Six Iowa school administrators were honored during a ceremony Monday afternoon in the governor’s office. Governor Tom Vilsack called the group the “best of the best” but he challenged the school officials to do more to ensure Iowa grads can compete against any other graduate in the world. “You’re the folks who set the bar high and expect folks to meet that bar and exceed it,” Vilsack said. “But as good as you are today, as good as your schools are today, they’re going to have to be a whole lot better in the future.” Members of the School Administrators of Iowa voted on the awards. Larry Hill of North Iowa Community School District in Winnebago County is the superintendent of the year. “We’re starting to develop a gap that needs to be filled and the challenge to us is a new civil rights movement on behalf of children and families and what better place than the state of Iowa to do it,” Hill said. Dr. Rita Vannatta, a principal at Bryant Elementary in Sioux City, is elementary principal of the year. “I think of my profession as a service to others rather than a job,” Vannatta said. “We enter the education profession thinking that we’re going to make a difference in children’s lives (but) oftentimes the children make a difference in our lives.” Becky Hacker-Kluver, the principal at Webster City Middle School, is middle level principal of the year. “As I think back, I knew the field of education would be my career,” Hacker-Kluver said. “The neighbor kids, my brother, my sister and I always played school, and guess who was the teacher?” The assistant secondary prinicpal of the year is Shane Ehresman of Marion High School. “A lot of times you think of the assistant principal as the dean of discipline or as the hammer or as the person (who is) going to crack the whip in the school and those were the expectations for me when I started,” Ehresman said. “But I soon learned that kids need somebody to listen to them. Kids don’t need somebody to just lay the hammer down. They need someone to come in and talk with them.” High school principal of the year is Todd Wolverton of Creston High School. “When I think back, the last thing I ever thought I’d be when I grew up would be a high school principal,” Wolverton said. “I have fond memories of my first experience with an assistant principal — Marshall Adams — who had me bend over and grab my ankles and swat me on the tail when I was in 7th grade and I deserved that and I don’t think that Marshall Adams would see me here today and he’d wonder ‘What the heck are you doing up there?’ but it’s kind of funny how life goes.” Lori Porsch, the director of special education programs for the Storm Lake Community School District, is the central office administrator of the year. “I come from a school disrict that not everyone would hold up as a place that they would like to be from, but I want to tell you that I believe strongly today the reason that I have this award is because I am in that school district,” Porsch said. “Our goal is really to make sure that all children, regardless of where they started or what their first language was or what socio-economic background they come from, they’re going to get an equal education in the state of Iowa.”