January 26, 2022 School Committee Meeting

001actually we can just go ahead and get started if you guys want with the um pledge of allegiance you call the meeting to order and everybody stand for the pledge of allegiance pledge allegiance to the flag of the united indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay thank you so we'll just give a few minutes for folks to join and then i'll just um make a couple of very short introductory comments in terms of the structure of tonight okay it looks like the numbers are holding so i'll just go ahead and get started um welcome everybody to the finalists interviews for the superintendent role duxbury public schools we have two candidates interviewing with us tonight this plan structure for each is that there will be 60 minutes for q a and then 15 minutes for

002the candidates questions and closing statements then the school committee will have a break in between the candidates the first candidate starts at 505 and the second candidate will start at 6 45. because we want to make sure that these are equal opportunities for presentation i will be a little bit strict about time keeping and i am going to i've said i've made little notes for myself when i need to kind of just make a comment about you know halfway through 15 minutes five minutes and then i'll do a five minute for the 15 minute session at the end and then um and we have um you are we are permitted to ask um if in an answer you want to seek a clear clarification of an answer you can ask clarifying question but let's be

003mindful of making sure that we get through all of our questions so that we get the full robust answers welcome dr klingman i was just going through some of the um oh did she disappear again yeah we put it into the uh 10d so we'll bring it back and write 505. oh okay all right okay so um so anyway so i just went through that i'll be keeping time and we've got the 60 minutes for q a and the 15 minutes for the candidate to ask questions and um and do a kind of a closing statement and if anybody has questions just you know let me know as we go okay and be very accurate on our timekeeping it's a lot of pressure okay it is 505. we are ready hi dr klingman hi everybody

004welcome hi how are you we uh i just gave a little bit of an introductory to the format for the evening with the 60 minutes for q a and 15 minutes for any questions you have or closing statement um and i'll be keeping pretty strict time to keep everyone on track and and make sure that we're covering everything so um please you know uh pay attention i'll take care of the time so just give you guys a heads up but um and i also have the opportunity to to lead the charge if that's okay um i'd like to ask why did you apply for this job and given what you know about duxbury in our school system why do you feel that you're the best candidate for this position all right so we'll get right

005into it so thank you for thanks for the opportunity to be able to share a little bit about myself um to start things off this evening so i'm sure all of you and many people listening have reviewed my resume but just to go over some of the highlights i've been working for children for over 26 years 24 of those years and years have been in the public school setting i started off my career working in a residential facility for teenage boys with emotional and behavioral disorders and then i switched over to the public school setting where i served as a special education teacher for a number of years and then i spent the next 14 years serving as an elementary school principal most recently i've served here in duxbury as the assistant superintendent and then

006this year is the interim superintendent so during that time i've always challenged myself while serving as a school administrator and found ways to stay current and innovative first by completing my doctorate then by teaching graduate courses for educators and pedagogy and instruction i've spent time working for the department of elementary and secondary education and served as one of the co-authors for the guidebook for inclusive practices i've been on the state principles advisory cabinet i've been on the board of directors for mass queue which is an organization a leading organization in the state that focuses on professional development and innovative practices for teachers and includes a lot of technology integration um i've most recently been serving as a co-facilitator on the assistant superintendent's leadership seminar through the massachusetts school superintendents association so i've had some opportunities

007at the state level to um help transition administrators into the central office role i'm also a parent with two children both of them are now in high school so i've had the experience of preschool all the way up to high school one of my kids is a sophomore and one is a senior and so i think that being a parent provides me with an important perspective one of the most important roles as a superintendent i believe is listening and sometimes unfortunately having difficult conversations so i always go into those conversations empathetic knowing that parents are coming to me because they believe they are looking out for their students best interests and and i do this work because i care about children and so why did i apply for this position and why am i interested

008given what i know about duxbury which is a lot i feel as though i'm the best candidate for this important position because my experience serving as the assistant superintendent here has allowed me a keen insight into the inner workings of of central office as well as the school district and the duxbury community as a whole so prior to this year i was fortunate to partner with the superintendent that involved me in all aspects of the superintendency i feel as though i was in a partnership role where i attended all meetings decision making including the budget process contract negotiations and all personnel and legal matters and i did all of that while also overseeing all aspects of the curriculum grant writing planning for professional development um leading all of the audits and compliance tasks that school

009districts um need to complete to make sure that we're operating at the highest level this is i've planned all administrative meetings and run all of the district committees so i have a really good sense of our curriculum as well as all operational aspects of the school district i applied for this job because i feel that the last four years in central office have prepared me well for the superintendency and i love this community i also understand that duxbury is a community of high expectations and school district with high expectations many families move to this community for the school district as well as our excellence in athletics and our focus on the arts and music and everything else it's a really well balanced um community and with our program so as a high-performing district i think

010we need to ensure that um we're providing the highest quality education for students um providing current and innovative learning experiences personalized learning and real-world experiences for students a strong stem background and frequent opportunities for critical thinking and these are all areas where i feel confident that i can excel and leave the school district forward so that's just a little bit of background about what brings me here this evening thank you dr klingerman and um i we i should have done a little bit of introductions but i think you know you know everyone we have our five school committee members and one of our student reps jake nelson with us and then ray and george from the collins center who's been assisting with the search process great so hey everybody you too um and our next

011question is going to be asked by julia great so dr klingman as superintendent how would you work to foster educational excellence within the duxbury public schools well i think that um in my opening statement i shared that duxbury is definitely a school community with high expectations if i am selected to be the next superintendent of duxbury schools i would want to continue with the many effective practices and traditions that that have served us well in the past but also utilize opportunities for collaborative processes such as strategic planning and last year for another example would be when we completed the duxbury portrait of a graduate program to be able to have all of our community stakeholders and parents school committee teachers and everyone really come together to be able to research best practices what the future

012of education holds and what are those trends and then develop a cohesive plan and so i think that um the way i would foster educational excellence is just ensuring that we continue to make sure we have strong plans in place i've worked in districts where strategic plans sit on a shelf and gather dust or they're just kind of tucked along a school website and not a working active document but i think in my practice and in my experience i've been able to make sure that we always have a strong strategic plan in place that we're updating yearly and that personally my goals as a central office administrator are in line with the strategic plan goals and then the school improvement plans are developed off of those goals and then our administrative team as well as

013our teachers are all working on goals that are having us row in the same direction um i think we're really fortunate in this community i'll probably say it several times tonight but we have highly engaged parents and a lot of really wonderful community groups i've mentioned it in my previous interviews but i've never been in a community with so many resources to enhance education that we have here in duxbury such as dbms duxbury student union the rural and historical society the free library our town departments our town boards the senior center really active ptas and ptos as well as school councils and i think they all really need to have input into the future goals and initiatives for the school district i don't think it's one person that's making i'm sure that the school continues

014to have excellent educational opportunities for students so using that really collaborative approach and involving as many stakeholders as possible i think it's important to make sure that we always have a strong strategic plan in our goals in mind so that we're all working towards the same goals and then coming back to those yearly to see if we're in line or if our focus areas need to be adjusted based on the times i don't think anyone expected there to be a pandemic in the middle of our last strategic plan cycle and so i think within that three-year period things come up and you have to be able to reassess um make some adjustments and then continue to move forward together and not have one person leading the charge but um one person leading the charge with

015a lot of input from our stakeholder groups including all the way to the students thank you very much welcome kelly hello dr cliff hangman hi kelly hi so my question has um multiple parts to it what do you expect to be your top priorities for the district in your first year and then for three to five years and how would you enlist your staff to support this agenda okay i think in my first year it would be a continuation of what i've been doing this year that has been effective and so what i've found this year to be effective here in duxbury is regular communication with the community and when i say community i mean parents i've been emailing parents on a weekly basis to keep them informed of things happening in the district and

016i think that sometimes we've needed to have multiple communications within the same week we've had a lot of weather events a lot of events because of covid and updates needing to happen so i've tried to make sure that i'm staying ahead of where the communication is needed so i'm not leaving people guessing um i think what else is um other things that have been effective for me this year are open office hours we spent the last last summer there was a lot going on as i'm sure many of you remember but i think having parents have the opportunity to come in and ask questions directly was really important um and again we're back on zoom this evening and i think for the last year and a half being on zoom zoom just makes us sometimes

017appear like faces on a screen and not real people so i really appreciate it and i'll never take for granted again the opportunity to have people in my office having conversations one-on-one or in small group because that's where you get to know each other a little bit better and where people can see where you're coming from and i think that's really important for establishing trust because sometimes when we're presenting new ideas and initiatives and the only time parents or anyone is hearing from me would be on a screen that's not really the best um the best place to be sharing some of that new information um i think what other things that have been important to me through the years are regular attendance at pta and pto meetings being able to attend cpac meetings school

018council i'd continue with my entry plan where i'm really trying to do a deep dive into our district contracts our budgets any curriculum reviews that we've done in the past areas that we've identified as needing um to be able to focus on moving forward for improvement so i'd like to continue the entry plan process um and meeting with stakeholder groups and so dr wilcox this and i have been meeting with different stakeholder groups and asking for feedback about what are the strengths of our district um what are areas of growth and areas um that our stakeholders are most proud of because you never want to come into a new position and make changes where you're not taking the culture of the community into consideration it's really important to respect the culture and what's important to

019the community before um you move in and make any suggestions for moving forward i think looking for the vision for the future which would be the next three to five years i want to continue to ensure that we have adequate budgets and advocate for the needs of our school district and by doing that i think the budget process is a really strong way to be able to share the needs of your school community and justify your spending and recommendations but the best way to do that is always to have that transparent really clear budget process so our families and our finance committee and the fiscal advisory committee and select board know how we're spending our our funds and that they can see that we're um we're starting with a zero-based budget approach each year and

020really making sure that we're spending wisely i think that it's been very important and i think in duxbury we need to be proud of the fact that we're not always focusing on the urgent matter at hand and ignoring other things that are important but not urgent so while many communities have kind of stalled on initiatives and strategic plan goals over the past two years during the pandemic we have really moved forward and finished a lot of projects that we had set out to do during our three-year strategic plan such as that portrait of a graduate process and also implementing programs such as the new um orton gillingham training for our special education teachers and just some really important things that we didn't let get stalled because we were dealing with a lot of pandemic challenges

021i think in the next three to five five years a huge impact you can have on student learning would be hiring prioritizing hiring ensuring that we're hiring the top quality candidates that we should have here in duxbury and that we focus on that mentor program and development of our educators um i think the next three to five years i would continue to make sure that our short and long term goals are being addressed and making sure that all of us as i said before are rowing in the same direction and our goals are in line with our prioritized initiatives i definitely see an opportunity here in duxbury for increased focus on stem k through 12. i'd love to see technology integration coaches be able to come in to support teachers and to be able to

