001and tyler how close how close is too close and how far back is too far back i would say don't get too close but yeah [Music] maybe a minute or two people can drift in we have people online so i will start us am i okay over here okay great um good evening everybody on behalf of the watertown school board i would like to welcome you to tonight's candidate meet and greet session and in a few minutes we will be welcoming dr jared burke and you'll learn more about dr burke himself as also his career and his interest in watertown i welcome you that are in our audience tonight as well as our participants who are joining us by zoom and i would like to encourage you to ask questions you'll ask questions by writing
002them on the cards that are on your table or by using the chat room feature that's on your zoom screen and we will try our best to ask all questions i'll collect cards and collect the questions from the chat as they come in and that will allow me to maybe organize them a little bit put them in categories and sometimes help if there are any duplicates there will not be any names read from the cards or from the screens on zoom and um at the last forum at the end i turned the cards over to an attending board person so that they would know that all questions had been asked and they would have a record of those questions see i'm pat newdecker i work for hazard young and netia we've been very fortunate to
003be working with this great school board who's trying to hire their next superintendent for your community and we're excited to work with them and we wish you well we feel you have excellent candidates to learn about and to choose from we'll probably take about 45 minutes to let our candidate talk and ask for you to ask questions and after that we'll take a short few minutes for um dr burke to wrap things up for us and summarize and then if you'd like to stay and mingle a few minutes you're certainly welcome to do that but all in all we should be here for about an hour and yes it probably still will be raining when we need it so that's okay but anyway we thank you very very much this is the last of our
004three finalists the board will be um meeting sometime next week as they begin their deliberations and hopefully are able to offer a contract to a new candidate to begin this summer and thank you tyler for all your help this is this is helpful tyler always dependable more than steady eddy right just always there for us so thank you so much for your for your help too um i think that's all i have to say for an introduction and a welcome so i'm going to ask you to join me in welcoming dr jared burke and we'll turn things over to you to go ahead and introduce yourselves welcome well thank you everybody for showing up and and those of you who are online i really appreciate the opportunity to come and have a forum with you
005to talk a little bit about me as a possible superintendent candidate but also to talk a little bit more about you as a school district and i'm wondering if that's uh you're going to be something that's going to be a good marriage for us so with that i just want to tell you a little bit about myself i [Music] am a current seven-year superintendent in the richland school district just completed our seventh year there it's been a great uh experience it's my first superintendency and i really large growth time for me in my career during that time i also finished or completed my doctorate through edgewood university edward college of madison prior to that i was the director of instruction in mount horab area school district for eight years and i got my master's degree
006in curriculum instruction and school leadership through marion college and fond du lac before mount horeb i was a principal and director of curriculum instruction in the southwestern school district very small k-12 school district 750 students approximately at the time i was there and at that point in time i was the elementary middle school principal uh and um had a great experience there and prior to that i was a middle school principal or excuse me a elementary teacher and middle school teacher i taught mostly science and social studies but i was a um agr stage i was sage classroom reduction teacher when i was an elementary teacher so that tells you a little bit about me i have you know i have been married for 24 years now to my wife melissa we have two children
007uh ryan uh who is going into sixth grade next year and declan who's going into second grade next year so that's a little bit about us um and we are really excited about the opportunity uh to possibly be here uh in this in the district it's a great opportunity for our children um that's one of the things that i'm looking for is looking for a place where i can have some expanded opportunities for our children we are citizens of the world we love to do world travel and take our children places and one of the things that i like about this place is i grew up in la crosse wisconsin and so i'm used to a little bit bigger town vibe and i also know that this is a good traveling distance between madison milwaukee
008chicago and it's just a really great hub with that i i also like a lot of the opportunities that this community has i mean it's a it's a large enough community but a small enough community where you still know everybody uh and and i think that that's going to be a really good fit for my family tonight um perhaps you could tell us some of the highlights of your day and i'm going to mention i think you know this from other candidates but we've asked jared to kind of stay put in a geographic area there so that we can keep him on camera otherwise i'm sure he'd like to mingle with you and get a little closer but um perhaps we know that you've been here all day and you've had a great visit tell
009us a little bit about it and perhaps the highlights of your day yeah oh boy i don't know where to start i mean you know a day like this is a whirlwind when you're meeting all the people of the central office and then all the administration and the buildings staff students one of the highlights of the day was because it was last day of school there were many treats abounding and so wonderful opportunities to touch base with the kids and you know get a cupcake here or a cookie there as a person who really loves food that was something that excited me and was able to talk with him but just what struck me i think is the wealth of opportunities that the families here in watertown have through the public school system it's just
