001i think we'll go ahead and get started i'm sure people may be wandering in and we do have an audience on zoom as well so we'll go ahead and get started on behalf of the watertown school board i'd like to welcome all of you and especially thank you for participating in this first of three finalists candidate meet and greets an opportunity for you to meet the candidates for superintendent in your district and ask them questions i'm pat newdecker i'm the facilitator for the evening as a partner with hazard young and atiyah who is conducting this search for the board the format for tonight will include an introduction of our finalist who will then really introduce himself and tell you a lot more about himself than i ever could and then we will also be asking
002you to submit questions via the note cards that are on your tables and for those of you uh participating with us on zoom you can put your questions in the chat room and i will be organizing and fielding those questions it helps us keep moving if i can watch the questions put them together if there's some that are similar and usually not but if there's anything that is personal or inappropriate we probably would overlook that question for those on zoom please add that to chat for those of you that have questions here you can put them on your cards and we will pick them up no names will be used so i know even on zoom your name is probably showing on the screen but we will not use names when we read your question
003and then uh at the end we'd like to do a quick candidate wrap-up where our candidate will summarize i guess their time here in the district today or any final comments and i'm going to ask your permission and your help in letting him exit quickly he's going to tell you but a busy guy his graduation tonight so we're going to get him out of here and on his way where i know normally he would stay and visit with you so thank you for that i'll remind you too that next monday and wednesday will also be another presentation just like this where you will have the opportunity to meet your great candidates but with that said it brings me great pleasure to introduce dr ryan crone who's with you with great interest in the watertown school
004district right thank you very much you bet thanks everybody for joining us here tonight live as well as online my name is ryan crone i am currently superintendent of the stone bank school district located in oconomowoc wisconsin it's one of the smaller school districts in the state prior to that i was the assistant superintendent in the waukesha school district seven largest school districts in the state um i've had about 25-year career in education most of it in waukesha county as a teacher and a coach assistant principal and a principal and a couple of unique paths in terms of getting a chance to open the waukesha stem academy which is a charter school based off of a grant a number of years ago and in a little bit of a short time i got a chance
005to step out of a formal role of schools and i did some consulting i was the director at the institute and our work there was to help school districts push for more student-centered programming help push their policy everything from policy level to practice level in the classroom i had a chance to do that for a few years and work alongside a number of districts across the state so with that being said i'm really excited to be here today to have spent an amazing day here throughout the district and get a chance to apply for the opening for superintendent i believe that watertown is is not only a fantastic district position for continued greatness into the future and i look forward to answering questions tonight and getting a chance to have some dialogue maybe for the
006sake of uh especially our people on zoom do you want to add anything else about your interest or highlights of your day or yeah sure if you'd like to sure go ahead got a chance today to spend some time getting immersed in the school district started without being at the district office or the educational service center and got a chance there to meet the district team a number of people that play a lot of roles at that service center everything from finance to providing student services hr development as well as teaching and learning just getting a sense of where the district is in terms of how what the role the district plays is great from there we got a chance to go on tour we got a chance to be in every single building today
007got a chance to meet each of the building leaders and principals many of the teachers a lot of high fives and thumbs up from students in the hallway but getting a chance to go inside of every dish every building get a chance to kind of see the people that have made up the stories that i've heard from afar i've heard great things about the people that have made up the success here in in watertown school district and we get a chance to hear and meet some people we had a chance to see uh really an investment at this time of year and the energy is still going full throttle in the classroom so we've got to see students continuing to work we have to see teachers sharing a lot of the progress and success that
008they're having we got to hear our administrators talk about the goals that they have achieved as well as what their sites are set on for next year um getting a chance to see a full spectrum from 4k programming that has been in the district are just beginning to sort of emerge as a program all the way through to high school where students are talking about their last couple of days in school and some of their capstone graduation projects is something special to see from an outsider looking in and to see a whole k-8 spectrum in term or k-12 spectrum in terms of the work that's unfolding i also had a chance to see some things that are i would say are part of the this really special portfolio here in watertown what i mean by
009that is there are traditional schools such as elementary school middle school high school but if you really turn the page you get a chance to see that there are a number of charter schools in this district from an online school and a project-based school or here in this high school as well including endeavor we got a chance to meet people that will help to orchestrate those schools and those services and the reasons why got a chance to see some of the stem programming that's unfolding at the middle and the elementary level as well as a dual language program one of the highlights today at the middle schools we got a chance to meet with an eighth grade teacher who was talking about her eighth grade students leaving this year with the first cohort of that
010dual language group that had made their way all the way from kindergarten through to eighth grade they're really celebrating the success and the growth of that moment how that investment eight years ago was playing out and seeing students today uh leaving eighth grade so those were many of the highlights uh beyond the school visits i did get a chance to meet with some community leaders back at the educational services center this afternoon and got a chance to hear about partnerships with the health department partnerships with ymca partnerships with local universities as well as other organizations and i'll remind all of you if you have questions um even if you think you know the answer you might ask it anyway because it's very helpful um for our participants on zoom to be able to hear i'll