022provide students with support to reach those digital literacy and computer science standards that are so important and um i think it's hard to be able to squeeze that in to the already packed curriculum but having those coaches would be something that would certainly enhance the instruction for all students i think our dei work ensuring that all students have a place in our school and feel as though they belong are going to continue to be an area of focus over the next three to five years how can we look at post-pandemic learning and i can't wait till we're actually post pandemic because i think this year we thought would be and it ended up being we're right in the middle again of surges that we weren't expecting and complicated um another complicated year of covid but

023we want to make sure that we're maintaining the high academic rigor but limiting pressure and stress on students and also making sure that any learning gaps are being addressed and that we have we have different plans in place for intervention so um i might mention this a couple times too but last year once we were able to finally get our students back fully in person i wrote a blueprint for learning which was addressing our students needs coming back after a year and a half of really interrupted learning and that plan focuses on individualized instruction inter intervention utilizing our assessments so that we're making sure we know where students are giving them real-time intervention um and so we also have really focused on differentiating instruction and what that means is not just teaching the content and

024saying i hope the kids are with me but knowing where each student is day by day and being able to provide those small group learning opportunities for students that will be very important for the next couple of years um i think we really need to step up our authentic learning opportunities project-based learning giving students different pathways to success whether that looks it look is looking at enhancing our cte our program so um just another example of that would be the work that um i've partnered with matt files on to make sure that our students have opportunities for internships utilizing our community partners to be able to get kids out into the community get those work experiences and be able to get a sense of what they want to do post college or even if college

025isn't an option different career path in technical education and other air and other areas like that where they might be able to get certifications while still in high school and i think just continuing to look at our inclusion and equity in terms of obstacle-free access for our students but i also think vision moving forward i have to continue to ask our staff members is duxbury a great place to work are we retaining our teachers are we making sure that our professional development is what is needed um and what what our teachers need to be most successful and feel supported are operational procedures clear and what they need to be do our school administrators have the training and support that they need i think the last two years have been extremely draining on our school administrators

026due to the constant contact tracing and having to look at the operations of the school so we can't we can't be burning out our school administrators we need to make sure that everyone is um having a healthy life balance and i think that goes along with our students too we want it to be rigorous and high achieving but we also don't want to have our students experiencing high anxiety and stress all the time we want that healthy life balance and i think moving forward as i said before high expectations and i think a focus on our special education program making sure we have an appropriate continuum of services that we have a strong high functioning cpac so that our parents are feeling supported i think having students on ieps can be really challenging and i

027think that that's an area that's challenging for many school districts and i think in our district we have an opportunity for some growth there and i'm pleased to say that we have a special education audit underway and i think that we'll be able to get some really strong feedback from our teachers from our administrators and from our parents who are in the special education program all right thank you how you doing danielle good how you doing matt good you know fighting crime uh all right so uh my question is about transparency and communication so these are important aspects of of being a superintendent and i was wondering if you could give an example of how you would be open and communicative in this position in a way that ensures transparency yep and i think that

028um it's it's there's a lot of things intertwined with um being transparent so i think the most important um lesson and i think you and i have had a lot of conversations about this mat and lessons learned over the past two years that communication is not a one-way street but a two-way street and i think that um if i could go back and and re relive some of the things that we've experienced in the last two years i would make sure that we had more avenues for people to be providing that that two-way car that two-way communication and i've tried to do that but i think we can always do better i mentioned before what's what is the best way to be transparent um ways that i do that are through my office hours that

029i mentioned i meet with parents all the time and i think sometimes having a phone conversation or an in-person meeting is so much more effective than having an email emails going back and forth because i get hundreds of emails a day and i get more out of a five-minute conversation with a parent because they can see we can both see where each other is coming from and we can set up a meeting um if we need to have further conversation um i think consistently emailing families with what's happening and i've talked to our parents this year i i always try to find the balance between over communicating where it's tuned out and people don't even open your emails because it's like redundant the same thing um or under communicating where people are saying when are

030we going to hear from central office on this issue she hasn't gotten back to us so i always want to have that that sweet spot um i think that it's really important to be transparent with the community when there's not a crisis i think we learned last year that um the key is one of the key responsibilities of superintendents is to protect the fiduciary interests of the school district and protect our school district from unnecessary lawsuits but with that it's very challenging to make sure that we're communicating everything we can while being transparent and but also not um violating student employee and employee privacy rights so i'd like to be able to communicate that challenge better while we're not in the middle of a situation where parents are having a lot of questions because there's

031something going on so i've really tried to steady the ship this year and get everything back to a sense of common normalcy as much as possible during a year that's anything but common normal i think the key one of the key pieces which i've been saying all along is um is establishing trust and making sure people have that trust built ahead of time so that when things come up and you're sharing information our community trust that you're sharing everything that you can and if you could share more you would be if you don't have that trust established i think that's where people are suspicious and thinking that the school district is holding back information so um as a building principle it was a huge adjustment for me to move from building principal to assistant superintendent

032because the district i left i had been in for seven years as the building principal and i had that established trust and i didn't have a lot of people questioning me in terms of if i was sharing new initiatives or anything that was going on because i had built those relationships spent time at pta events spent time working at concession stands and getting to know our parents on a personal level and through those meetings talking about um concerns that come up parents learned to trust that i would be doing following through and and doing what i said that i was going to do um so i think that i need to do everything possible um in my role as superintendent um interim superintendent this year and hopefully superintendent moving forward where i've established that trust

033so that when it's time to share information people feel as though um that there's nothing that's being withheld and that there's no um we're sharing absolutely everything we can i think also transparency is really important with the budget process as i mentioned earlier to use the budget process to really communicate the story of the current status of the school district and any real needs moving forward i think it's important that we communicate with all stakeholders to understand the budget meet people where they are there's some people that would love to go through our budget items line by line to see how our money is being spent and then there's other parents that are really i mean we have a lot of people that are very busy in our community and just want that general overview

034of where we are um where additional resources are needed and what they can do to help so i think it's important to let our community and family members know when we're doing budget presentations we're really telling the story of what we need um and it's important that we break down the budget in in terms that families and everyone can understand and i think that's where katie blake has been really effective and able to break down our budget um our make really appropriate projections and plan for um moving ahead but also to be able to have families understand the budget because i've worked in a lot of districts where the budget process is not as transparent and clear and i think that leads to trouble so i'm i'm really proud of the work we've done as

035a team over the past few years to make that budget process more transparent to be able to work collaboratively with the finance committee the select board and our town um our town departments to be able to have that be a collaborative effort with the school department as as well as the other town departments so that when we head into town meeting everyone's really on the same page with the current budget picture and and what we're able to do moving forward for that year great thank you very much and i think kristin has the next question hi i do um so shannon did you want to give an update on time um yeah we've we're um 25 minutes through so we're five minutes away from halfway through okay we're you know what i looked at that

036we're on target oh perfect okay so hi doctor klingerman is what do you see as the role of the school committee and what type of relationship do you think is needed to help the district be successful well i think the role of the school committee is a very important one and i've said to all of you that i have so much respect and admiration for um serving serving on the school committee because it's extremely time consuming um in the last two years have been anything but easy to serve as a school committee member on and i think that what we've found over the past two years is that the decisions that we're having to make um in school districts are such that we can only please a portion of our stakeholder groups at a time

037and i think all of us do this work as school administrators or as elected officials on the school committee you wouldn't do this work if you if we all weren't um aiming to have the best possible school district and to provide students with what they need and so it's been really really challenging to not be able to have a higher satisfaction rate i always i always want to please 100 of the people and as much as i know you can't do that um it's been it's been a hard couple of years because there's been such mixed feelings about a number of things from remote learning plans to masking and everything else in between so um i think it's essential to have a an effective school district for there to be a strong relationship between the

038school committee and the superintendent um i think the school the superintendent's responsible for making sure that the school committee is informed about what's happening in the school district i never want the school committee to find out that there's an ambulance at the school and they have no idea why because i think there's so many things that come up and with cell phones and social media being the way they are today i think that um it's hard to stay on top of communication but in general my thoughts on school committee relationships are that superintendent must keep the school committee ahead of things that are happening in the school district at a high level i think sometimes having too much information can put the school committee in an awkward position but obviously in terms of overseeing superintendent

039hiring and evaluation overseeing policy development overseeing the budget that there's a lot of implications with things happening in the school district that have um implications in those areas that the school committee is responsible for overseeing and so my strategy this year and then in the past has been to communicate regularly with the school committee making sure that we have relationships beyond just coming together for two-hour business meetings i think um that's one thing i don't think people are their true authentic selves during meetings and so it's really important to me to be able to get to know school committee members where they're coming from and their background on an informal basis as much as possible so this year my strategy has been to meet with the school committee chair and co-chair um vice chair once

040per week just to have a check-in meeting make sure our agendas are in line just to keep the school committee um abreast of any situations that we had lingering over from last year and to be able to have a plan moving forward for any um any different initiatives that we need to bring to the school committee to have the whole um school committee see in presentation um i think that it's also really important for the school committee to trust the um superintendent so that when if a concern comes the school committee's way that they have a background of why some decisions have been made to be able to support the superintendent and if there's questions i think it's really important for the school committee members to be able to give superintendents feedback in real time

041in schools when we're evaluating educators we never want the evaluation system to be a gotcha to be able to say oh it's time for your formative evaluation midway through the year here's um six things that you can do better that that weren't presented to you maybe in the moment when you could have made some adjustments so i try to be open and accepting of feedback along the way and um i feel like i've gotten a ton of feedback in my time and so i think that because of i do make people feel comfortable to be able to tell me if there's an area that i that they think i can improve on whether it's from a school committee member or whether it's from an administrator or a teacher i do try to take that feedback

042and make an adjustment whenever possible because i do try to always say feedback is a gift even though in the moment sometimes it doesn't feel like a gift so i think it's important for the school committee in the superintendent to have that relationship where it's ongoing feedback i think superintendents need encouragement from the school committee because i think we're all in positions where i make sure that i am always grateful um and show my appreciation to the administrative team and to our teaching staff um and i think sometimes you can feel really um stressed out and pressured when you're the superintendent not knowing if you're doing what the school committee needs and i think sometimes we hear a lot about what's not working well um and not a lot of what's working well and what