010amazing what you've been able to do and it's inspired me to think of even what else could we do what else could we achieve in the school district um you know we traveled out to lebanon and i saw uh the you know program out there um and we talked a little bit about you know um how that is a neatly situated little school out in the country uh and we still have near watertown a number of family farms uh and you know a great ag program you know i hired two ag teachers in a high school uh this size it's amazing that resource and you know could we use that resource out in lebanon even to to really grow that program out there and try to get more students if we're going to keep that
011facility open and i know that that there has been some commitment made to keep it open for a little bit longer to see if we can grow enrollment out there and led to a lot of big conversations about um you know that property and all the properties within the school district um the uniqueness of each of the elementaries one thing that i really noticed i'm traveling through each of the schools especially the elementaries is a sense of community that is at each building you know it's a little different in each of the buildings but the the total commitment that the students and staff have together was really apparent even on the last day of school you know and and that the kids were really tied to that so those are some of the really neat
012things that i noticed um i could go on and on but we only have 45 minutes so great well i'm going to start with the questions so okay in no particular order the first one is about board relations and governance if you and the board could not reach an agreement how would you proceed yeah so um first of all you know i i do take some good ownership in that you know i'm hired to do a specific job and that's to be the educational leader for this region uh and although although i have that and i have a lot of schooling and a lot of experience it doesn't mean i have all the answers so i am open-minded you know and if we don't agree then that just tells me that there's more conversation that
013needs to happen until we do because that's our job our job is to lead the school district and if there's not agreement um and and what i mean by agreement is you know some consensus by the board to show a leadership action right so the controlling majority of the board has to say yes this is the direction we want to go in um that may be in the in the direction that the administration is leading but it may be in a different direction and if it is then i follow the direction of the board at that time and we go in that direction but hopefully you know um being the person that they hired and looking at that and our administrative team who um the the prior superintendent and myself would manage and hire um
014would be looking at how can we work together to find a way to get into the same or right direction and i'm willing to look at all pathways but if there's an impasse it's probably because we probably just aren't done with the conversation and so looking at ways where we can try to find more answers get more data survey more people talk through the issue i think we'll get there again thank you excellent about our teachers how would you foster teacher retention okay um so for for me uh retention uh is is a part of it um i think to get retention we have to you know have recognition recognition of the good things that people are doing because we have people staff not just teachers but all staff do such wonderful things for our
015kids each day and and i i share this with with my staff um especially the new staff that we hire every year we um we take charge of our family's most valuable possession right i don't know any parent i'm one of them who wouldn't give my house my car any money i have you know all of me to protect my kid and to give my kid what would help set them up for a better future and so when when we're interacting with our students um you know we have to keep that in mind and and when when people do keep that in mind they go the extra mile and we need to recognize that okay along with recognizing them we need to reinvest in them okay and reinvestment might come in the form of salary
016and benefits and those kinds of things and i'm sure that you know they're appreciative just like i am of anything that comes their way because let's face it you you can't just pay the rent with gold star stickers you know even though recognition is good you know the gold star sticker is good you can't pay your rent with a gold star sticker so we have to reinvest in them not and not only just in salary or benefits we have to reinvest in them with professional development education caring for all of those things that we can do um to make sure that our people feel like they belong to us as a community um because they will then go the extra mile um and so after reinvestment uh and and recognition um i think that those
017things do lead to retention yeah so um i also like to put the other fourth four in there which is retirement when we have good people who retire the longer we can keep hold of them the longer we can keep them mentoring the new that come in if we've got a good culture and they're part of that culture when they choose to leave us if we can find any way to keep them invested in our school system and to keep them working towards and working with our other staff members that's better because it just hands down the tradition of what makes us us so i also look at our retirement are you are you still able to give of your time efforts and talents because we put a lot of money funds efforts recognition into
018them along their career and if they're still willing let's find a way to to have them here in any kind of capacity thank you how do you approach what are your thoughts on voucher charter and open enrollment okay um about your charter and open enrollment uh i will tell you that i am probably one of uh fewer people in public school and administration that actually support school choice and i i know it's weird to say that being a public school person but i i believe it's our job to educate students that's my job then as the district administrator to work with all of those other choice programs right and to offer the benefits of the public school to them whether it's a private or a voucher or a charter area to say we do have