011um sure i can represent this correctly okay here's our first question ready um if the watertown unified school district school board wants to do something that you disagree with whether it has to do with safety curriculum health or anything in general how would you resolve the disagreement in terms of running our board meetings one of the most important things that we do is make sure that our we're really transparent with our processes and communicating to the community as well as sort of how about we go about our decision making practices and so in that piece making sure that our agendas are clear so that the community understands topics that are being discussed uh making sure that there's opportunity for conversations to take place at a at a board level uh in terms of what's a
012discussion or what's informational item what's a discussion and what's eventually going to be a vote our goal there is also help help community understand how boards function and how boards work in terms of decisions that uh boards make um and last but not least in terms of having opinions on these things i think the important thing is to really make sure that they're a really good um we have a chance to hear all the perspectives on every topic make sure that's included in the process before decisions are made and what decisions are made that really gives us a new starting spot for the future conversations if they're necessary great i'll encourage people who are joining us on zoom to please put their questions in the chat room and we will field them for you and
013also our audience participants if you will too i know i know dr crone would love to be walking around with you but we've asked him to stay on camera so um he i know is more comfortable out here conversing with you but we'll mention that for everyone's benefit because it's easier for the zoom folks to see as well any other questions who knows other questions well i can ask one um how do you balance all the what sometimes appears to be competing interests and needs for what everybody thinks students should know and be able to do with what we really know from research and best practices what makes a high school or a school district great how do you do that is it as a as we look at sort of the program or the
014classes that we want students to take and sort of that piece that's that's the student experience that we want to look at and as a school district we want to look at what's the the avenue that we want students to have what i got a chance to see today was a variety of pathways a number of students that could be looking at taking everything from ap honors classes and looking at a four-year career others that were looking at getting early accreditation for um moving into industry and work and likewise so to really balance that one of the things i think watertown has as a gift is really a portfolio of pathways and really programs that offer that that piece so that right there um that's i think a real strength but in terms of really
015balancing that piece out of what are some key priorities i think it is important to really establish our key goals as a district in terms of achievement or programming in our offerings um we call them our key performance indicators or some of our key markers but really establishing what do we what do we value that becomes clearly defining what we offer and why we offer it and then really has a team really sort of having an opportunity for students and teachers to decide how we can get there how we can build programs that might do that um in that work so there are a number of priorities and sometimes you'll get a lot of feedback and there's a really important channels to do that uh at the same time when ideas come in we have
016to be able to put it into a process that we can discuss it and does that go in so if it's a new science program that might be coming in and people are thinking about this is a new topic this is where we should be looking at we want to have a nice process to have that go into looking at it annually to make sure are we adding courses is this something we want to do how does this fit into existing courses and is there a removal of other competing priorities i've had some local interest in that this year we have used many of the project lead the way programming models that are for a long time we found some nice success with it we also found i've shared this example in the past but
017we found a new drones program happening at a couple of universities white water and carolina university and what's really interesting about that is we're seeing that that has turned into not only a minor but a major at universities and even complementing so many different industries that was an area that something came in new and we took time to explore it look at how did that fit into our existing project lead the way stem and science curriculum and how would that fit were students interested and what were some of our outcomes with that from that spot but we also found some areas that maybe were a little bit outdated and that we wanted to kind of have a replacement and a choice so we successfully implemented it this year and we're excited about the partnership that
018it formed and in the end we found out that it complemented a number of our classes really well and it was a nice fit and with the engagement that we got from students it took off so we had to be careful with an idea coming in not to just sort of have a wall that we couldn't get past it at the same time we had to be careful that it wasn't just open or things were just coming that we didn't have time to really fully vet and understand and approve at a board level so we knew it was coming in and that we could really do it well another question what drew you to pick watertown unified school district this was a pretty easy one because it it stood out um i mentioned before i'm
019at a relatively small district right now superintendent i also previously was at a large one waukesha school district which is a larger one when i started to look uh and heard about this position being open i got a chance to take even a deeper dive under the program the off the programmings and offerings that are here so what's interesting is that three things stood out really clearly which was the the programs uh in and of themselves really stand out in terms of saying we have an extensive high school program middle and elementary but we also have again charter school programs project-based programs environmental programs dual language ap programs a number of programs that had just sort of beyond and that's a really exciting piece in terms of a culture for a district to have sort
020of an innovative portfolio and to say we're willing to continue to look at things now and into the future another piece was practices so with programs and practices and that was really where what were the instructional strategies that were being used or what were some of the leadership practices that were being used to really engage staff and students because i kept hearing about sort of the strategies that were being used inside the classroom if you've been on the website and watch the video or if you got a chance to tour like i did today it was clear that active learning uh highly engaged learning is something that's valued in this system and you saw students really own their learning experiences time and time again and that was a really nice piece to see in terms