043people are happy about so i think that that is is really important for school committees to be able to give that positive feedback back if there's things that are working well because that makes us all appreciate and know that our efforts in certain directions are effective and if there's things we can do differently i'm certainly open to feedback and through along the way and not just at the end of the year or i think we have the mid-year goals report and that's an opportunity to get some targeted feedback and um and so i think that it's it's a really important relationship and i think we've been fortunate in duxbury to have great school committee since i've been here and i've worked with a number of school committees in the past as a principal and i

044think that um it's always appreciated as a principal to be able to go before the school committee to be able to share the wonderful things that are happening in your school that you're working on with your teaching staff and your school councils and i think that if there's ways for us to be able to highlight some of the great work in the schools more frequently having more frequent student visits to the school committee more positive opportunities for our schools to share what's happening i think it brings us all back to our purpose of why we're all doing this work because there's a lot of really amazing teaching and learning going on and our students are generally really happy and um very successful so i think that um we always have to check ourselves and not

045just be worrying about task oriented and budget all the time but um really looking at celebrating the learning and success um in the classroom so that's my thoughts on school community one one more piece before we move on i do think that um it's been really wonderful um to have tours of the buildings in real time um so i know matt has toured we've i think i've toured with all of you actually kelly and um chris i don't know if we've had a chance to walk around the school buildings especially with covet over the past two years but i think um it's really wonderful for school committee members to see the teaching and learning in action when possible and i think we are really lucky here in duxbury and in districts i've worked in in

046the past where teachers want to show off the the work that they're doing with their students and so we have amazing educators here in duxbury who are always thrilled to have people walk through and see what's happening in their classrooms so i think the more we can do those walk-throughs when we're back back in a little bit more normal times is really essential and it allows you to see the programs that we discuss at school committee in action in our classrooms so i would love to do that more thank you and the next question is going to be asked by jake nelson i will say we're several minutes past the halfway mark and we've got six questions to go so okay all right jake you're up hi dr klingman how are you hi jake um

047so my question is can you give an example of a specific way you have engaged students and worked collaboratively with them in the past and then the second part to that is and how would you engage and work collaboratively with students in the future okay good question um i can say that the number one best part of my job as a school administrator is working with students and so any day that i get to see students i am happy um i got to go in erica stolloff's class this week and i learned about photos was i learning about yes photosynthesis see erica if you're watching i have my science experiment here on my desk um some examples i can give you of ways i've engaged with students in the past um so as i said

048i was a building principal for 14 years and when i was when i started in both of the schools where i was principal there hadn't been an established student council and i worked with students in elementary school up to grade five and so i was able to bring student councils to my elementary schools and i did that through a job application process where i had students who were interested in serving on the student council complete a job application and submit that to me and then i would interview them i sometimes feel as though elections for school councils end up being not an authentic way to select the best students who might be an ideal candidate for student council and i think we have a lot of kids who are a little more on the reserved

049shy side and a little shy who if you if given the opportunity to have a leadership role really shine and so i was so proud of the number of students who went through my elementary student councils who ended up being on their high school student councils um and it's a real confidence boost and so the way we used to function with our student councils when i was a principal is we were able to vote on our initiatives for the school year including community service projects that would be run by the whole school plan for special school events decide on new menu items in the cafeteria and that was always a really popular day when the cafeteria director would bring new sample items for the students to try and be able to have new items on

050the menu and the students were so excited when they sampled a new item that they picked and it showed up on the um on the menu for the next month our student council also provided training for younger students if we were having issues with bullying or if we were talking about safe computer use and so our student council was really able to build their leadership skills through the year on that and for the many students who applied for student council but didn't make it on i created a position called student ambassadors because i hate to not involve students who took the initiative to go through the whole application process and then didn't get selected for student council they all became a student ambassador and so what i was able to do with student ambassadors is

051have them um i think it turned out to be more manual labor than anyone anticipated but that's okay um so they were in charge of taking up and putting down the many hundreds of chairs for concerts or if i needed things passed out in a hurry i'd be able to call my student ambassadors to the office and they would be able to do something that would have taken me two hours in about 20 minutes our student ambassadors also took if we had people from the department of education visiting um or if we had state legislators visiting the school they would be in charge of tours or if we had new students they'd be in charge of tours so um i was able to really bring a lot of student leadership opportunities in our school and

052have our school be really student centered our student council members and student ambassadors would also be able to introduce if we had concerts or special events happening to be able to practice some of those public speaking skills so um another simple way that i've always collaborated with students is just being present in classrooms and talking to the students about what they're learning so i'm in classrooms as much as i possibly can and i would love to be in classrooms on a daily basis and i think that's a goal area for me moving forward some ideas i have for future student engagement would be last week when i met for my interview with our student forum um one thing i talked about was having a student a superintendent's student advisory committee i would love to have

053a group of interested students apply to be on that superintendent's advisory committee at a time when it wouldn't interfere with their courses but um i think that's something that would be a nice resume builder for our students to be able to have that opportunity to share what's working well ideas for improvement and um just be able to have some feedback on some of the things curriculum and different aspects of school to be able to get that student voice directly um just last week um the interim assistant superintendent dr wilcox and i met with a few randomly selected student groups that mr donovan was able to set up for us and i always try to get student representation not just from students who are volunteering but just the students that may be on the quieter side

054that wouldn't raise their hand to want to come talk to me um so i try to get that those um equal groups of not just students that are on our student council but students that have different areas of interest and are in different kinds of course schedules but i did speak to the students last week about what's working really well for them in duxbury schools areas that they think we could have improvement and what they're most proud of jake that's how i met you last year i don't know if everyone knows how jake ended up on the school committee but i hope that he's glad that he did what he did but last year when we were going through some troubled times in the school district jake reached out to the school committee and emailed

055and just said that um as a student there was some questions about what was going on that hadn't been answered and was just a little bit um disappointed in um the communication with the students and so um i was so glad to hear that he reached out to do that so we immediately set up a meeting and i think kristin that was when you first had um joined us on school committee and so kristen joined us and the former superintendent and we just picked jake's brain for about an hour about everything that was going on how he was feeling and he was so articulate and sharing what um what was working really well and some areas where we had fallen down with not communicating with students to the best manner that we could have and

056so jacob more than he bargained for it because he ended up on the school committee after that because he did such a nice job but it's been it's been really wonderful just hearing jake's got a special way of um being very honest and in a not in a critical manner but um being able to really i think he does a really nice job asking other students in his classes and his friend group and people that he comes across for feedback and sharing that in an unbiased way and so i think every time we engage students and we talk to them about what's going on and how and how are things working for you and what interest groups do you have and what we could do to make school better we always leave with valuable feedback

057and so last week when we met with our student focus groups not for my interview but when we were just meeting with students to get feedback a couple of the high school students shared that they didn't know we had a school psychologist or that they were counselors that worked with students beyond just the guidance counselors and so we spend so much time working on our mental health support and services for students and hearing that students who may be going through an episode of anxiety or feeling a little bit down or worried or going through something with friend group or family or whatever it may be don't know who they can turn to that tells me that we have a real opportunity to be able to better share our social and emotional resources and support and

058so um i think i think we just need to make sure that um our superintendent is communicating with students um i personally if i am selected to be the next superintendent of duxbury want to know the students and i want the students to know me um i miss being in the buildings with students on a daily basis so anything that i can do to have relationships with students is going to be a top priority i don't want to be just um again like i said a face on a screen or somebody that occasionally is walking by in the hallway i want the students to know who i am and where i'm coming from and that they can always come to me as well as the rest of our wonderful administrative team to share ideas and

059suggestions so that's an opportunity moving forward thank you very much thank you okay so now we have um michael and we do if we're gonna get through all of our questions we need to just go a little bit faster otherwise we're going to have to skip over i'll hurry up hi dr clayman ah nicole i didn't see you there i would have said hi to you too when i was talking to jake oh no it's fine sorry i thought it started at 5 30 so i was freaking out when i got textured as i came back from my swim practice uh so what does equity mean to you and how do you plan to incorporate it into the duxbury public school system okay so equity um i'll make sure that my answers are a little

060bit more brief i mentioned it earlier um i think that equity to me is just making sure that all of our students have um obstacle-free access to all of the programs and resources and experience that we can offer and not just our students but our families um from any whether whether our families are from duxbury new to duxbury or um whether they are native english speakers or just making sure that all of our families are able to access our programs and feel as though they have a place of belonging in our schools and i think when we talk about diversity equity and inclusion um we've been talking about that in duxbury for a long time it was part of our initial strategic plan that we developed back in 2018 and 19 and it's one of

061our core values which is equity and inclusion so i think in communities like duxbury where we do have a little bit of a lack of diversity um with race and ethnicity it's important that we focus on prior prioritizing experiences for students where they're able to learn about diverse perspectives um and then engage in culturally sensitive instruction and practices so that our students of color and any students of diverse backgrounds and ideas feel welcome and have a sense of belonging and so we've been really doing some amazing things here in duxbury in the past year um we have the holocaust remembrance day coming up i think tomorrow and i've just been blown away with the work that our our new dei coordinator caitlin sheehan has been doing i'm proud to say that i advocated for that

062position as a way to be able to make sure that every student in duxbury schools has a sense of belonging and is um is being supported and we have been working really hard over the past year to um have our community be represented in the way it should be and that we're actively working with students to be inclusive and use sensitive language making sure all students feel welcome and that we hear and respect diverse perspectives and no matter what your background or perspective is our job in schools is to make sure that we're teaching students to have civil discourse and be respectful of those different opinions whether that's in person or online and i think that if we do a really great job of that in schools i think our society is going to benefit

063from that moving forward because i think it's difficult sometimes for adults to remember to be polite and respectful when they're online and there's different viewpoints and perspectives so i think that we've done a lot of things in our school i won't list them all out but we've engaged with student leaders we've engaged with a core group of educators here in district and we are um really trying to provide a balanced approach to diversity equity and inclusion so that um that we also partner with our duxbury for all our duxbury rotary and the interfaith council because i think these issues are not something the school district can solve alone we need to make sure that we're partnering with our community groups and that we are being as inclusive as we as we possibly can in our

064district committees like our dei committee so that we have parent representation and community member representation um in all of those areas so um again i'm proud of the work we've done and i think it's important that we continue to have our eye on that um moving forward thank you thank you okay second question from me i well it's not from that i'm saying how do you collaborate with your leadership team to navigate through different opinions or approaches okay so i think collaborating with my leadership team um i think my background as a special education teacher allowed me to individualize my approach in working with members of the teaching staff or my administrative team you can't have a one-size-fits-all approach to leadership just like you can't be a teacher and just have one approach to teaching

