School,” says Johnston. “Even though we were nominated and awarded, it really should go out to the entire team.”

She says that everyone being on the same page and same philosophy has led to a climate and culture at the high school where students have a safe place to learn and grow.

“That’s the thing I’m most proud of. It’s not the data, though it’s amazing data across-the-board, but it’s providing that safe space for kids to be themselves so they can grow and develop into who they are and helping them achieve their goals after high school.”

“Obviously, we have an amazing staff and we don’t get this kind of recognition without them,” Olson says, echoing the words of Johnston, lauding the amazing staff at CHS as a big contribution to their recognition.

Johnston and Olson also acknowledge that there has been some negativity around education, especially with public education as there is a rise in families choosing home schools and charter schools, but if people have a calling to impact the lives of students and the future of their communities, the best way is to become an educator or a leader within the system.

“The rumors of the demise of public education are greatly exaggerated, especially for me,” says Olson, who has been in the Mat-Su Borough schools for 27 years. “I can tell you that schools are at a higher level in the Mat-Su than they’ve ever been. I look at what our kids achieve and what our expectations are of our teachers, and I wonder if I’d have been able to survive with the rigors that we have. But it shows what great people we have, great people we have teaching, families supporting the kids and what they can achieve when expectations are high. So, the system is not broken. You just gotta get in there and get after it.”