021of the role and the importance of the role that student plays in the learning process and that was a culture piece that is not it is rare uh to see and when you see it you know it the last piece that has really stuck out is the people and i have some smaller relationships with individuals in this community but one of the things that has stood out was the number of times when you talk about where i listen and hear stories about watertown was the people that made it great uh from not just educators and then people in in the district but also parents students community leaders business leaders a number of services around there and we kept hearing about this is a wonderful supportive community but then you start to hear the stories behind
022that one of the meetings that we had today we just heard about the number of services behind the scenes to support different programs pieces to understand not just individual families need but even collective families in need of sort of that piece so again the programming that is there is a is a draw and really got my attention the practices that i uncovered in sort of getting to know the district were really really exciting to see but the piece that's continues to grow on me are the people that have been a part of this system now uh people that work here that have gone to school here people that continue to um have to talk about two or three generations of their kids and families in this town is something that is really special to watch
023it's also a piece that as the future comes in and every district faces different challenges along the way in the future it's also one of those pieces i believe is essential to addressing challenges and successfully addressing challenges in the future is to have a really strong community and people that really know the town and been a part of it and understand it as well as having a portfolio in the past of good practices that you've done and big changes you made the past so that that can continue as a culture in the future those questions coming in please here's another one great what is your experience supporting programming for multilingual learners and families prior to my um current role i was the assistant superintendent in the schools of waukesha about 10 years ago we had
024looked at a pretty significant need in terms of programming that we did not have at the time we did not have dual language 10 years ago 11 years ago in washington waukesha we had a pretty big opportunity to look at how we were going to continue to serve kids and sort of address some of the challenges that that we were facing as a system uh since that time we started and we looked at from an elementary model first but higher blair and banting three schools were identified as becoming a dual language school and we started similar to what has occurred in this district with looking at a 9010 model a one-way model or two-way but eventually as the program grew um it really turned into a model that is there from there taking time and
025i shared in my opening that warehouse got to here in this district celebrating the 8th grade model growing that program also grew interest in the community of really understanding the the value of being of a dual language program for all students for the community at first it went from what does this program look like and what does this mean for my my school into schools right now that have uh students driving families driving families to get there having wait lists to get in really understanding and seeing that being having this being the part of this dual language program really has a vet was a value-add for the young children was really going to leave their students be able to be fluent to languages so that was an area that we started from a programming model
026it made its way through middle school made it through it through high school and in the end we've really established and i did learn about it here in this district as well as having a seal of my literacy at graduation and really recognizing the gifts and talents that students have and really taking a look at a really innovative inclusive model to be able to have students see their gifts recognized and to bring forward a chance to bring really what would be a whole new program to a district but to do it in a way that is really evaluated to the community the future workforce keep those questions coming in as we read yours um dr crone what are some of the first steps that you that you will be addressing in this school district what
027are your top three priorities so early on in this process got a chance to look at the leadership profile that was done through the consulting group and just take a chance to get initial feedback uh most important piece in transitioning to a community is to really to develop an understanding of really what's there and so again i'm going to go with programs people and processes but really heavy on some processes as well and what i mean by that is really first of all just get a chance to understand the programs that are in place and just what are they what level are they performing at where do they come from and that's everything from schools uh math programs literacy programs as well as just community programs so getting a list of programs that are there
028and really getting to know and understand what's happening too is is people and really getting a chance to work alongside uh today i got a chance to meet with some of the cabinet team getting a chance to understand where the district is at getting a chance to form relationships with the school board getting a chance to form relationships with other community partners so getting to know people and really listening uh i'd say listen large but to really listen in a manner that we're getting a chance to hear uh different work on that and then processes what are the processes for decision making that have been here in the past regarding finances what are the process that we have for safety and communication engagement what are the process that we have for decision making just trying
029to follow the history of that so that there's a level of predictability in terms of communication and those things so in the end coming in relatively new uh it is really the goal is to gain perspective um from multiple people in the system and what is the different perspectives that people have in terms of the current state of where things are at imagine that being and generally a superintendent will have 100 day plan in some way shape or form but in doing that in concert with the school board to say 100 days from now if we run a chance to do kind of an audit of just some programs and get some feedback of getting to know people and getting to know the processes coming forward at that time and really sort of being more
030informed to say okay well here's was a new transition in but here's here's what we've heard and how does that help us understand where we're at and then how does that help clearly define the next steps in terms of where we go and so that coming in new is really a chance to hear perspectives uh as as we really do that again i'm going to they'll start with letter p but just getting to know people programs and processes but real goal is to get the perspective of where things are at in the current state so we can understand then how do we approach each piece we're going for the future another question from our video audience what would your focus priority be to increase enrollment in our district so i'm a firm believer that there's
