001welcome USD 264 stakeholders parents patrons staff and students I want to introduce myself I'm Jason Johnson I am the superintendent for Clearwater USD 264 and here's our first volume of Clearwater Clarity from August of 2023. so I just want to introduce myself I am come from a family of Educators this will be my 22nd year I've been in education I grew up in southwest Kansas it's been a good majority of my life there growing up teaching coaching and then also being an administrator as of last week I've been married for 24 years I have two children 19 and 17. my son Caden is will be a sophomore at Garden City Community College participating in baseball and then my daughter Corinne just turned 17 and she'll be a senior and she's going to continue her last
002year of school at Holcomb High School I am extremely passionate about learning and one thing that I preach each and every day is we're going to get one percent better each day and then in my spare time or what you may call for fun I love the opportunity to get out and officiate basketball I've been doing that for 14 years was privileged enough last year as you can see in the picture to be able to work some games with my son and get him started in the officiating Pathway to give back to schools and give back to student athletes so here's just a little bit about me and my employment history and where I've come from so I started out as a business education teacher my first teaching job was just up the Roadie and
003Cheney and then had the opportunity to work at Bueller and Deerfield as a business educator as well while moving back out west to spend time to be closer to family and also to coach football with my brother at Holcomb high school starting in 2006. after that I became an elementary principal I knew that I wanted to get into Administration fairly early in my career and wanted to have that opportunity and being a lifelong secondary ed teacher I decided taking an elementary job was a good first step for me so in 2009 I took the elementary principal job it was a Ka building in Meet Kansas which is just south of Dodge City and spent five years doing that so as my passions continue to grow about where I wanted to learn and grow as an
004educator I had the distinct opportunity to work with Southwest Plains Regional service center out of Sublette and work with some amazing consultants and learn a lot about education and how how to better impact education in the long run knowing towards the end of my tenure there I was putting about 50 to 60 000 miles a year on a vehicle driving all across the state doing consulting work I was missing seeing my kids grow up and so an opportunity where I lived at Holcomb to be the high school principal came open and I took that and I felt that completed my Loop of being a teacher being an elementary principal being a consultant and then being a high school principal so I knew after that my second my next step was to get into central office
005and I had the opportunity at Garden City for the last two years to be the curriculum director and assistant superintendent prior to coming to Clearwater so one thing that we're really going to focus on this year at Clearwater is making sure that our communication has three distinct components to it first is going to be the why and we're going to be able to explain why are we doing this the second will be what are we doing and what are we going to do about it and then finally how are we going to achieve this so in any communication that is being sent out to external stakeholders from USD 264 we should be able to identify the why the what and the how my why I believe education is a mission field I believe we are
006all put here to help children uh grow to be the best that they can be and to impact those lives and then I have a driven passion over the last five years to establish education as the most respected profession it's something that has just started to dry up in the last couple years in terms of people wanting to be Educators but also people wanting to respect education for what it is and what it does and our job will be to create that respect again are what or my what will be to implement the Strategic plan that stakeholders staff students and community members all put together last year in reviewing this and during the interview process I fell in love with the Strategic plan and what it's all about it is going to ensure that all
007children in USD 264 are going to be given the tools to be successful once they leave Clearwater schools and so my goal for this is in five years USD 264 strategic plan will be fully implemented with visible data that supports the overall vision of USD 264 which is at one we are one team one family one District where all students reach their full potential and are well equipped to be successful and then finally I'm going to just take a few seconds here to talk about how we're going to achieve this goal in year One what we're going to do is we're going to start implementing this plan by having listening tours of stakeholders students and staff so we're going to be inviting multiple people over the year to really take a look at our strategic
008plan and what does it mean to them we're going to Define what implementation looks like and we're going to begin that with staff on August 10th at our back to school we're going to Define lead measures to gather data it's going to be very hard to determine success or areas of improvement within the Strategic plan if we do not have data that we can gather to look at this and then we're going to create a common communication plan that shares the why the what and the how and everything that we do so that we can make sure that we are clear and provide Clarity for our stakeholders and everything that we do so the last thing we really want to just kind of share is that we're going to have one scheduled Community meet and
009greet for all new administrators and the entire administrative team it'll be August 7th Monday night from 6 pm to 8 p.m and we're going to use the Clearwater intermediate Center Middle School Commons area due to construction that's going on around the high school with the bridge and some other areas this will be the best opportunity for us to have a meeting greet so you'll come out and all Administration will be present you can meet myself and new administrators that will be starting in this District Mrs Jennifer Miller will be the cims Principal as well as Dustin Clevenger will be the new high school assistant principal athletic director as well as all returning administrators which is Casey Piney the director of teaching and learning Eric Cooper High School principal Kelly shanejad the assistant principal athletic director
010for cm in cims and April Lutz Elementary principal for Clearwater Elementary West also during that time I will make sure that I'm at all the schools open houses so you can take that opportunity to meet and greet me I am currently here in town and throughout the week and so if you see me or you want to have the opportunity to come in and visit please do so I ask if you want to come into the office and take the opportunity to sit down and visit with me please call and schedule a time at the 620-584-2091 or email me at jjohnson usd264.org to schedule a meeting also you can follow me on Twitter to get up to date with all the things going on with USD 264. I hope to meet and greet with all
011of you during this first semester and get the opportunity to establish our relationship and really focus on our theme for the 2023-24 school year is to be the one we're going to make sure that every student and every staff has someone that they can turn to in the time of need but also we're going to be there to support them during all of the ups and the Downs that go through a typical school year thank you again and please reach out if you need anything