Principal Josh Wasilewski prepares Howard County’s Guilford Park High School for opening this fall

From selecting furniture to hiring staff, Guilford Park High School Principal Josh Wasilewski has spent the past 10 months helping Howard County’s newest high school come together piece by piece.

“I knew how to be a principal,” said Wasilewski, 44, who started as Guilford Park’s principal before the school had an official name, on July 1. He was Long Reach High School’s principal from 2016 to last June.

“But being a principal without any students, without a community at first, and then learning construction was definitely the biggest learning curve I ever had in my career.”

Guilford Park will be unlike any other high school in the county when it opens its doors to about 750 freshmen and sophomores this fall. The building is the largest the district has ever constructed, and is one of its most sustainable, with a range of eco-friendly features including solar panels that provide 18% of the school’s power and solar tubes that feed natural light into interior spaces.

Walking Guilford Park’s halls and grounds, still abuzz with construction workers in hard hats, Wasilewski and Oak Contracting project manager Matt Lurz point to a number of unique features, including a multipurpose room for special events, a spacious auxiliary gym and a 3,517-seat athletics stadium that will be the county’s largest.

“It’s a million-dollar view,” said Lurz, looking out from one of the floor-to-ceiling stairwell windows that overlooks the school’s 5 acres of natural turf playing fields.

Construction on Guilford Park — which broke ground in 2020 and has cost more than $88 million as of February — is nearly 90% complete. Wasilewski wants to ensure the new school’s sense of community is given just as strong a foundation.

Since redistricting for the new high school was approved by the school board in November, Wasilewski and Assistant Principal Adrienne Williams have visited the three middle and three high schools sending students to Guilford Park to answer questions.

Wasilewski has also led a series of student focus groups this year to brainstorm everything from hallway decorations to the school’s mascot, which will be revealed after spring break (finalists include bucks, cobras, griffins, panthers, pumas and pythons).

“I want them to enjoy their time in high school and to feel that sense of connection,” Wasilewski said. “If you don’t feel connected or engaged or feel like you belong, you’re not as invested.”

Building a school community

Wasilewski, who lives in Crofton, served as assistant principal at Patuxent Valley and Wilde Lake middle schools and principal at Murray Hill Middle School before moving to Long Reach, where he was named principal of the year in 2019.

He said he knows first hand how nerve-wracking going to a brand new high school can be. His oldest daughter is a junior and part of the first full class attending Anne Arundel County’s Crofton High School, which opened in 2020.

“It made me feel really comfortable [with] him understanding our viewpoints from a parent perspective and not just an educator perspective,” said Elkridge resident Kira Bloechl, 41, whose two oldest sons will be entering Guilford Park as ninth and 10th graders next school year.

Wasilewski hopes to apply takeaways he heard from Crofton’s principal and athletic director to Guilford Park as he plans for the inaugural year.

“I want to provide all of our students with the opportunity to be successful and they will be successful,” he said. “But what that means is developing a school community where our family members are engaged.”

A key component of opening a new school is acknowledging challenges it faces, Wasilewski said. Throughout the fall, dozens of Elkridge residents testified that moving their students to Guilford Park in the county’s southeast would lead to a dangerous commute on Route 1, complicate participation in after-school activities and geographically isolate them from their peers.

“The best I can do is hear from what parents have said and what they want to have from Guilford Park,” Wasilewski said.

In addition to his school visits, Wasilewski held a series of meet and greets with the Guilford Park community in the winter where he heard residents’ concerns about transportation and other issues.

“I’ve just been impressed with his understanding of how everyone kind of feels and trying to make it a community school instead of it just being where your kid’s districted to,” Bloechl said.

Bloechl’s oldest son, Perry, is a freshman at Howard High School and will enter Guilford Park as a 10th grader this fall.

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As a trombone player, Perry, 15, was relieved when Wasilewski said Guilford Park would open with a marching band, despite only having junior varsity sports teams.

“[Wasilewski] genuinely seems to care about what the student body thinks of the new high school,” Perry Bloechl said. “I’m pretty excited to see how he’s going to take care of us.”

Ensuring students have access to adequate food and health services when the school opens will be critical, Wasilewski said. More than 54% of incoming students participate in the school system’s Free and Reduced-price Meals program, giving Guilford Park the highest FARMs rate of any high school in the county.

In February, Wasilewski and all 10 of his instructional team leaders took a tour of Guilford Park’s entire attendance area to better understand the region’s history and needs.

“Understanding where our community is and the feelings is part of us developing ourself as a school community,” Wasilewski said. “Because now we’re not just Guilford, we’re not Jessup, we’re not Elkridge. We’re Guilford Park.”