Times Focus: Education -- Principals With Class -- Guiding A School Is A `Killer Job'; Here Are Seven People Who Do It Well -- Dr. Jayasri Ghosh, Head Of School, Seattle Country Day School

Dr. Jayasri Ghosh, head of school, Seattle Country Day School:

Known for: Giving teachers creative freedom.

"Part of my style is to give others the credit. I try not to have things funnel to the center. . . . I like to see people succeed on their own."

In this school, where every child has a computer and every parent turns out for open houses, it might be easy to forget the less-privileged reality of most other schools - overcrowded classrooms, the financial roller-coaster of state funding, social problems overflowing into classrooms.

But Jayasri Ghosh is reminded of that reality daily when she leaves the school for gifted students on Queen Anne and goes home.

Her husband, Richard Manion, is a public middle-school teacher in Tacoma. Over dinner every night, they are constantly confronted by the gulf between their two professional worlds.

"I am reminded every day of how fortunate we are," said Ghosh, 42, who has one young daughter. "I believe we have this niche - serving the needs of highly capable kids who get overlooked elsewhere. That's what wakes me up in the morning and gets me going. We're raising a group of potential future leaders."

What started 32 years ago as a parent-led effort in a Burien church basement is now a school serving 290 children in kindergarten through 8th grade. The school has a $2.5 million annual budget and charges as much as $8,240 a year in tuition.

Teachers are responsible for developing their own curricula and handling most disciplinary matters. That frees up Ghosh, who has been head of school for 10 years, to focus more on long-term vision and less on day-to-day operations.

In that time, she's overseen the construction of a new middle-school wing, helped create a five-year strategic plan and grew the school's enrollment by 100 children.

She's currently involved in fund raising for a campaign to get the school's computers networked.

Rick Peterson, who heads the school's parent council, said her leadership in building the middle school helped tap a new market for the school.

"She saw it would enrich the whole school and provide an opportunity for parents to keep their kids in the school," he said.

Each child, who must test in the top 3 percent to 5 percent on intelligence tests to qualify for admission, gets individual attention. In Ghosh's office are stacks of books with test scores and other data she and teachers use to identify each student's academic strengths and weak spots.

Teachers focus on teaching in a three-dimensional way. Middle-school science teacher and department head Meredith Olson has students take apart children's toys to understand how a cam shaft works, then create their own models. This is all a buildup for the big experiment: Olson, a consultant to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will have students build their own space "rovers," models built on ones the lab creates for space exploration.

Olson credits Ghosh with encouraging collaboration and helping create "an electric place to work . . . I think it's a joint enterprise here with teachers, and she allows that."

Ghosh said the lack of any strict hierarchy lets everybody feel they have a stake in the school's success. "This is a place where people are free to question - students and adults."