JUST CALL HIM 'FRANK'
- Nathaniel Kraemer
- 9 hours ago
- 5 min read
Columbia High School’s principal prepares for a new year
Written by Nathaniel Kraemer
The principal’s office at Columbia High School is a small wood-paneled room where everything is open – windows, books, folders, cabinet-doors – and seemingly in a state of active use. Everything is also functional, save one personal touch, kept on the coffee table at which he seats visitors: a 3-foot-long polished stone cougar. This is Columbia’s mascot.
When holding meetings in this office, Principal Frank Sanchez sits at that coffee table as well, in a matte-black armchair. He smiles when he talks, a warm, friendly smile that punctuates his sweeping, enthusiastic midair motions while describing the results of this year’s Advanced Placement (AP) tests, a point of pride for the administration.
“We used to have only 600 students take AP tests. Now we’re at 777. And the number of exams went from 1,000 to almost 1,600. You can see how many students have really focused on post-high school academics since then,” he says.
Sanchez rarely dresses like a principal. During the interview, he wears a red Columbia quarter-zip and olive khakis, the same outfit in which he leads assemblies and walks the halls. His mass messages to the student body are similarly informal, not to mention infrequent. He prefers his interactions with the kids to be face-to-face. In my three years as a student, I’ve never seen him greet anyone with anything other than a smile.
He makes a point of standing on the steps outside the main entrance each morning. He greets people, shaking their hands and saying hello. To teachers and students, he’s neither Mr. nor Principal Sanchez: He is Frank, brought into conversations with the same tone as a friend. He is an administrator like no other.
Sanchez has well over 20 years of experience in education. He began his career as a social studies teacher and director of humanities in the Springfield district. He then worked as a supervisor and later a high school principal at the Mountain Lakes district for 16 years.
He started at Columbia in 2020, the year the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped education to fit the confines of a computer screen. Since then, he has been charged with leading the student body back in through the school doors toward a high-quality, in-person education.
He describes with evident pride some of the new programs that have resulted from those efforts. Columbia seniors can, among other things, find internships for real work experience through Career Capstone and get a jump on vocational credentials through a new Manufacturing Engineering program.
“I think when I first got here, we were just focused on high school academics,” Sanchez says. “Now I think you’ll see some of the things that I’ve seen that we’ve really pushed for.”
These offerings are accompanied by much-needed improvements to the school building itself. Columbia is a building that will celebrate its centennial this coming year. Ceiling tiles fall to the ground with alarming frequency, wires and outlets work at their leisure and any given sink is either broken, clogged or clotted with tissue paper.
“We have completed the major parts of the renovation,” he says. “Millions of dollars were invested in a new roof, which is really important so we don’t have leaks and we have safe working conditions.
Ramps in front of Columbia High School's entrance are the norm this summer as upgrades to the building are made. Photo by Nathaniel Kraemer. Columbia High School is undergoing much-needed improvements to the building. Photo by Nathaniel Kraemer.
“In addition, what’s really great for students was all the HVAC work that was done. In nearly all of the classrooms, we have… um… it looks like a pretty large phone booth. These machines provide heating and cooling, as well as air purification. So, again, great learning conditions for our students.”
As a student, I view these issues as only part of a larger problem. Ongoing issues with student drug and alcohol use have fueled a mental health epidemic. It’s resulted in suicides, suicide attempts and received national media attention.
“Next year, we’ll have vaping detectors in the boys and girls bathrooms. We hope that will help and curtail a scourge that is on a national level, an uptick in students self-medicating and smoking.”
As to the mental health crisis? “Next year, we’re going to have a new partnership with an organization called Mental Health 101, and that will be a curriculum that will be embedded into health classes that will help students actually work with other students, not to counsel them, but to support them when they go through a crisis.”
Those efforts alone are enough to show how deeply Sanchez cares about the student body. He’s cool with being called by his first name. He’s got a fun story about how it started: “I first started at Columbia during COVID, so I never met anybody. So I used to send a weekly email … and my email signature was, ‘thanks, Frank’ right?”
“It wasn’t until they got here in April that year when everybody started calling me Frank. And I was like, ‘Oh, why?’ At my last school district, they called me Mr. Sanchez!”
To him, this is evidence of how special his school is. It’s clear to him that Columbia – with its extraordinary diversity and diversity of opinion, robust and accessible athletic and arts programs and talented and caring faculty – is unique.
“What makes Columbia, Columbia is that it’s electric. I think that’s probably why we have so many successful creative people who have graduated from here. It’s not just a coincidence that that has happened. It’s because, I hope, I think, the teachers and the administration set up parameters, and then students can do from there what they want. And they can be creative and independent and I think that’s what’s magical.”
Sanchez has faced his fair share of personal turmoil in the past few years. He was arrested on charges of battery and child endangerment in 2024 and suspended from his position. He was reinstated only when the charges were dropped, following a grand jury’s decision not to indict him.
These events constitute what Sanchez refers to as “my lowest point.” They stemmed from allegations that Sanchez physically slammed a student against a wall in the process of breaking up a fight in March 2023. In those times especially, he’s reminded of how special this district is. “The community stood up for me,” he says, “stood up and rallied, supported my family. They didn’t need to do that.”
And as to why he chose to come back after he was reinstated, “This place is magical. I really do feel that way. I drive an hour to get here every day, and it’s a special place. The students are awesome, you know, they really are. It’s an exciting, exciting place. So, I mean, I’m addicted to that type of excitement here. I didn’t think twice about coming back.”
Columbia is many things, in many senses of the phrase. Every day I walk through different rooms constructed decades apart. The same halls where the wires can be seen falling from the ceiling have intricate, beautiful murals made by students, the result of four or more expertly led arts classes. It all confused me when I was a freshman – so did everyone calling the principal “Frank.”
Columbia is wonderful and complicated. Columbia is not an ordinary school. That’s all right. Frank Sanchez is not an ordinary principal.
If Nathaniel Kraemer feels any electricity in the air at Columbia High School, he’ll be calling PSE&G immediately. He’s currently a senior there.
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