019resources and they come through tax dollars now don't get me wrong i still see the competition in that and i still think that we need to do everything we can to be the first choice in education and most public schools are the first choice for students in their area um and and i'll do everything i can to do that and i'll do that trying to to form community not to form divide because i do think that if what we're offering is a good product we will have students and if it's not i want the families to get what they need and hopefully we can still work with the place that they need to offer the supports to offer uh what they need and hopefully we can keep that connection and eventually those students will come
020back to us so um again i i'm not afraid of school choice i'm a little leery about how our state's looking to fund it um and that's a whole different conversation but the choice in itself i think is a good thing great thank you um what is and what should be the role of technology in the classroom um so um i think the role of technology in the classroom it's a foregone conclusion there's technology in everything i mean people are starting to buy thermostats for their houses now that they can control from their cell phone uh so i think it is what it's always been technology the pencil is technology it's a tool right we need to make sure that we harness all the tools that we can to help have our students be successful
021and i think we need to stay at pace if not ahead of pace because it's really one of the next issues that is going to bring challenges uh and what i mean challenges i mean equitable challenges to students if our students don't have access to broadband which means in their evenings and weekends and everything else that they have the ability to enter into chat rooms or to you know submit homework assignments or be synchronous instead of asynchronous with their learning that's going to be a problem and the reason that's going to be a problem is because other communities have that for their students all right and if their students are used to using that tool and they are well versed in that tool and they go on to the next step in their educational process
022having that experience it's really hard to travel about a community if you don't know how to drive a car real well but if you're a very good user of a car and you've done a lot of driving and you can get around with a navigation system and everything else it makes driving in a big city really easy and those are the differences that some of our kids do face whether it's on a personal uh issue within their family and their ability to have those resources or it's a community-wide resource that we're talking about but i do think that our students need access to those tools and we need to stay at pace with them okay thank you um talk about communication how would you communicate out to parents and the community yeah so there's a
023lot of different ways that i as well as the community can communicate out and and you will find that i do that in many ways whether it's through local news sources newspaper radio stations news stations those kinds of things on bigger topics district-wide newsletters a short email out to staff or parents i just want you to know that this is happening this evening of law or having to make sure and ensure that that communication is being done by the district in some fashion even if it doesn't come from me uh if it's coming from the district it's going to have that same voice so having all those communications one of the biggest pieces of communication that i think is the most important though is how we communicate at the board level uh because those are
024probably some of the most public places even if people aren't in attendance where they get information because nowadays most of those are televised right recorded zoomed whatever and how people see administration in the board interact and solve problems and work for them as a people is really important and so that is a communication that i really try to stay in touch with and discuss with the board our other administration who end up speaking at those places and other things so also this form i mean this is a great first start to try and do that and i'm going to piggyback another question on to that do you do you feel parents should have a say in their child's education oh absolutely uh and i will go a step further not only just parents we have
025to remember that a good part of our our community and our electorate don't even have students in the school but they still care about students in the school and they care about education and so not only looking at our parents and what they have to say about education and what they would like to see happen with their son or daughter's education but also hearing from the community about where they think communication should go um they put a lot of good resources uh through tax dollars and other investments um when i mean that you know we school districts get so many donations from not only people as citizens but businesses and so on um and and they care and so we have to listen to them we have to think well what is it that we
026can do to work together to have the best product we can for our students okay let's shift to those students how do you approach school discipline uh so how do i approach school discipline well i am a i'm a big fan of restorative justice i'm a big fan of every time you make a choice choices come with consequences both good and bad so make a good choice and it's a learning experience for everyone and i know that there are some learning experiences that come with consequences that are hard to recover from and sometimes that's the reality of us as a society so you know would i and have i needed to expel a child from school yes most of the time when that happens you'll see me ask the school board for a way to
027early reinstate the student back but i use that as an opportunity to be able to apply things to the student through a mutual agreement with the families to get some more further supports or help that they need for instance if a child is found having drugs in the school or something and they're going through an expulsion well i want to get them back into education real quickly because i don't want them to be just hanging out about the house and maybe get into drugs but what i do want to do is i want to make sure that they get the proper aoda counseling and you know other things so that we can keep an eye on them as a student and give them the supports they need check in with some kind of counseling program