065students and so i i really try to develop relationships with my leadership team so that we have a level of trust established and i think that relationships are at the core of everything we do i do encourage and ask my leadership team to provide alternative viewpoints and play the devil's advocate and argue with me i don't want a team of people that are just agreeing with me i don't think we can grow and make progress if there's not people that are willing to disagree with me or other members of the leadership team in a respectful way i think sometimes navigating the different opinions and approaches i have um i can i have a good skill set in being direct but not being offensive and so i think that helps me navigate some difficult conversations with

066families as well as our administrative team um and i i feel as though my administrators feel comfortable to come to me for advice i can be i'm always confidential um and they can share their ideas with me and like and disagree with maybe some suggestions i've had and tell me why it's not going to work i try to let our building principles run their buildings i believe in um site management i don't believe in micromanaging um but i do believe it's really important for a superintendent to be able to coach and guide our administrators so that they're being provided with regular feedback and suggestions for improvement um and i welcome that same feedback to me i've always surveyed our administrators and um since i've been in duxbury and in previous districts where i was a

067principal i've asked for anonymous direct feedback about my performance ways i can better support my team um and i've tried to be really open to feedback and give all anonymous opportunities for people to provide that feedback and so i will continue to welcome um growth and strategies that my team can share with me leadership wise i feel like i'm a strong communicator i i'm willing to do any job in the district there's nothing that i won't step in and do um i believe in follow-through you're only as good as your word um that's how trust is built i try to be collaborative and i try to let people who have strengths in different areas really shine um we have a member of our administrative team who loves logistics and he knows who he is and

068so if i can let that administrator run with um with a project i do believe in distributing leadership and maximizing people's strengths and um having our our administrative team grow i'm really proud that we have three members our administrative team here in duxbury that are working on their doctorate right now i think that's really fantastic and i'm so proud of them um i think that i try to have a culture of learning and so every meeting that we have i try to provide professional development and learning opportunities for all of us as administrators and to be able to really step back and take a moment away from dealing with the crisis at hand and focusing on our own professional growth through um having our administrators present um to be able to teach each other and

069to use each other's um knowledge and i think um most of all i try to have a sense of humor i can laugh at myself and i'm not i don't take my myself too seriously um and i definitely don't claim to know everything so i show vulnerability i don't have all the answers and i'm very aware that to be successful in a superintendency you can't go in thinking you can do the work alone you have to distribute that leadership and have members of your administrative team use their strengths and support you and each other because um it's it's just impossible to do this job without that and i think overall i always try to remember what it was like to be a teacher because i think we're all teachers to start and we've ended up

070in administrative roles but we cannot get so detached from the classroom that we're forgetting the day-to-day um what it's like to be a teacher with um in some cases 120 students and in other cases you're with the same group all day but that's extremely challenging work great um shannon i just wanted to check in on the time it looks like it's four minutes to the top of the hour so how do you want to proceed yes well she started at five after so we have we have nine minutes for three questions okay um yeah so let's all right so um well this is good news dr klingman this one's easy okay uh this is going to take me 30 seconds to read um so you find yourself in a challenging position for example advocating for

071a controversial new initiative responding to a complex situation or proposing budget reallocations in response to fiscal limitations and the school committee and parents are divided on the issue you strongly believe your plan of action will be highly beneficial to students what steps would you take to promote your plan okay so i think um i'll try to be as succinct as i can with this one i think that if you're presenting um a new controversial new initiative that prior to presenting that you need to start with getting stakeholder feedback and being able to break down the need um so that you're not finding yourself saying here's something that we need to do it's very important for the school district we really need this and we need your support um and having that be the first time

072that our community is hearing about it and so i think that it's really important to not be springing new initiatives on a community i think that it's essential that you're sticking to your strategic plan and you're revisiting it on a yearly basis so that if there's something lacking that needs to be added that we do that in a collaborative manner so that there's no surprises i don't think you should be surprising your stakeholder groups you shouldn't be surprising your school committee by saying that all of a sudden we've done a curriculum review and we believe that we should be eliminating one of our world languages i think that it's important to have school committee members on our curriculum committees and to have parents involved with that process and so that we can be communicating along

073the way what our needs are and what recommendations we might have moving forward and if something turns out to be controversial i think that it's important to develop working groups where you can have different stakeholders come together to talk about the concerns talk about the issues and perhaps bring back to the whether it's a school committee or whether it's a parent group that you're presenting the new initiative to so that there's a clear explanation of why this is needed where the data is coming from we can't just be making decisions um arbitrarily without having it be data based so i think that it's important to be doing the have the data to back up what you're presenting research based data um data use approach to be able to share some of those new initiatives and

074then be able to have ambassadors that can reach out and share why this is necessary um for the school district and be able to make the decision so that it's not um polarizing so that it's a one group against another i think we've we faced that a lot but i think with strong communication and a plan you can avoid um being in some of those tricky situations great thank you and i think kelly has the next question thanks matt all right danielle name a professional failure describe the situation and what you learned from it okay um this one is um is definitely a tough one and makes me feel vulnerable um sharing it but i will i will do that this past year um at a school committee meeting um there was definitely a situation

075where i felt like a fate like i had failed um mrs blake and i had just presented a really elaborate budget presentation it was on our november 3rd meeting the budget presentation is really a result of five months of work and to finally get to that school committee meeting it feels like you're running a marathon and you finally crossed the finish line so this is blake and i had just finished presenting this the fy 23 budget and what happened was a situation came up that i was not expecting or prepared for we had a member of our community that came to the podium at open comment and said some things that um were shocking and unexpected and they were really hurtful and inappropriate and hateful to be honest and i froze and i didn't speak

076up in that moment and i know school committee meetings aren't my meeting and it's not always my um role to be able to speak up and and to say something but in that moment i needed to have spoken up and i felt as though as soon as i got in the car that evening to drive home i felt as though i had let down a teacher i had let down a school that was attempting to implement a program that was brought forth by students and much needed and i just feel like in our district we talk about teaching students interrupters where if someone is saying something inappropriate or hurtful i think that we teach our students to be able to say stop what you're saying is inappropriate or can you rephrase that in a more

077respectful way or what did you mean by that and i did none of those things in that moment and so i found myself not being able to sleep that night and i ended up doing whatever i could after the fact to be able to go to that person and apologize personally and a couple of people that were offended by my lack of action um and i will never let myself be in a situation like that again i need to be able to speak up in a respectful way that honors the person that's speaking but also um calls out if there's hateful um language being shared in our school community there's really no room for that and it's um i never want to disappoint um our teaching staff or our administrators by having me be in

078a position where i'm not supporting them um i think that sometimes you learn the hard way when you have a conversation that doesn't go as well as you want to i think in general i have had situations where i've learned through the years through conversations that maybe didn't go the way i wanted them to to be reflective and so i think i've improved a lot in my communication skills so i don't really have meetings that um that go wrong as much anymore but i think that through being a school administrator for as long as i have um i've learned a lot of lessons but that comes to mind as one situation where i wish i could have reacted in a different manner um and i i will be prepared for situations like that more effectively

079moving forward thank you and i think julia is going to finish us up yes thank you just one question we have three minutes but dr clingerman you can take the option if you want to use a little bit of your 15 minutes to finish up this last question because we are on the last question so that's great okay julia sorry great so the last question is um resources are always a hurdle but given your understanding of duxbury's municipal fiscal position what one thing one change one initiative would you propose that you believe would have the most positive and lasting transformational impact for children in the duxbury public schools so that's a long question to have be the last one that i need to hurry up on but um i think it's difficult to choose one

080thing but i will try to stick to the question i think the greatest impact we could have on all students would be to individualize or personalize learning for every student and not just say it but really practice that concept there are ways that you can influence student outcomes that don't have budgetary implications and some that do so i think increasing intervention opportunities for students in real time is one important initiative that i think has the greatest impact for all students to make sure that all students are learning at their level getting the support they need in real time it's not always a staff member that needs to be doing it but i think utilizing some of our technology integration resources that have personalized learning plans for students but also making sure that we have intervention

081structures that are in place to be able to support all students i think we i had mentioned earlier need to have pathways for students beyond the college track i think that we need to get our students out in the community hands-on project-based learning um and i think we also need to make sure that we have a good handle on our students current learning levels so that if students already know the content we may not have gifted and talented programs but what we need to be able to do is challenge students who already have mastered the learning concepts for the grade level so that we are not just having students not be engaged and challenged so i think that can be tricky because we're working with students who have a large range of skills and needs

082some of those individualized needs that they have may be social and emotional other times they may be academic but we through the pandemic and where we are now we see that there's a huge need for us to focus on individualizing learning for all students and providing rich enrichment opportunities so we want to see all of our students beaming when they come in the buildings in the morning and are just having that joy and i i think we can always do a better job of that whether it's kindergarten all the way up to grade 12 or pre-k we want to make sure that our kids are experiencing joy are feeling seen and heard and that we're fostering their um their individual interests so that they um are able to do some passion projects and really be

083able to focus on what's interesting to them and not just our course content okay thank you very much i'd say you packed a lot in there doctors well done thank you um so now we're at the portion where if you have any questions about the district and um happy to answer them and got 15 minutes for the questions and uh some type of kind of closing statement if you'd like i actually do not have any questions of the committee and so that's good i hope that gives us a little more time of not feeling rushed yeah yeah i mean i guess then if do we want to just do people have follow-up questions is there anything that you didn't get a chance to say that you want to share i mean please um we can

084use this time as you can see yeah i interrupted you i'm sorry shannon no no it's fine go ahead please so following up on the role the school committee question um how would you best deal with we're going to have two new people on the school committee in march um how do you see yourself working with a newer school committee and or possibly a divided school committee or a school committee that's all harmonious and homogeneous like what can you sort of hit on that i'm not being very eloquent i think that um having turnover on the school committee is um i think we've had a really wonderful school committee it makes me sad to think that we won't have the all the members that we have with us right now moving forward but um i

085think we can utilize kristen's experience as a new member coming on last year so i'd love to be able to talk to her about what was challenging during her transition what could i have done better in my role as assistant superintendent or this year's interim to make that transition more smooth run be more smooth for new members i think we i think as a committee you all did a nice job making sure that we had trainings that took place so that new members were able to come in and understand um policy-wise and legally what the role of the school committee is so that um that was clear and i think that i'm attending that school committee training is really essential and having school committee um retreat opportunities is really essential part um as well i

086think that um you're not always going to have harmonious decisions and i think that the reason that we have a school committee in the first place is that there may be diverse opinions shared and so i think it's just like working with the leadership team is making sure that our committee members voices are being heard um by the superintendent and by each other as much as possible so that whether or not you are able to always agree unanimously on decisions i don't think necessarily needs to be the goal but i think that having that respectful discourse and listening to um what's being presented is really important so um those are some ways i think if we have new school committee members in march i would want to um be able to have meetings with them