031a huge impact happening each and every day for students classrooms for schools and one of our important things to do as a school community is just is to share that cloud as we can in terms of the programs that are happening the great results that we're getting what we're doing for students how students are forming everything from relationships and friendships to having an outstanding educational experience in this school district so one of the key pieces is to make sure i'd say that from a messaging and communication message that we're not shy about the great things that are happening and we get a chance to celebrate the impact that we can have in kids and families lives and so i would look at that from a sort of a marketing pr standpoint what are we doing
032that well and where can we continue to go the other piece for looking at enrollment is just to continue to and it kind of goes hand in hand but just to define it collectively as often as we can what is the watertown experience for students what is that experience and how do we get people in the door to have that experience so currently we're doing a lot of marketing around looking at uh starting up our 4k program and we've been targeting a number of parent child events that we can do in our community for three-year-olds and for us just to get families in the door to form some of those initial relationships start to have art and family nights start to have open gyms to start have read alouds in library all of those kind
033of things to just get sort of those initial relationships going where they can be the teacher meet the staff member be in the school and start to understand at the same time there are families that will choose uh to be in schools because of sometimes they have an assumption about this school would be that or that it'd be it the other piece would be formally just to start to look at who's in our area that's not coming here and start to find out why is it a programming piece is it a work piece is it child care piece is there some other gaps or some barriers that are that we're not that we're unaware of then last but not least is really just having as many opportunities we can to have what we call open
034doors doors open forums and just opportunities to engage families in forming relationships that we want them to have with our district and so we've run open enrollment fairs in the past we've really looked at making sure that the marketing is out there in terms of getting families in we have found that sometimes people don't know that they can go here if they're out of district we have found that sometimes people don't know where their boundary is or that they go to another spot so it's just sometimes there's an education piece as well in terms of where we're at so all in all there's a lot of marketing that would go into it but i really think that the best marketing is a story of the impact that we're having in terms of great programming um
035i was in one conversation today that somebody explained the experience that they had with their daughter in school and how it was sort of really high level top notch and open some doors that the employees said that they only knew because they went here and the story line behind it is imagine if they didn't go here do other families know that this class is here to families that don't go here to know that there's this program in this district and so that she really comes back at that really doing our job to put out the information not only to enroll in school but to talk about the impact that we're having and pay backing on those questions about enrollment um what is your perspective concerning wisconsin choice programs such as open enrollment charter and vouchers
036yeah um i think over the last decade we've there's been there's greater and greater decision making happen inside of household of where they're going to go to school for a long time it was where do you live or where's your address and where's your either local neighborhood school and that's where you're at um since there's been a great report and i mentioned the strength of having a portfolio of options and programs but since there's been more and more options you're seeing more and more people have conversations about where they might go to school i do believe that inside there there are people that are choosing to go to different spots and might not just take for granted their neighborhood or their local district where they live but also inside there we can understand the conversations
037that are having that people want it's a great opportunity to understand what people are looking for and draw programs from there about 13 years ago i had a chance to open the waukesha stem academy was a new charter school what was interesting about that moment was it was at that time it was the first time that a stem programming model came into that school district where i was at and what's interesting about that is um we we opened it in a building and we had 1300 students apply to be a part of that and there's a couple story lines in there we had wait list we had to get a second building but what was interesting behind the scenes on that was at the same time that that happened what we recognize is that we
038were promoting that school at this level it was new here's what it was going to do here's what learning looked like here's what we were going we had open houses but we weren't doing that for a lot of our other schools and was interesting we overeducated the whole community on here's what it was and we hadn't been doing that probably for the last decade in terms of our other schools and we didn't celebrate the way what happened in the silver lion that was happened after that was all of a sudden our game was raised for everybody else to celebrate the great things that are happening and so instead of looking at just it was one thing we made sure that we celebrated everything and that was a great area to just do our part in
039highlighting those programs but also just really pushing onto what did people need to know to have be informed so coming back to charters vouchers choices magnet schools or whatever they are i think the better job we do with sort of marketing and getting their hands on families since they are making choices let's help them be informed of the choice they're making great um would you please let us know your thoughts about transparency with parents about curriculum so big big topic this year in terms of just really want people wanting to have trust trust is one of our biggest pieces that we can do for our community trust some good processes from everything from finance to even trust right now in terms of curriculum and what's being what's what's being taught and approved so annually every
040year when we approve standards or we approve curriculum those are always what all school boards will have a chance to do and so we want to make sure we have clear processes of where people can sort of get a chance to review material and understand what's being taught in schools what's interesting is over the last number of years most districts when it comes to a topic such as like human growth and development have a pretty clear process for getting materials adopted uh reviewed and having parents know what's being taught right now especially over the last year we're having more people saying we want to be informed of what's happening at a little higher detailed level some of that came with kobit when people were hearing lessons and seeing things online some of it just came