028or other things and we can mandate those through early reinstatement so i do believe that discipline is a learning process and it's our job to create structures within that can support students could you take a minute to define describe uh restorative justice yeah absolutely so so what i mean by that is um and i will i will talk by way of example okay um my first job out of college was in reno nevada and i i worked at a very small neighborhood inner city school i had 120 kids in 7th and 8th grade but within that community it was a very diverse population and heavily gang involved students so a lot of times we would have students who would come by on the weekend and maybe do some tagging art on the building right well
029when we found out you know who may have done that first of all you know we we wanted to make sure that the art came down and then we said if you are interested in beautifying the school then why don't you spend a couple of days on the trainer re-beautification project we got them a vest so that they wouldn't get hit by a car but they got them in the car and they took those little things they picked up you know trash and everything else and maybe weeded the little flower beds out front and those kind of things to kind of repay their their debt back to the school for having to time efforts and energy staff costs and everything to retake the vandalism that they had put in place so that's how we restored
030the justice it wasn't necessarily here getting punished and here's your consequence it was uh hey there are other ways to beautify the place here um and in a way that is a positive not something that promotes violence which is what your tagging was doing with your gang violence tags that you were putting up and so on so it's those kind of things okay let's talk about budget and money a little what would be your top tier budget priorities right so so um for me um i would really want to invest more time in looking through the budget and the priorities that the district has in place and from there understanding the needs throughout the buildings as we walk through them as we walk through the programming and other things i clearly identified some things today
031as i was walking through just from conversations that people had and ideas that they had that's where that priority starts is to get that information from people and to talk through it at our administrative level as well as the board level to then allocate the funds for what's needed so for me it's not really ever a personal priority or a personal list will i develop my own judgments as as to how i would try to do that yes but when i do that i look at how can working this budget scenario and need versus this budget scenario need and that one and thinking about the different funding mechanisms that work to try to get the best bang for our buck because they're all needs that are out there and we can't afford all of them
032i famously say all the time you can afford to do anything you want to do but you can't afford to do everything you want to do so we have to prioritize and if you hire me here you'll hear me say that a lot can afford to do anything you want to do but you can't afford to do everything you want to do so let's prioritize and that's how i prioritize the budget is by asking those questions of you what do we want to do and what is the most important of all them when we weigh them and here's how we can fund them here or there to make a better financial plan for all of us to hopefully fit as many of those in the budget as we can because we're not going to fit
033all of them great segway and under what conditions or circumstances might you consider a referendum uh what circumstances we absolutely have to take care of our facilities and we do not generate enough funds through our regular enrollment process to do that no wisconsin school district does anymore uh and so all wisconsin school districts at some point in time have to enter into the conversation about how do we get major equipment taken care of major buildings taken care of or other large purchases that wouldn't normally fit within our operating budget through the enrollment process and generating funds through enrollment so that's one condition the other condition that i would look at is if we're looking to do more or different a lot of times that takes reinvestment into our community into our into our facilities whether
034that's through a continuing referendum or others give you an example in richland school district um two things happen uh within my first year that led us to part of a referendum one was once i got there we were talking about having to go one-to-one with technology and um bringing in a position like technology coach or something else to make sure that that process happened well um so what we did is we studied uh technology funding within our school district i found that we were budgeting about sixty thousand dollars annually for technology purposes back then seven years ago but i also found out that we were spending over four hundred thousand dollars annually for said technology purchases we just called it something different we would buy a piece of software that we used in the classroom
035and we said well we're just going to say it's curriculum when it's still a technology purchase and it was taking away from other curriculum pieces that we needed to have so i brought that information then to the public and i said here's what we want to do we want to go one to one okay but you can see in our budgeting not only can we not afford to do one-to-one but we really can't afford our day-to-day operations and so we came up with a plan the plan was to go for a 475 000 recurring referendum now why did we pick recurring because we knew that those technology expenditures weren't going to go away ever so it doesn't pay for us to say we're going to have a sunset in three years because in three years
