An educator with more than 20 years of experience as a teacher and as an administrator, Seals was an assistant principal at John Glenn High School before accepting his new assignment this summer.

Unlike his eight and a half years as an assistant principal at John Glenn High School, where he said summers were "very, very quiet and have all afternoon pretty much interrupted," he has been busy this summer at La Mirada meeting with parents and other members of the community.

"Here's it always busy and I'm always moving, which is good because it's a community school," he said. "It makes it difficult to get things done, but as a new person I feel it's more important to meet the people than it is necessarily to do the paperwork."

As far as his dedication to education, school board member Darryl Adams noted Seals's commitment as a recipe for success at La Mirada High School.

"I'm impressed with his attention to detail, his accessibility, his understanding of the community, culture which we hope will continue the strong success at La Mirada High School," he said. "The administration team is focused on student achievement, student success and a commitment of the community."

Adams added that Seals and the rest of the administration will "bring a good wealth of experience and complement each other well."

Seals had made efforts this summer to tout his wealth of experience by meeting with parents through an informational evening last month where he and the rest of the administration introduced themselves and met with families.

"Parents want to know who it is that's leading their school and feel comfortable sending their kids here," he said. "It was important for us to share our professional background and our family background. We had the opportunity to meet people individually and get to know them."

Most of the people he met at this event had the opportunity to introduce themselves and helped Seals understand more about the community he is serving.

Despite the change in administration at La Mirada High School and the overall performance of the school district, Seals does not think that the school has overarching problems and is looking forward to improving on the achievements of the past administration.

"I don't think there's anything here that is broken where I have to come in and fix everything," he said. "Maybe I have to improve on a couple of things, like test scores, but I want to continue that trend [of rising test scores]."