041out of more curiosity and some of it came with just a lot more transparency of online learning people seeing things so it is critical that we do our part to establish what is within our range in terms of what's adopted for curriculum what materials we are using and things like that the challenge is going to be you can do the math on this and you think about 100 teachers in the building teaching eight lessons a day right now we're going to have 800 lessons a day and then by the end of the week we're going to do the quick math of you know some you know a few thousand lesson plans happening so the other piece on trust is going to be to really establish how do we well won't be able to possibly monitor
042every single lesson every single day it will be important that as a district you establish the parameters in terms of this is what's taught um there's a big piece about the word indoctrination comes in a lot of that and that's really important to talk about how are things presented so when things are presented in this category this category with social studies science or other things that it's clear about what's being taught as well in terms of how it's being delivered so there's an expectation on that so again i think the questions are really valid of people wanting transparencies so that there's nothing to hide the challenge is going to be on the down to the daily lesson detail to make sure that there will be some mistakes how do we minimize that or how do
043we give a framework for this is how things are taught or when it is and so there's great examples of being transparent uh and then we've got to make sure we just continue to have an understanding of what that could be from material selection and i will say it has gotten a little bit tough with people finding great resources online that look like a nice compliment to something and then the next thing you know it was a little bit maybe wasn't aligned wasn't approved and so they're really going to be a sense of kind of finding good parameters for that so that there builds trust with it's not just anything off the shelf or off the internet and it does follow sort of the district standards or curriculum um shifting back to programs what steps
044might you take to measure the success of educational programs to make the most impact on our kids and i'm going to add the second piece and would there be a situation that would cause a district to discontinue a program so that's a that's a great question we want we want we want highest achieving literacy program most effective math programming our question is going to be is what is our what is what have we determined to be success in that what is what is the measure is that all students at this level is that a group of students having access to this to this level of coursework defining that that measure is really important in terms of what we see success as and there's a different ways that we could look at that the other piece
045on the programming piece is defining um the the the level of engagement that we want to test there's a number of different math programs that are out there so are we investing on again is it an overall composite score for a district is it number of students qualifying for ap classes or what is that measure for what does success look like at the same time one of the things for programming is so defining that success and really trying to adhere to it knowing that we're either hitting that success or that we have a plan to track for it is important one of the pieces that i some work that i do and i work with school districts on contingent improvement models is sometimes student achievement is a lagging indicator and the leading indicator is that
046program and how well it was adopted how well there's been support and training for teachers how well it is and if it's effective or not so really going into that side of it is important as well so we can say on the surface boy we're not getting the results that we have right now maybe for a math program and then we could look at it and more often than not we'll find well staff turned over this many people in the last five years which means nobody got the initial training when it came in or there hasn't been maybe some ongoing support on how to look at achievement data and how do we put that in there so there's a little bit of recognizing not just the results and throwing a program out until you get
047a chance to also do a program review uh today i got a chance to just um haphazardly ask a couple people i met in the hallway i know that you're a district that uses the star assessment and then the window just closed so it's sort of that two three times a year getting a chance to look at student growth and results and just ask somebody casually they said they had it in their hands they said how's it going and what kind of results are you seeing and they really had their report they were carrying with so that's a really good indicator of a local measure that's being used to see what success looks like in terms of i heard about a growth score today i heard about the achievement sport today that's a really exciting
048piece um a deeper dive on that beyond just the score was what was happening also in a school maybe we were not getting results how did people feel about the support they were getting on the materials how old they were things like that so i'm i'm careful to not throw something out when the score is not where it wants to be until we get a chance to understand where the understanding is or the resources of support but both both of those look together if you've seen if you're not seeing the scores and you feel like the program that there is time to sometimes move to the next thing but no matter what you go to you will want to make sure that you have a really good model in place to help the adoption process
049get started because even starting something over sometimes is a whole another step in rather than just sort of reinvesting in the understanding of the goals what success looks like for students and what we want technology what role should technology have within the classroom hope to continue position technologies as a resource uh for students in their learning journey uh not as necessarily the driver of it but as a resource to sort of assist them uh we've all got doused with technology the last couple of years as things kind of shut down and we realize that there are some real benefits everything from being on being unable to be here tonight to be able to be on zoom as well as to find some other resources quickly for what we're working on but we want to make
050sure that it's complementing the learning journey or is seen as a resource so again having books and materials accessible for students in the learning journey is great and so there are models that districts use one is called samar which is where technology is just a substitution for a piece of paper you're just doing it online and so that's the the substitution level and then there's a chance where it's just really starts to move into where it's modifying the assignments even redefining the experience and sometimes when you're getting up to the r in samurai you're getting a chance to a redefined experience using technology today i heard about the school when i was touring it that was using technology for a virtual cow or calf that was adopted by the school and they got to do