036we're going to come back to you for that plus more plus the cost they're going to raise each year so when we explained all that to the community then they were supportive hopefully that answers the question sounds like it but i'm not the judge um let's talk about your current situation does your school board set goals each year okay and if so what do you believe was the most important goal this year and did you achieve it so our school board does set goals each year sometimes it's saying we're going to continue on the three-year plan of goals that we had we set goals three years ago we asked for them the sunset within three years right and we want to monitor our continued progress on those goals over the next three years because sometimes
037you just can't get to where you want to be within one year and so uh they do that uh how do we monitor that it depends there's different uh pieces of data that we use but we always use the data we try to pull visualizations together um or testimony or or what have you from our our building principles or our students or you know parents those kinds of things but what we do is we reevaluate those goals quarterly if we can every once in a while it goes a little bit past quarterly but we still keep focus um we also uh review those goals in the place that they need to be and where i say that is that if it's something to like our five five-year plan for facilities improvement we discussed that in
038buildings of property and then we bring the results from the review up to the board if it's a curriculum issue it goes through our curriculum committee and we bring the results of that to the board so that's how we do that uh back to communication i'm going to read this descriptive you have very busy days in school please explain how you manage to keep up with the many emails you probably received from parents or community members and what is your typical turnaround time in answering emails okay so i i think everybody does it differently i have a prioritization list based on the rule system within our email system so uh for instance at richland center our url is at richland.k12.wi.us and so i set up a rule that says everything that has a dot k12.
039or at richland.k12.wi.us within the email system i forward it to this box um and i take care of that box first because those are my people right those are the ones who really need me right away then i have another box that says if it comes from dpi.wisconsin.gov it goes in this box those are important things i probably need to save rest of that i you know need to make sure that i handle so i organize it a lot through inbox um and i organize my responses based upon a lot of that so you know i tried to respond within a day or two of of an email and even if that response is i i'm looking for more information i'm letting you know i'm looking for more information if you don't hear from me
040in a week remember i'm very busy will you send me a reminder people are very responsive to that because the a they heard they were heard they know they're you're looking and they know that you may need a reminder you know uh and so i found that that that works well um and then um you know if if i um have other places out there that i know it's like okay that's a vendor they can wait a week then the vendor waits week um because i just i need to make sure i prioritize the the content as well as the sender in how i do that so a controversial hot topic um crt critical race theory is a very hot topic right now briefly what are your thoughts as it relates to the watertown school
041district yeah so um you know i i know that may be a hot topic here it hasn't been in our region um uh and um i i it's not because we don't have people on either side of the issue it's just um people are focused on other things moving the school district forward so um i guess i i would need more information about that topic here and how people feel about it just like any other topic i don't care if it's crt or or you know how we spray chemicals to you know take care of dandelions okay if that's an issue i need to hear more i need to hear more from our constituents of people in our community what what's the what is having people have some discussion about it and then how i
042usually go about that is to talk about here's here's what you're hearing or seeing um and i wanna let's let's start with the facts first here's here's what actually happens you know it may jive with what you saw or heard it may not but here are the facts um and and i try to share with them where we got facts or how or why that is because a lot of times the controversy comes around not really knowing one that hit us really big this last year and we probably heard of it too was they the community was just limited they thought we had litter boxes in the restroom you know for students who you know chose to identify as feline and um i can't remember what the other topic or other nomenclature was but that
043they would then use the litter box instead of our fulfilling facilities i'm like absolutely that is not the case you can come and you can walk through our restrooms we don't keep litter boxes and if you come up and you walk through it's probably a senior prank because we don't uh do that we we have normal toileting facilities and everything else but then you know once people understood like oh okay maybe that was just a thing that went around on facebook they understood but it was like you know every day at least five ten people calling me and saying what are you doing with these kids um so then we then we started being proactive with the communication listen there are not litter boxes out here you know and those kind of things so a
044lot of it is just that and so for me whether it's crt or whatever else i want to hear what the issue is i want to make sure that i tell the facts as to what is really happening and then if we want to have a change then it's my job to bring the issue to the school board to say here's some discussion topics that are out there if they don't bring it to me first and a lot of times that happens that way you know the school board gets involved and they bring me the issue and say hey what's this and answer them the same way well here's the facts that i know of so far but if we want to change or if we want to do something else or we want to