087to talk about the reasons that they were interested in serving on the school committee um talk to them about ways that they learn best and function best as a team and then really come to some group norms and agreements that we can work under so that we can have the most effective school committee possible so i think um just having that honest upfront communication and some strategies for if issues come up how as it has a team we would like to move forward with solving them is and just getting that consensus consensus on some of the norms would be helpful thank you yeah and thank you kelly and i i am you know i wasn't expecting that we would have this time so i just and kelly's question was like a clarifying question so to

088extend anybody wants to ask questions let's make sure they're clarifying of things that have already been asked i don't want to go too far off in terms of keeping us within the topics that we've already addressed um okay dr clemen would you like to sure i can give my closing statement yeah and then you can send me back to the land of attendees um and so i just want to summarize by sharing that i think you're all aware of this but i was able to step in last july during a very tumultuous time in our community and i was able to calmly get the district back on track by providing consistent communication stability high expectations and a clear plan moving forward this year has been anything but back to normal but under my leadership we

089have continued to move forward with district initiatives that i've shared this evening based on our strategic planning goals we've been able to move forward and pivot with covid regulations and protocols and changes to testing programs and surges um and i won't pretend that this has been easy but i will say that um i've been loyal and committed to the school district all the way through and it was really important to me personally to get everything back on track because i think what our community went through last year was extremely difficult and the heart of this community is amazing and it really um was hurtful to see some of the negative press and media that we were facing last year so i i'm committed to making sure that everyone sees what the heart of duxbury is

090and it's not some of what was shown last year i think fit is extremely important in the superintendency this is a very very difficult job you can ask any superintendent across the state and no one will say that this is easy but it's really important to me to be in a community that supports its schools it's superintendent to have a talented and dedicated teaching staff in the support of a strong administrative team which i know we have here in duxbury you can't do this work alone and i'm only as strong as my team and i don't think there's a better team in the commonwealth than the one we have here in duxbury i drive a long way to come to work and i do it for a reason because i love being here and i

091wouldn't do my commute if i didn't love where i was going to end up at the end of it and as i mentioned in my cover letter i hope that you had a chance to read my cover letter when i submitted my application materials and my letters of recommendation but as soon as i drove into this community for the first time i knew that this community was special um and i after meeting the people here the teaching staff the administrators the parents and most of all the students i knew this is where i wanted to be and right now where we are i believe i have the support of our school community um i believe i have the district level experience needed to lead our high performing district um i believe i have the qualifications

092and the strong relationships in place to be the next superintendent of duxbury schools and so i thank you for the opportunity to share that this evening and um i think that's it thank you so much thank you dr kleman thanks everyone thank you all right take care you can send me away now have a good evening okay um so now we're going to take a brief break so that um school committee members can take a few notes and um kind of organize their thoughts and the next candidate we're actually going to adjust the start time the next candidate which means i have to go change my cheat sheet on the on the warning so it's going to we're gonna start at 6 35 with the next candidate um so i don't know if people want

093to exit or just put yourself on um video off and then come back but we've got about um 20 minutes okay hey everyone since we're all back i'll just go ahead and go over the framework again so um uh regarding the structure for for the candidate interview um the way we're structured for tonight for everybody um is uh 60 minutes q a and 15 minutes for canada's questions and closing statements um we definitely discovered in the first round that it is it is um we do have multiple questions and there um cover a broad range of topics so i am going to continue to play the role of timekeeper and remind folks to keep going so that we can cover all the topics because it's helpful to get through all of them to hear the

094full all the answers so i'll give time reminders halfway through with 15 minutes left and with five minutes left during the q a portion and i will also provide a five minute warning during the 15 minute ending session and um clarifying questions are permitted although i think we did find that that's a little bit hard to do because the content is is so in-depth but we do have that option if we want to use that so we'll just give it a few minutes so that we can start at 6 35. okay we're at 6 35 so if we can begin the next candidate alan strauss hi mr strauss welcome how is everybody tonight good how are you doing hi thanks we're gonna do a quick round of introductions um we have ray and george from

095the collins center who i believe you've already met and then we have our five school committee members and our two student representatives if everyone can just go around and say hello and i'm shannon we had the opportunity to meet mr styles during his stay in the in the district julia and we've met um at the screening committee and at lunch actually i was trying to do the um alphabetical and i didn't do that too well i'm kelly bresnihan and i'm following the dinosaur on school committee so welcome thank you for coming thank you matt hi mr strauss uh nice to meet you virtually my name is matt gambino a member of the school committee welcome nice to meet you thank you hi mr strauss thanks for joining us tonight my name is kristen o'connell and

096i met you briefly after the student forum yeah nice to see you again nice to see you um jake want to say hi i'm mr strauss i'm jake and i'm a junior at the high school and i'm one of the student reps to the school committee nice to meet you jake hi mr strauss i'm michael o'malley i'm also a student rep and i'm a sophomore nice to meet you great thank you everyone and mrs stress i don't know if you heard but we have six the way we've scheduled is 60 minutes for um we have 11 questions and then 15 minutes for you to ask questions and to do a closing statement and i'm going to be the time keeper so i'm going to give some reminders here and there to try and stay on

097track because we're going to be um a little bit strict with the time um lock in front of me so i'm prepared okay all right great um so i i get the opportunity to start with the first question so i'll go ahead and kick it off um the question is why did you apply for this job and given what you know about duxbury in our school system why do you feel you would be the perfect candidate for this position so first of all thank you for having me i'm really looking forward to having a conversation with all of you and that's really what this is about um it's been a wonderful process from the beginning when i first applied to duxbury um [Music] the reason was i want to be a superintendent but i don't

098want to be a superintendent anywhere and and so i did a tremendous amount of research from envisioned duxbury all the way through everything that duxbury is doing has done i've read every article you know we all know what happens over the last year and a half and what i learned was when i first began teaching i taught in a community very similar to duxbury in western connecticut um a top five school for 30 straight years top 100 nationally and and it's where i learned my roots my foundation my foundation to excellence eight years into my career my superintendent asked me a very simple question what is your goal and i was young in brash and said to him i want your job and he said go out and see the world and and in order

099to be a great superintendent you have to have experiences far beyond just what you see right here so i've been in multiple districts i've been in naugatuck connecticut which is el students i've been in windsor which is almost 80 percent uh bypac students of color at the gilbert school where i ran both a middle school and a high school similar to here in duxbury except for the fact that there was one principle so i ever saw both we were also an international school and i came to massachusetts um to be closer to my son who utilizes boston's children's hospital and i chose weymouth for its diversity but also because of its vocational tech component of which i oversee that as well as as well as the comprehensive so there's very little that i have not

100seen in education and in spending multiple weekends here listening to lots of school committee meetings um visiting multiple places uh the thrift shop and and brothers market and every place else that that i visited sailors and and what i found was a community that says what it means and by that i mean i read in the envision dutch very report it talked about what is your top priority um for the community and its number one priority 77 percent was a successful school district that says a lot to me um and so i haven't applied to other places i applied here because this is where i think i'm ready to connect my core values of empathy integrity um equity and inclusion rigor excellence and opportunities for all your your four pillars line up with exactly what

101i've done my entire career um equity inclusion for example is not something that i started three years ago with the um the horror with george floyd it's something that i've done for 25 years social emotional learning pillar one if you look at my resume i was director of the student assistance team at western high school district-wide when i was 26 and that was tier one tier two and tier three interventions many years ago so i've seen it all and and this is a in my opinion a perfect fit for me um it was i was absolutely sure of that with the search committee and even more sure of that when i met the teachers and when i met the students student body blew me away so i'm really excited for this and i look forward

102to talking tonight julia great thank you hi mr strauss as superintendent how would you work to foster educational excellence within the duxbury public schools absolutely so obviously the first five years foundationally is the key to everything so we have to ensure that our primary schools are strong and with the understanding that where our primary school students are where uh michael is as a sophomore maybe jake is a junior we don't even know the jobs that are going to be available to them when they graduate from college so we have to be very much aligned with moving our kids forward understanding providing understanding that we are providing opportunities that are connected to personalized learning plans connected to project-based learning connected to um ensuring educational excellence for where students are whether it is um our special education

103students we have to make sure that we're providing them opportunities um so that they can be as successful as they can be our vocational tech students our students who are going into the military our students who are going to four-year colleges medical school and want to become lawyers and engineers so we have to provide opportunities to push rigor to push excellence but also to take care of our kids to make sure that our soft skills are taken care of so that whatever our students choose and for some of us who have been in education a while we don't know what it's going to look like in 15 years so we have to provide an umbrella where our kids are going to be able to find their niche that may not exist today and that's a

104complex task but it's a task that if we are scaffolding from the time our kids enter into primary school all the way through till they graduate duxbury high school i think we're going to be in a pretty good place we have to provide as many opportunities early on so it's um i know that our kindergartners are taking spanish so what do we do with that and how do we use spanish as a kindergarten student so that they have bilingual trilingual opportunities so that when they leave duxbury the community of duxbury public schools they can go in so many avenues we cannot just wait until high school so it's it's ensuring that we're taking care of their social emotional needs and ensuring educational excellence and combining social emotional needs are not separate entities so too often

105i think that people look at if we're going to take care of social emotional needs we have to tear down rigor and i don't think that's necessarily true at all so for example if we add ap capstone diploma program that means jake is a sophomore can begin taking an ap class earlier so that he is used to what is going on that's one piece the next piece is for example i'm just going to give an example of the high school i want our kids taking four aps if that's what they want but what we have to do on the social emotional side is ensure that they can handle that and i do not mean can they do the work can we make sure that they are not on overload so one of the suggestions that

106i certainly have done previously we did in connecticut and it worked phenomenally we just did it um in weymouth is to scaffold testing so example um and i don't know jake if you're taking ap classes or not but generally what happens with ap classes is teachers are not talking to each other so it could be you go three or four days with no tests and then suddenly you have three and if you're playing sports or you're in theater and we're all excited for a little mermaid this weekend let's hope it doesn't snow out i know it was canceled on saturday but we have to ensure that there is constant communication so what we're doing is ela can only take tests on monday history can only take tests on ap tests on tuesday math on wednesday

107thursday is where language friday is science what that does is it prevents the overload of our students who are on overload anyway and and so there are lots of ways to begin to balance and continue excellence without necessarily adding more and adding more and adding more to their plate i think we can be smarter looking at schedules how do we help our kids providing study times and and doing all those things and that's something that that i've done you know back when i was in weston and we were exactly in the same place and we were doing that with our primary kids how can we make sure that our kids are not doing too many things great thank you very much hi mr strauss it's kelly um what do you expect to be your top

