While saddened to hear that Dr. Cain Jagodzinski will not be our Fountain Hills High School principal next year, I want to share some positives.

Perhaps not everyone is aware that besides being the principal, Cain has a strong science background. Those skills were demonstrated when he led a group of outstanding students to set up 10 virtual reality stations in the Community Center for the 2019 Dark Sky Festival. From morning until late on the Saturday night of the festival, he and his students made sure that as many people as possible had an exciting virtual reality experience. This was all done on his own time. He even offered to provide the experience again at this year’s festival, which we unfortunately had to cancel because of the virus.

Cain is a very strong supporter of STEM education and he immediately “got it” when we discussed our plans for the International Dark Sky Discovery Center. Whenever we talked with Cain about the many ways that our schools and area schools could interact with and benefit from the center, we came away incredibly energized by his ideas. In addition, he gave us this support statement for our materials, “The International Dark Sky Discovery Center will provide unique educational opportunities for our STEM program that will attract students in this competitive educational environment.”

The Dark Sky Board members who worked with Cain will miss him. However, we are focused on the future and will seek to maintain our strong working relationship with all the Fountain Hills schools and forge new relationships with the new superintendent and the new high school principal for the Fountain Hills Unified School District.

Thank you, Cain, for all that you’ve done. I wish you the best for your future endeavors.