051that virtually and sort of track this probably not a good idea to have that cow in the school in the environmental school that we heard about but the one that they had was they had a chance to adopt it and learn about its growth and its feeding and things like that that is a great redefinition of technology and the use of it in terms of the work that we're doing but in terms of just having students sitting in front of materials or just having their technology from it and not interacting with peers can really be detrimental to sort of the turning and talking and sharing and looking at that we want to have so got to be careful with how we use it but at the same time there are some great benefits to enhancing
052a learning experience or opening up doors that might not have been available at the same time we don't want to replace really students turning and talking building and creating and being a part of it thank you uh should a situation arise where an administrator has transgressed what process or steps would you take to address that um it's it's critical that for everyone in our organization we have really really high expectations and standards and i would also complement that with a high support and so if we are a spot where we're not seeing um a spot where we're seeing success or we're starting to see that um from a support system we've got to try to figure out what can we do to support um this model and can we get it to where it's expected
053to be at the same time if we can't we have to put steps in place and so um over the last number of years i've had to uh engage in conversations with like this uh in different districts and different times in terms of performance and so we establish i mentioned our kpis our key performance indicators as a district a number of times um i have put in a system of quarterly artifact checking with a group of principals i've also put it in for teachers and for schools and what we did is we established really what our our plans were strategic plans for the year and then every quarter we did public reporting out by school and by leader in terms of the work that they were leading how they were pushing on really hitting our
054targets for achievement how they're helping to hit key initiatives for the district how it was unfolding we're listening for progress reports we did that publicly uh sort of like imagine having schools present in front of other schools we gave each other feedback uh but it also was a chance to have really clear expectations to see the quality across the system and across different leaders and it became sort of you could see where bench we were about benchmarking in terms of work and then from there we could really have conversations where there wasn't whether the benchmark wasn't being hit to find out what kind of support was needed because the expectation was there at the same time we could also find out that there was a chance to sometimes uh have people removed from the role
055sometimes have their role be redefined or be reassigned or things like that but i try really hard to be really clear on what the expectations are whether it's for students in the classroom whether it's for teacher performance in classroom it's or principals or for myself but really having a spot to define that should have a chance for artifacts conversation discussion for that so that we have the high expectations um and high standards and at the same time when it's not there have a process that we can keep an eye on that and i mentioned the quarterly model that we do but really i put that in for about the last decade of just because that to me that becomes a live moment of pause of the artifacts we wanted to see and for the most
056part and this is the best part is for the most part those are celebration moments so if you're doing that with a group of 20 leaders or school team you're seeing highlights from the year and success and celebrating periodically throughout the year at the same time it does give you an opportunity where you're not to address that before we go too far to get it school year down the wrong path great um just a reminder we probably have about five to eight minutes before we'll give you a little wrap up so you can get out of here on time so i'm going to combine a couple questions so that everybody hopefully will uh hear their their need or have their need met one is about um communication what principles of communication ples principles um would
057you follow for transparency uh with and communication with the community i have a little framework that i try to use around communication it's a challenge to myself so pick a topic any topic and i try to ask myself in terms of well where does that top how is that topic being communicated i'm not talking just one-way communication but i'm talking about real communication and real engagement so i call it inform involve and impact it's a model that i try to really to use which is at a minimum we need to have our our staff our community informed of these topics that are unfolding so simple information from everything from website to the district app to paper to flyers whatever it would be so that's the basic level the second layer is where i really think
058of like well so informed and involved so who needs to be involved in this conversation that's not right now so really trying to be transferred and have opportunities for involvement so everything from ongoing listening sessions being public with staff getting a chance to connect with community having open forums is critical and it's essential to any topic because there's always people are looking to be a little bit more who should be involved who's not involved do we have the right perspectives and so that's sort of layer two so inform is just sort of one way we're hearing things there two is this is a topic that requires some real involvement what forms do we have for that i run listening sessions every month we run a number of committee meetings talk about staff we run a
059number of parent sessions that's really our goal is to get people the right people involved and to make sure that our perspective is inclusive of everybody's perspective that they're trying to understand and then the last layer which is a little bit is the highest layer of impact who are the impact players in this conversation that really need to be in a position to have impact to share their talents their gifts who should be making these decisions who should be informing us at the highest level so we have again a layer for that sometimes that turns into board committees or school committees sometimes that turns into deeper discussions and sort of that process but you're getting a chance to really learn shoulder to shoulder with each other so from a transparent process i really try to
060follow that process so that there is a level of an ability for a level of engagement for us employees there's a level here for the community to be involved in decisions so that they can be a part of it uh and there's moments where we know we're doing it well and we're getting that there's also moments where we look back on something that happened like we should we needed more time to be able to have an impact team or we had the wrong people on that or we needed more time there so let alone we even established many of our board committee work um in a rhythm that is happening on the first monday with community listening sessions and availability for myself daily to be able to hear that for that time in between to