108priorities for the district in your first year for three to five years and how would you enlist your staff to support this agenda so educationally i have seen superintendents who come in and building principals who have come in with their agendas and they fail because they're only their agendas so first year let's go back to the first part of the question if i'm fortunate in enough to be named and i believe it's tomorrow night is when you are you are naming um the superintendent my first priority after being named obviously are my seniors in weymouth my staff in weymouth my admin team in weymouth in ensuring that the rest of the year goes smoothly our kids have gone through so much as all of you as students have but with that it really has already

109begun in some ways in which i've begun to build relationships in the community i've begun to talk to multiple um what would be community partners and and businesses certainly going to um i've gone to two duxbury hockey games already i've gone to i'll be at theater this weekend it's really about connecting to people so that when we start july 1st officially i've already met with all our teachers every teacher in the district i want to know every teacher's name and it's important to understand weymouth high school has 197 full-time faculty duxbury has 225. i have 405 adults in our building we have 2 300 kids so weymouth high school is a city in a lot of ways it's it's its own district and and so the size uh moving from principal to superintendent is an

110easy easy situation if i weren't here right now i would be presenting the budget at budgets up so the high school principal we present our budget and we present it to the school committee so it is work that you know i want to make as seamless as possible and that has to start with relationships so to the first part of your question kelly it would be about building relationships between now and july because once teachers are gone they deserve to go we have hiring to do there are um lots of interns that we have to figure out and i certainly would want to be part of that as as part of what's going on it's getting to know teachers it's getting to know strengths it's getting to know where are we so that when day

111one under contract it's not starting over jake who's going to be a senior next year doesn't deserve to start over in september we will be seamless running into where we go our first year is going to be about listening lots of listening it's going to be about looking at data and that's going to be work that we do all summer in terms of where do we have some gaps now i i've gone through the budget i know that we have adjustment counselors coming in um i know that there are math coaches coming in all of those are our wonderful things we want to make sure that we are putting our money exactly in the right places so that come september every learning gap i want to make sure that our el students every new student

112to duxbury high school needs a mentor every new family needs to know what the wraparound services are in case they have questions especially our el kids so so the job is to begin scaffolding now while of course i'm i'm doing taking care of my kids in in weymouth but understand i did that going from windsor to gilbert i did it from gilbert to weymouth and i was in two different states and i was splitting days i and i wasn't even hired yet or contract contractually obligated to weymouth i was working in gilbert which is upstate connecticut leaving at 12 getting to weymouth at 2 and going 2-6 every day and and so i understand what the transition is so that it's smooth for staff it's not about me it's about making it smooth for staff

113the community in our students um our three to five year plan you know and reading a strategic plan and there were lots of pieces that i absolutely loved but a couple of things that stood out for me was duxbury at one time was 17th i believe in the u.s news and world report went to 22nd duxbury is everything it needs to be to be the top-rated lighthouse districts in massachusetts and that's where we're going to be and we're going to do it not with more money we're going to do it with some innovation with some creativity and with a mindset that we know how good we are and we don't need to blow up we don't need huge changes well we need to tweak some things we need to get our students to absolutely have

114opportunities that they may not have right now so there are global learning opportunities when i was at the gilbert school we did international work and and um it's more than just you know having student exchanges so i would take our spanish students in in kindergarten for example and do this k through 12 in which they can take classes online we have the infrastructure they can do spanish immersion classes with kids in spain we did it when i was at gilbert and if we can start that that connects dei it connects global interconnectedness and it understands collaboration with people who are not living within duxbury and that's ultimately by the time they're seniors and jake is getting ready to graduate high school he is going to be so prepared for whatever is out there so it's

115a consistent model of continuing excellence and just building upon what we already have thank you all right i think i have the next question mr strauss um transparency and communication are important aspects of being a superintendent and i'm wondering if you can give an example of how you'd be open and communicative in this position and ensure transparency i have learned from from many years of experience that communication is a two-way street and by that i mean i have to listen more than i talk i may be talking a lot now but it's transparency and communication are all about the ability to hear from people to hear all stakeholders to be able to have difficult conversations one of my favorite lines in the world is really about the fact that if we are afraid of difficult

116conversations we put off short-term discomfort for long-term dysfunction so we need to talk and and and we need to hear voices and so communication starts in a number of ways it is not reactive communication obviously when there is a problem we need to let the community know and and we need to be very transparent we need to let this i need to let the school committee know immediately what's happening but it's also about some consistency so i know shannon you were at um at weymouth for for the site visit to us i don't know if anybody talked about it but since i became principal in connecticut every week for every week other than christmas week um and february break i send out a sunday message and the sunday message has to do with a lot

117of things everything that's happening in the school which would then be the district all the great things that are happening all the day-to-day details that people may need to know whether it is picture day whether it is you know games links to addresses to schools all the things that we do daily in school but there's also going to be a communicative message of grace humility this week's happens to be what happens when people make mistakes in the in the african term of umbuntu which is living within grace and humility and allowing people to make mistakes um so it's about constantly informing people but not just the high school people need to know what's happening the great things that are happening in duxbury but it's not just parents we need to let community members know what's

118happening in duxbury i need to go and have a conversation not by email at the senior center and and sit down with our seniors they're a voting block for us so when we talk about budget we need to make sure that we're going and talking to seniors we need to be able to talk to as many people um so for example when i was in windsor and we had um eighty percent of our students were coming from families of color including multi-racial families we knew a couple of things one of the things was that we would get 5 000 people at a football game and we could not get enough people coming to parent open house which isn't actually unusual in most districts in the country at the high school level so what did we

119do we would hold forums at the one place we knew that there would be thousands of people every weekend and that would be at the baptist church and it was wonderful and and we would have communication forums in which we would talk about things that were happening at the high school um we did it for the primary schools communication if i don't hear what people are concerned about then we have a problem i have an open door at the high school i have an open door i will have an open door as a superintendent but i have to ensure that people feel that when they come and speak with me that they're heard and there has to be follow-up to that there has to be this is somebody comes to me and wants a program

120changed if the program is tweaked that the program has not changed it's my responsibility to go back to you matt for example and say we had this conversation on this date this is what i gleaned from this this is the decision we made and this is why so that people not only feel as if they're heard but that we do something with it we're not always going to answer everybody's responses in the way they want but we are going to allow people to feel yes you are heard that's what staff and they are key in all of this it is with parents it is with central office it is with school committee and maybe most importantly with the two sitting in front of me which are students because there has to be student voice there

121has to be voice throughout the district our primary students i listen to questions from sixth and seventh graders who blew me away with the questions that they asked that kristen was there it was fantastic the depth the integrity so um it will be a very typical lots of forums we will do things at night we will do things during the day but it will also be proactive and it will be responded to after being after their needs are heard that's vital great thank you i think kristin has the next question again mr strauss what do you see as the role of the school committee and what type of relationship do you think is needed to help the district be successful so obviously you are responsible for answering to your constituents and and it's a very

122it is a very complex job um in a job that i have seen work wonderfully and and a marriage that i've seen work very poorly not because everybody wants what's best for our kids in every district it's how do we communicate effectively and how do we both learn who each other are i mean you need to know me you need to know my background you need to know how i view things and i need to know how you view things and and so we have to understand the role of policy obviously you oversee policy you oversee budget and and what is you know how do i implement that i have to know we and we have to have lots of conversation we have to have weekly meetings i have to have a blog so if

123something happens you know you know immediately so that you're not reading it first on facebook now sometimes you may read it first on facebook but it but in general it's my responsibility to get you that information but i also think that we have to have a relationship that is of trust that is of um trust that trickles down so i'm the bridge for you to all the schools without question you know i understand that parents will call school committee first sometimes it is my hope that in your conversation with me i'm not solving the problem i'm going to the buildings and i'm saying here was what i got what are we going to do can you look into this schools need to be able to run and so i am responsible to answer to you

124obviously i will go to staff i'm not gonna fix it because i'm not in that building so i'm not jim donovan i need to go to gym and say okay this is what has come to me find out let's get some information let's come up with a plan so that i can then report to school committee and it will be quick um allowing people to wait is not ever good it's not ever good and so the relationship begins really this summer when when there's you know our school committee retreat and we start laying out strategic plan we start laying out my goals and objectives for the year um i've always said people do not have to break bread together but we don't want to throw bread at each other either and so we want to

125be able to agree to disagree discourse i was a psychology teacher us history teacher i love discourse i want jake i want i want michael to be able to come into my office and say mr strauss i'm not happy with x y and z or why did you make this decision that is the only way this district or any district can go from wherever it is to the next level and that's what we're looking for to continue to rise we don't want to stay as good as we are and we're excellent we want to rise to the top so that our kids have more opportunities that that that's ultimately the goal so it's a we're never gonna there will be times we don't agree and i want that to be okay um shannon and i'm

126sure i know my staff really well um they will tell you that discourse is good we're kind we're okay we don't fight we don't always agree but we are always caring for each other and we come to good places because we all have the intent of what's best for our kids and that would carry on here in duxbury thank you and jake has the next question um okay hi mr strauss so my question is a two-part question and so the first part is can you give an example of a specific way you have engaged students and worked collaboratively with them in the past and the second part is how would you engage and work collaboratively with students in the future so long before you and michael were born i i was teaching social justice i

127was teaching um i coached there were so many things that i did um that taught me the importance of student voice so as i became a leader in our building i continued to teach so as a vice principal i taught as a high school principal i taught i came to massachusetts it's a little more complicated i certainly want to um if i can find the time and and matt i said this at um to the union president at our um at our meet and greet that i would love the opportunity to co-teach a middle school leadership class um because i want to hear from students um and and so my point in all of this is student voice is nothing new to me it drives schools there are more students than anybody else in our

128building they are the eyes and ears of what's going on so but student voice as silos is is not a good thing so i say that because when you ask can i give you one example i came to weymouth high school pretty diverse place pretty large large school all of our student leaders look the same and we're pretty diverse i did some research there had never been an elected student of color as a as a student um government person i have a problem with that because then it's not student voice so long before george floyd long before the horror brianna taylor some of our students of color felt comfortable enough and said mr strauss can we have a black student union absolutely so we created within a uh within the last couple of years a

