For most of her life, Mrs. Marlena Conroy has had a natural instinct to help teenagers. Nearly everything she has done in her adult life has been at the service of teens, from teaching to serving as current Dean of Students. At the end of this school year, Mrs. Conroy will leave CCHS and move on to help other students.

Mrs. Conroy has been a part of the Uni/CCHS community for the last eight years. She taught during the last year of summer school at Uni before it was moved to Carmel Valley in 2005. During the first year of CCHS, she taught English 1, English 1A, and Speech Communications before she decided to move in a little bit of a different direction. In 2007, Mrs. Conroy applied for the position of Assistant Dean of Students.

She applied for the job not because she enjoyed enforcing the rules but because she wanted to help students who struggled. “I wanted to be a bigger help to the students,” said Mrs. Conroy regarding her position as Assistant Dean of Students. Mrs. Conroy said she knows that students don’t always do well in school because of outside reasons, and for this reason, she wanted to take a position where she would be able to help students in their personal life. “I want to do the most good for the most amount of people,” said Mrs. Conroy.

Mrs. Conroy was the Assistant Dean of Students for four years before she took over as the Dean of Students, where she has been for the last three years.

Before Mrs. Conroy joined the Uni community in 2004, she was the Volunteer Coordinator for Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD.) She was there for about four years, helping to coordinate events and aid teens before she realized that she adored teenagers and wanted to be a teacher.

Once she came to this realization, she started to teach at the San Diego Court and Community Schools. These schools were for juvenile offenders, and her classes consisted of 9th-12th graders in the same room, teaching them every subject. “It was very challenging but very rewarding…Teaching isn’t always about a subject,” she said.

At the end of the school year Mrs. Conroy will leave to become the Asistant Principal of Curriclum and Instruction at Notre Dame Academy, instructing teachers on the most effective ways to teach their respective subjects to their students.

While Mrs. Conroy is excited for this new position, her transition will be bittersweet. “The thing I’m going to miss the most about [Cathedral] is the community,” she said.