061make sure we're hearing perspective before we go back to four full board meetings just in case there's conversations that we have we want to make sure the door is open i'm going to read three questions but i'm going to kind of cluster them around the bigger concept of school discipline mental health of students and school safety especially with recent tragedies in our country so one would be how do you approach issues of school discipline programs one's programs yeah it's a discipline program i think discipline in general student media here mentioned before some of our key performance indicators as a district we establish school safety is one of our key areas that we were looking at just tracking data to see what we would have really for the most part depending on what your context is
062we looked closely at what our data was saying for past everything from individual student behavior daily to some of the larger things that have been happening across the nation or that we have to prepare for and we try to put a real plan in place um our our work in this piece just again to be really clear from the get go about what the expectations are from the simply put if you're going to see me in a hallway i'm going to say no students should be disrupting the learning experience of another student next to them or disrupting the teachers being able to do his job their job so that's that's the bar and i've never actually had anybody argue with me um that's saying no i want my students to just drop their orders from
063learning or i want my students to disrupt the experience so that's a pretty universal line it usually goes over pretty well the challenge is when we get sort of those repeat pieces and what kind of what are the things that we need to unfold so one of the pieces that we also looked at was in most schools almost 80 percent of the students or more never end up having a discipline problem having to go to the office or the principal's office almost their entire career and so we wanted to make sure we were investing in one end of the spectrum of really empowering students and recognizing the gifts and the of that students are bringing and also recognizing that that's generally the group that might be impacted by the behaviors um that are taken away
064so we really wanted to sort of put as we put a model into what we call the empowered leader program into really establishing and investing the energy into that to recognize that piece when it comes to discipline though when it comes to things that are compromising learning or even safety of a school or community we are really clear on really establishing processes for what we can do to get to the right say the root cause of this where is this behavior happening why is this happening um we have the things that can be a swift you're out of school it's it's a suspension it's a potential expulsion those are things that are sometimes right there but it's the ones that are repeated that really stick with the school or school community in terms of what
065other things are going on that are causing this pattern to occur and what kind of supports do we need to get into and we've seen things everything from a real need to reach some health services we've seen some other things that have been a real need to just form relationships with kids um and we try really hard to form that piece and some of the questions that you'll ask sort of like sometimes there's a threat assessment on a bigger issue um like but other times you ask yourself where's the where's the assessment of the student's level of engagement do they have best friends in school they're part of any club so they have a teacher that they connect to we try to find some of those pieces uh really to see what we can do
066or where we can begin and often times when we can start to chip away at that piece or give the student a different role or a different relationship we can start to get to the root cause of that so all in all from a safety standpoint we have a pretty stringent crisis plan in place that covers all of the things that are scary to schools from intruders and bullying and harassment and some of those pieces that are really kind of just this is what it is and this is what we train staff to do and how to respond we also have a chance to really invest in really the students that are just doing everything they can to bring their a game every day and how do we recognize those students how do we set
067the tone for their learning experience to be this is the expectation how do we address things in the moment that for those one-time events that because they're young or their middle school they made a bad decision but then there is sometimes that area where do we need to invest to really engage the student to be successful long term in our school and community and do we have the right services and support so it kind of takes a little bit of assessment but we want a real line in the sand in terms of this is the goal for expectations this is where they're going to be and if it's disrupting learning and disrupting other kids from learning we've got it it's got to be addressed because that's why we're here and just to piggyback how would
068you um ensure that parents feel that everything is being done to protect the safety of their children yeah again there's this is a tricky one because you want to have a real clear level of expectations that we're not going to cut any corners when it comes to that sometimes you can't get into the details of what a safety plan and protocols are for entire district but really knowing that there's routine drills having open forums we've run a lot with our waukesha county sheriff's department we run a lot with we do a lot with internet safety in our school this year alone we added three new tabs to our crisis binder one was internet into computer safety with so many kids being online we wanted to have an ongoing that was something we were dealing with
069every hour let alone intruders thinking about intruders we added sort of a social emotional piece for families just to make sure that families knew how to talk about topics that were coming up in schools in the community and just giving people resources that was done with a lot of our counselors and then we did some other pieces just on some community forums in terms of just overall safety school safety uh that was just sort of things that they were thinking about topics they were hearing so that they could understand there was a high level of expectation for discipline that it wasn't disruptive because sometimes what they hear in the car for kids is half the story we want to make sure that there was a real piece there and so we just again with parents
070we went real public with those were part of our monthly newsletters and we also want to have forums to really do some parent education on that thank you audience here and on zoom for letting me kind of combine some of those so your questions would be uh just a couple left i think maybe time for one more and then give you a couple minutes to wrap up and we'll let you escape quickly i'm glad we had so many questions ryan when he got there told me well i can always give my graduation speech if there's no question which he also has with him for his next event but um and this um kind of goes back to school improvement and the things we started talking about in your picture of the total profile for students