129black student union a latinx student union a human rights coalition and and i will get to exactly what you're asking when you hear the overarching um an arab alliance are adl anti-defamation league lgbqt plus group a weymouth leadership which is really our captain's council but the way their voices work is no one does anything without the other groups knowing so they are talking to each other so our human rights coalition and our black student union of which we have many students of color who are in athletics for we changed the captain policy how to become a captain because they felt it was very biased and that was student voice that drove that to change what was going on and it's changed the dynamic of our building the conversations are much richer the narrative is truer

130and we're not perfect we certainly you know things happen there's no question about it but we are um symbiotic in what we do and i am very proud of that fact and our kids are too so that was the first part how will i engage the work collaboratively with students in the future so the role of superintendent um i plan on having and i've been told obviously i haven't told any anybody obviously at chandler i'm there um but alden i need to have a room someplace at the high school i need to have a room not to check on mr donovan but to meet with kids i need to come to the high school to meet with students student advisors should not be coming to the superintendent's office that's taking you time away from school

131we need to sit down and have lunch together we need to walk the halls and and you jake and you michael need to be able to tell me we have a fantastic culinary program i wish we had more of this i wish we had opportunities i wish we had more voice i wish because otherwise student voice is simply we're going to meet once a month and i'm going to hear what your problems are and what do i do with that so i got to get into the trenches that's why i'd love to be able to teach if the school committee lets me co-teach so that when i have to go to meetings there's still another teacher there um but that's really how we will start it um and then we will have i have a

132principal's counsel now of students that come in to see me we will do those kinds of things but it's really getting into your building and beginning to bridge kids together all right thank you very much thank you before michael goes with the next question i'll just do a time reminder we're just past the um halfway mark so we're we're in good shape in terms of questions thank you thank you uh hi mr strauss um what does equity mean to you and how do you plan to incorporate it into the duxbury public school system so following from from how's your year going michael good you're still very well good um as i said in my previous answer i i've been a part of dei from the beginning way back when and and so i look at

133equity as um multi-faceted it's about opportunities it's it's far different than equality which is we provide a math class and so everybody can take it so therefore we're being equal it's ensuring that that everybody has what they need to be able to reach whatever it is that they need so equity is really multifaceted in terms of you know you cannot talk about equity without talking about diversity and inclusion obviously um i am the dei district coordinator where we are um we have created an equity plan a a one in three year plan and i think i sent it to you shannon um which includes an equity audit in it so we have to look at our practices so we can talk about equity we can talk about i'm going to ensure that there are lots

134of voices in our school but we have to look at our curriculum and is it equitable and is it equitable for all students are we ensuring that there are opportunities for everyone and opportunities go beyond just curriculum so for example on sunday assuming it doesn't snow too much um our unified basketball team is playing the first ever unified game at um the boston garden at td north to the garden um against hingham that is an opportunity that we started when we brought in unified sports so we have to ensure that our special education kids are are getting opportunities that they haven't gotten in the past it's not just about insuring ieps it's ensuring that they have access to programs that policies are in place to ensure that things are equitable across the board that everyone

135is more than given a chance but is given what they are needed to succeed that's really the truest definition of equity which is a little bit different than what we all think about when we think about equality we have to ensure that it is a building that is safe for everyone emotionally safe obviously physically safe but it is a place where my needs as i'm a i'm a parent of a special education son and i have to ensure that his needs his educational needs are being met in that school they're very different than yours jay or yours mike so i have to focus on you i also have to focus on him that's equity it's not we're going to create this one program and everybody will fit into it so it's really it is some

136personalized learning um we need to shift structures we need to shift curriculum so our kids for example in in weymouth have such a good relationship with our teachers that our kids are starting to look at curriculum to determine whether or not it is equitable what is missing in curriculum from their lens from their narratives and it's been very powerful we've added classes for it we're going to have our first um women of color literature class we're going to have um we have a voices class this year which is for our marginalized kids but we also in our childcare are going to to start adding courses for um handling special needs students and so we're trying to do everything we can to be as global as we can which is really what equity is all about

137thank you thank you hi my second question how do you collaborate with your leadership team to navigate different opinions or approaches so i am very proud of the fact that i've been a principal um for two two leadership teams um every one of those people stayed except for one nope except for two um and they went on to to other positions but our teams have stayed together because they again going back to jake's question they have a voice and and going back matt to your question you know about communication we have conversation it is not a top down i'm smart enough to know what i don't know and and so using coaching analogy and i coached for years if if you watch and i don't know who knows football and who doesn't but if you

138look at coaches for example bill belichick does not talk to his team much during a game he has offensive coordinators defensive coordinators special teams people all of them are part of the puzzle i look at my role and i said this julia in in our search committee i look at the role of superintendent principal as the orchestra leader now by that i mean i don't write the music i don't play the music we have an agenda together that we come up with as a team the teachers write it the teachers play it the deans carry out um evaluation i do evaluation we all have a piece to it my responsibility is to make sure everything's harmonious so our deans are very different personality wise for example my ap and i are very very different but

139we sit at the table and talk through on boards what is the best decision for our kids i'm going to give you an example i mean i know you didn't ask for one kristen but i'm going to give one anyway i think it makes sense i know that duxbury did not have midterm exams this year and that may have made you happy it may not have made you happy every district is different and that's really important that i'm not coming in with an agenda this is what we did at any school i've been at we weren't sure what to do first of all we're so big we were really concerned about covet cases and makeups and all of those other things so i went to our staff our i was very much in a we

140shouldn't have exams social emotionally there were a lot of reasons makeups all that our deans were split our ap was split so i went to our staff and we put out a survey and they were 100 i don't want to say that 95 yes we should have exams so then we as the team sat down and made a decision that we would do 45 minute exams that if teachers wanted to do a second part for which would start in term three we would do it the way i expressed it in terms of on monday it would be ela on tuesday it would be social studies on wednesday it would be wednesday so that we could take care of our kids and then if they needed to make up because they were out for covert purposes

141they could make it up in a 45-minute block which is the length of our classes we were very concerned if they had 90-minute tests and they missed them during exams it would come back into term three and start missing other classes to make up exams so the point of that is we heard what was said going back to your question matt about transparency and communication we listened to what was the majority we listened to our students who said we can't take 90 minute exams we're not we're not in that place and we found an incredibly positive way to get an assessment and to have kids feel as if their knowledge was going to be seen without stressing them out too much in our teachers feeling that this makes sense to them so um i think

142i was against it and i think it turned out fantastic all right uh my second question uh mr strauss is um a little wordy so bear with me uh you find yourself in a challenging position like interviewing virtually over zoom you find yourself in a challenging position for example advocating for a controversial new initiative responding to a complex situation or proposing budget reallocations in response to fiscal limitations and the school committee and parents are divided on the issue you strongly believe your plan of action will be highly beneficial to students what steps would you take to promote your plan so i didn't think that that was that wordy so okay okay um many years ago i studied under a gentleman named glenn singleton who created a uh program and is it's very famous today called

143courageous conversations at the time it was courageous conversations on race then it became race and gender gender equity then it became sexual orientation but the one caveat that we all took from it was this is about every difficult conversation and how do you have them there are effective ways to have them there are ineffective ways to have them so if we are going to put this to the school committee i better darn well have done my homework first of all i better have done my research thrusting something upon people i wouldn't do it to my staff i wouldn't do it to students i wouldn't do it to parents and i certainly wouldn't do it to any of you so i'm going to make the assumption that we've done all of our lead work in terms

144of the data in terms of seeing it in action elsewhere um so that i can come back and begin to be the conduit if you will to why we think this is right and then bring in why are you opposed so i've seen it failed miserably when people tried to put in math programs and they didn't talk to the parents about it in primary levels they just said we're doing a new program and a lack of communication is the single biggest problem in any initiative a lack of firm data a lack of really being able to show how does this help our students how is this going to help jake and michael and every other peer that they have or how is it going to help our primary students read more effectively i mean i

145i i heard the question one of the parents asked the question at the forum about lucy calkins and third grade reading you know i heard it and i know exactly where she's coming from because clearly she's not feeling that that is the most effective program so for me to simply wipe her away and say nope this is what we have that doesn't work my job everyone's not going to be happy uh you know the famous line is if you want to be popular sell ice cream so it's not about that it's really about doing your due diligence knowing why it's important why is this initiative so important for our kids talking if possible depending on the grade level talking with students or talking with staff because if staff doesn't have a buy-in it's not going

146to work in any way shape or form having communication and when i speak with parents it's not this is what i'm doing it's this is what we're thinking what do you think and why not and give them time don't don't have a forum that we are going to change a math program explain why and then go run into the school committee and say okay i had my form it can't work that way it's this is what we're thinking come back at our next forum and tell us what you're thinking so that we can then create the proper program is everyone going to be happy no that that that's the reality in the world um and that's you know my shoulders have to be strong enough to accept that and i and i do um but

147it will be open it will be transparent going back to your question which i think is ironic matt that those were your two questions because it's really the same thing it's how do we talk about it my way is not the highway and i could hear things from parents that i may never have thought of you know in in our admin team our central admin team in our our district admin team have to be able to be on board with things and and and and go through every reason why it works it took us two and a half days as an admin team to decide what we were going to do with midterms and that was a pretty simple solution but we wanted to see it from every single angle and that's the way good

148decisions are made did we still have some parents who are upset yes did we have some kids who wanted to just go to school all day yes i get that but as a whole it ended up being far more effective very good thank you and i think kelly has the next question thanks matt okay i do name a professional failure describe the situation and what you learned from it just one so for you so i actually look at failures two ways um the most powerful scene in a movie from an educational lens that i've ever seen from an educational lens is from schindler's list when at the end of the movie oscar schindler and everything that he did i understand that and and but there were he saved a lot of people and at the

149end as he was as as the americans were coming in to to arrest him he said to his his accountant as he spun his ring around his finger i could have saved four more so every student who isn't successful is a failure and i don't mean a plus i mean social emotionally suicidal ideations um we can't find the right um you know academic prescription to get them on the right path we didn't have the right pathway um they um dropped out they weren't happy um now if they dropped out and went to night school which we have we haven't even in high school i don't necessarily look at that as a failure we have lots of questions but i don't necessarily look at that as a failure so i so that's the global educator in

150me the one example that i i will give you was the first hire i ever made as principal at the gilbert school there was an opening for a vp and i came from a social studies background one of the vps came from an english background so the commonality is we need somebody with math and science background so we put together a committee i had barely met our staff and they put forward i was on the committee they put forward their first choice was a person with an english background they just liked her connection they liked her connection with kids it was in my mind that i need science our science scores were terrible our math scores we needed to improve we had this international program coming where kids were going to be taking multi-variable calc

151we had work to do so it was my first hire and my gut told me one thing and my head told me another and i made the mistake of listening to my head and my head was we needed science so i went against what the rest of the committee did i was the first one to say this is the person i want then the rest of the committee these teachers don't know me staff doesn't know me they kind of followed my lead because they didn't want to anger the principal and we hired the science person it backfired i brought everybody back and i said what did we do wrong by that time we had built relationships and they said you went first and i realized that i am the least important person in a hiring

152committee i need to hear everybody else's voice and if the committee felt unanimously other than me that this is the person that's who we needed to go with and we would work out the rest i have never made that mistake again i am always the last person to give my opinion on on a candidate and we have had almost 100 success rate in everybody that we've hired which to me may be the most important job of a principal and a superintendent is hiring the right staff for our kids julie i just want to give that 10 minute notice i think we're right on target but just just in fairness yeah okay this is the last question so okay you're in you're in the home stretch um resources are always a hurdle but given your understanding

153of duxbury's municipal financial position what one thing one change or one initiative would you propose that you believe would have the most positive and lasting transformational impact for children in the duxbury public schools so i'm torn between ensuring personalized learning but i started with the idea that i don't know the jobs that our kids are going to be looking at in 10 years so i'm gonna continue down that path duxbury has the infrastructure in terms of technology um what i would create and it's actually not incredibly expensive because we did it at the gilbert school is we would create and i started to talk about with our kindergartners and and and spanish immersion classes is we would create opportunities for all of our students using technology to take courses around the world with like-minded peers

154so take take engineering classes and i don't know what you want to study jaker or michael but the idea that take engineering courses with kids from italy or china take in their high school courses that that are accredited take courses um in eighth grade on leadership on drawing take our um fourth grade music kids in our choirs and have them connect with choirs from africa because if we're going to talk about dei if we're going to talk about global opportunities unless our climate changes in duxbury we have to go out to the world our kids need to be able to go around the world that's what true education is and and so we can provide that because we have the infrastructure because we have the technology in which we could get a choir class if

155we did this at the gilbert school we would have our seventh grade choir singing alongside of a choir in africa in south africa and it was the most beautiful touching thing i've ever seen and and what did that do for our 97 percent of our kids who were white in at the gilbert school it gave them an opportunity to see other schools it gave them an opportunity to meet with students he gave them an opportunity like our mandarin students at the gilbert school were fantastic students and then when we brought in international kids obviously there were kids who could speak mandarin but in the beginning they were taking mandarin classes in china and and so they had the opportunity to speak with native speakers i want our spanish students our our german students our latin

156students to latin is a little different to to speak globally on a regular basis and the best way to do that is with the technology we already have so so that would be i think one and it's really not pie in the sky because it's not incredibly expensive it's a lot of phone calls and connection but that that i think would then help our kids whatever path they took by the time they left duxbury high school great thank you very much thank you i think i'm on time actually you you absolutely are on time well done mr spouse um so now it's your opportunity to ask questions if you'd like so i mean i'm an educator so and i actually said this to julia's group um there are a hundred thousand questions that i i

157could ask um uh i've learned an awful lot walking down powder powder point bridge with my son um and and talking to people in the community i've learned a lot about what duxbury is all about it's history um uh obviously this is the most important decision you make this is not a decision that's about checking boxes um i am a lifetime educator who has seen everything i was 16 miles a very long run from sandy hook where we had seven of our teachers who had babies in that school thankfully nothing happened to them but i've seen disaster i've seen major situations um uh i was teaching in connecticut and and you know 911 and connecticut are are connected in far too many ways um and so i saw what that devastation did there are two

158kinds in my opinion of superintendents there are leaders and there are managers the closest thing in my opinion to a superintendent of schools is a high school principal because we're both ceos and we oversee everything and um so i guess my question for you really is what are you looking i i read the superintendent profile survey from the community what are you as school committee and as two vitally important voices as students looking for in your next superintendent kelly please so thank you for all your answers um and i just want to this is kind of my question is coming from a lot of your responses and from our questions you are referencing a lot of really um worldly situations you have a lot of um urban public experience so i think for us i

159know the two things in duxbury i've been on to hire a couple of other um superintendents it's parents in duxbury want experience and they want to be heard so the most important thing i think is i'm looking for someone that has a vision has um a strong personality right and is able to weave those qualities in with a community that's not very diverse that's very focused on rigor and sports and music right and then and um i guess you'd say we want to preserve our community the way it is so that you know i don't know if anybody wants to chime in um but but this is a very you're right this is the biggest decision we can make welcome i welcome other members kristen i was just gonna say i think it all comes

160back to the kids always and at the end of the day it's about them so i'm looking for somebody that has like kelly said a clear vision that's going to help our children through the interrupted learning that they've experienced through the any emotional trauma that has gone on over these two years and really help them be the best person they can be and also allow them to get some back some school experience back jake being a junior has lost almost all of his high school experience to covet so i just want to make sure that these high schoolers have a true experience of what high school was and i just want a superintendent that is strong enough to really lead the district and to not only think about what we need to fix but really

161maximize what really makes duxbury an amazing place i'm a transplant i came here i'm not born in bread in duxbury and i think duxbury is amazing um i think this we're very fortunate to have the schools we do and i just want to have a leader in position that can really help us flourish and really capitalize and help these kids be the best they can be great anybody else like to okay yeah and from for me mr sauce i think it's um you know we have somebody who can navigate a lot of different stakeholders with different opinions lead the school in excellence in all areas i think are we're at a point where the um the strategic plan needs to be updated but i still think there are several items in there that are still

162um guiding beacons for the for the school district um i think those are when you look to that those are still topics priority um and um and then another big area for our town which we talk about a lot in school committee is uh navigating the the finances and the budget and the um and uh pulling that piece together in a little bit of a difficult environment in the town so i don't know if so that i think that hopefully that answers give some idea of what we're thinking about as individuals yeah but i think the the the piece pulled together by the collins center has a lot of community input to it so i think that has the broadest um and probably most accurate uh perspective as the community with communities looking for so

163that that's really i mean as i said there are a million questions i could ask but but i'll leave it at that one okay would you like to share any closing thoughts things that you'd like to share with us that you haven't yet sure absolutely so um i want to reference back kelly to your your statement about my experiences um as i said if you were to you know as we all do as as human beings now google western connecticut which is where i got my foundation my dad was a teacher for 44 years in fairfield connecticut which is where i grew up um again a town very similar to duxbury um you will see that that i was raised in my first 11 years as a teacher in maybe the most high profile district

164not only in connecticut but nationally and and so rigor accountability um parent communication while also coaching teaching leading student activities um and being a district director of sel long before it was sel um has been the springboard to everything that i've done since um my experience in naugatuck and el school in a lot of ways 40 percent um i everything that i've done has been very purposeful so that when i lead a district there's no one left for me not to understand their path um and that is vital it allows all of our voices i have a son who is a bundle of joy he's just love that's all he is um cognitively disabled physically disabled um will never go to college will never live on his own can't write can't pick up a pen

165and write on his own but if any of you said to him play any song he could play it on p uh he could play it on the drums fluently where that god gift came from i don't know but what it's taught me is this broad spectrum of what education is all about and and so um success is success and leadership is leadership i had tremendous success in westin we moved the school in nagatok windsor where i became vp we moved you saw our scores how they moved um we took gilbert which was broken and turned it into a u.s news and world report school of the year um students were coming from all over the world to go there weymouth we have raised scores in a lot of ways we still have lots of

166work to do so my point is every place that i've been in we have never remained status quo we have become exceptional i know shannon spoke with our staff i have no idea what they said but i know that they said that they were led everybody has a voice in our building everybody's always had a voice we lead i lead with grace and humility um everything in our building in everything in my entire career has been about relationships with parents relationships with students relationships with staff the old book one of my favorite books in the world if you don't if you don't feed the teachers they'll just they'll eat the kids and the point is if staff is not happy and i don't mean getting everything they want but if staff is not heard they

167are going to be going become disrupted and leave our teachers in any of the districts that i've led aren't leaving they're staying and they've gone through some difficult times obviously everybody has but they're staying some are retiring but people aren't going to find greener pastures in in some interesting places and so that to me is what leadership is we lead from the heart um we take in where everybody is but i have pretty strong shoulders and and we have faced some real adversities and and um we have to provide opportunities for our kids in duxbury globally without changing the demographics of our town um because for our kids to be successful as fortune 500 you know company chairman or chair women we have to know that they've worked with lots of different people and not

168not face it when they first get to college because the studies have shown the difficulty of that so i'm really excited about this opportunity um you know i've coached and i look through a coaching lens i know what's happened over the last 18 months um i can tell you that making decisions is not difficult for me but i also don't make decisions haphazardly but i also as as i i use the term orchestra leader i know everything that's happening in our building um i met and shannon again i'm sure parents said it i meant everything to be visible means you know what's happening within your within your building in your district so i will be at stem fairs in in second grade poetry readings in third grade we will be at all of that that's

169not my vocation it's my advocation it's all i know and my relationship with cpac is outstanding my relationship with some fractured groups in our town have come together and i'm not afraid to have those hard conversations yet bring him in a very peaceful calm positive way we had we had a the first ever community forum on anti-racism and anti-hate in a community that did not want to have it um and there were a thousand people there um and i stood up as a white male having no problems having the conversation and we've moved our community we've moved every community we've been in because it's about what our kids need and and as long as we are focused on the why which is why we got into education and why is this good for kids i

170firmly believe i'm the right fit um for everything that you're looking for to move duxbury to become the lighthouse not not great to be the um when we google duxbury i want to be googling how fantastic the district is not some something that happened a year and a half so i look forward to the opportunity thank you mr strauss greatly appreciate your your time here and and all that you've put through in the process as you know we'll be uh deliberating tomorrow evening great i appreciate it thank you everybody thank you so much thank you thank you for your time so um thank you um so i believe with that that we can um [Music] uh need to do a motion to adjourn the meeting because that was we covered our meeting agenda for the

171evening i moved that we had during our meeting okay okay we have to do a role can i just oh yeah answer the question tomorrow at six o'clock same zoom length or are we going to get a new one that's an excellent question i believe our duxbury public schools person will know the answer to that same link same okay perfect so everybody tomorrow at six o'clock on zoom same link yes so i'll go back to my trash folder and put it back in um okay so we have an emotion oh sorry oh go ahead is that something jake and i will be going to tomorrow or no yeah absolutely we'd love to hear your opinions for sure yep awesome thank you okay um is that good everybody's good absolutely all right so i think the

172motion is still standing so i'll do a roll call vote julia hi kelly hi matt hi kristen hi shannon aye have a good evening everyone thank you you