071but given that this school district has low ela and math scores under 40 percent specifically where would you begin to increase growth in those areas there's a programming would be a programming review that would really need to happen what what's the history of the programs that are being used right now in terms of training adoption and purpose and where do they come in and where do they rest right now there's always a kind of a current state of that like i always ask in my office i have an ore hanging on the wall um like a paddle but i have to use an orange because it's an acronym and therefore stands for ownership agency and responsibility and i think a lot about who has the ore in their hands and our system i go into
072a classroom i look at what the student role is what's their role to move this journey forward i think of teachers what do they have what's their role in this i look at our administrators right look at our team i think about that in terms of are we really clear on where we're going and does everybody know the role and the importance of their role in getting there so when we look at a program review like performance this is something that i thought about the minute i started thinking about this district because of the conversation that i heard it's really i would walk into a classroom and look at what's the role of our learners in our math classroom what do we want it to be or in our literacy classroom what role are they
073playing actively in terms of we asking them to solve problems are they communicating with each other are they advocating for themselves when they're getting stuck things like that what's the role of our teachers when it comes to this experience in terms of making decisions like following a curriculum or are they adjusting their curriculum based on students learning or not they have ownership of the data are they recognizing the end of the week at the end of the if if a unit 4 exam occurred and it didn't get the performance that we wanted what is the culture of the system or what we do next do we go on to unit 5 or is it a chance to really dive in and say we need more time we need more materials and who owns that conversation
074that moment because our system for that just continues to go on so in terms of looking at this piece i would i use this analogy a lot but what's the role of the learner what's the role of our educators in this and really what's been the role of our administrative cabinet and really understanding how we're going about fixing this is this something that we're looking at systemically are we reviewing data critically and what decision decision-making processes do we have in there so again if the school board has established key strategic objectives and we want those goals and those scores to go through the roof and that's our indicator we want to get into this piece of really what's the work that's happening our system and who has the ownership agency and responsibility for the adoption
075and the success at all three levels and looking for that piece as we go so it's a really important acronym for me as i think about that work because as a system whether it's a role superintendent we really want to look at does everybody understand their their impact and their need to have a good impact of us hitting our collective goals together so that that score for literacy and numeracy is not going to get where we want it unless we're really clear as a system of what we're expecting from students and from families and from staff and that we have that local sort of responsibility and accountability for that achievement and we then when we get there we realize that our efforts matter and that's really one of the best pieces of being on a
076team is knowing the contribution of everybody mattered and that people's um that their efforts uh moved us to a collective spot we'll give you a minute or two to just wrap up so you can be out on time i want to thank everybody for participating tonight as well as the people that were with us on zoom there are a couple questions that we weren't able to get to i did paraphrase some to hopefully get to most but i will just pass the questions on to the board so if they feel they're important they can include them perhaps in their final interviews so your questions will be addressed um would you again help me and thank him ryan and then we'll also give you a couple minutes let's do that first let's give you a couple
077minutes and uh wrap up for us it's been delightful having you thank you drive safely and have a wonderful graduation thank you and thank everybody for for taking time off your schedule to be here i had a just a tremendous day getting a chance to see this district a little bit closer and kind of under the hood so to speak uh this work is has been my heart and has been for every day that i've done this i believe our job has changed a little bit uh in the last few years not just of educating kids but empowering them so at the end of my signature on my email line i always talk about educating and empowering kids for their future and when i think about the break those two things what i really hold
078to is educating them at a high level what do we want students to learn but also investing them as a learner empowering them that they see themselves as a learner they see themselves as capable they see themselves as really ready to take on their next learning challenge and so we think about how do we nurture a powerful learner while they're becoming a highly proficient student and sort of that that piece and it's something that i'm really excited about because you never know the moment when a student starts to believe in themselves and has a disposition that they can do it you never know that the skills that you need when you feel empowered to advocate for yourself find a resource take the next step and so i really think a lot about not just the
079learning but the learner and today during my journey i started by seeing the videos online when i started seeing what was posted on your website with every school and this is they're all about kids they're all about kids learning and doing something but i saw it live today and when i go into classrooms still to this day i don't really look at what the adults are doing to look at what the students are doing and you can tell a lot in that moment in terms of how they've been positioned are they talking to each other are they solving problems are they thinking are they sharing resources they have a sense of ownership of this journey it was really fun today to see what i would say across the system of students who felt really comfortable
080in their schools students who really understood their role of finding a just right book advocate talking at an appropriate level and engaging in a lesson even the hallways being respectful as they're walking down the hall but at the same time having a sense of this felt like home for those kids and the relationships that they had so it was a real pleasure for me to get a chance to spend the day here i i believe our work is to educate and empower all learners for the future and what's exciting about that is that there's great things happening in this district and great designs that allow kids to do both it's not one or the other but it's both and it's that idea of what so thank you for having me um good luck in this
081process and thank you so much good luck on the rest of the school year you've got a few weeks to go we will let you escape because i know i'm off zoom so so please please feel free so yeah exit as you need to i apologize i have to run but graduation my my speech is ready so all right well i don't have to change i'm in my suit so there you go be careful you