045have this become a bigger topic we can we had a bigger topic issue in our school district it was around bullying right and a lot of people were just livid they thought we weren't doing enough and everything so we had six community-wide forums over four and a half months to hear from people you know what's your issue with bullying what are you hearing or seeing because it might be you know not necessarily what we're hearing or seeing what would you like to see happen you know and then that helped us and informed us of writing a really good policy and and finding a different way to deal with that i'm not saying it's perfect but it's what we've done i'm going to continue on the touchy topic category since you're warmed up for it okay
046um and i'll just preface all school districts went through some very tough years the last oh absolutely so parents and community members in this community petition spoke out at school board meetings to set our send our kids back full-time face-to-face and other masks not unlike many other school districts what are your thoughts on covid mitigation provided that we don't have major a major spread in our schools i'm assuming that means going forward going forward right well i would say going forward um i most school districts if it's anything like my experience over the last two years is most school districts have mostly it pretty well figured out uh unless a new bear ant comes and we get that spike again uh even if we have that spike again we at least remember what we had
047in place during some of that as a starter but my question would be then what didn't go well during our last spike that we really need to work on and fix you know and let's have a plan for that so that way if the spike happens we can take care of it um at the bristol school district we we've started having some of those conversations in case you know and i hope it doesn't happen again but in case it does we need to have some communication here in watertown about what what well what didn't what did parents like what didn't they like and then try to come up with a strategy you know and i will tell you that strategy may work and it may not everything you know is you know different and what
048worked yesterday might not work tomorrow but at least we'll have a better starting point than what we have right now i'm going to add this with all of the challenges over the last two years how will you address the mental health needs of our students yeah oh boy that's a question um people come at that many different directions um and and i i think like a lot of other things that have happened through schools um this becomes a new discussion as to how far do services go for students you know what is the school responsible for and it does seem as though that's a service that many people in the federal government the state government and even local governments are saying needs to be addressed in concert with education and learning and not in opposition
049to it um let me explain that to you um maslow's hierarchy of needs right in order to get to a place of learning or self-actualization you need to have your safety met first and we've always viewed safety as you know are you well-fed you know which didn't used to be the school's responsibility but now is right um are are you hurt which didn't used to be the school's responsibility much you see more and more nursing facilities actual pas dentists coming in to do fillings in the schools so it's become more part of the school work and now we're talking about mental health right as another safety feature for kids anxiety has gone through the roof on kids for a couple of reasons one omicron and covid and the displacement of security within the day-to-day school
050the regular what i mean by that is the regular um you know what humans love to have pattern right you have it in your everyday life you get up you go to work you know you have a certain route you travel to work maybe even a stop at the quick trip or somewhere else and you do those things on a pattern basis just about every day um even a lot of the meetings you have you have on the first monday of every month or whatever it is right just because it's easier well when you don't have that that caused problems for not only our students but our staff and our families because when coveted hit you didn't have the pattern to rely on anymore so that caused a lot of anxiety when it causes anxiety
051to youth they don't have what that is that normalcy to go back to as adults we do right we when when we get through this we're just gonna go back to normal and you know how many times have you heard we can't wait till we get back to normal right well my child who is a first grader going into second grade right um fourth our 4k year got cut short kindergarten year was in and outs and this last year was full of a lot of sub in and outs from teacher subs and other things right doesn't have normal to understand in his realm of what schooling is yet hasn't had a normal year and even our older students who are now juniors didn't really have a normal freshman year or number so that produces a
052lot of anxiety right and mental health issues and so it's going to be some years before we can work through that and get to a realized normal that kids can get back to so that's why we're hearing a lot of screaming about we need to help mental health in the school it can and it can't be just well you're having problems go see somebody why because the problems are in their daily everyday life and again that goes back to research with maslow's hierarchy of needs what a student needs to be self-actualized and have proper learning and if we can even if it's in the short run help put those band-aids in place then we take that on as a school if it becomes a long-lasting thing that we think is good like we need to
053feed students who don't get normally fed and we are starting to you know use snack pack for backpack programs to extend food into the uh weekend time i mean schools are doing that right schools haven't in the past not done that um you know but but now it's getting even commonplace where you know we put a little backpack in the locker and they take their their backpack and the other backpack home and they bring back the empty backpack that had food in it right because we're taking care of our community so i would say you know for mental health having an open mind and talking about how it's going to support our learners is that a good thing or not and do we want to take that on and that has to be a community
054decision we can't just you know just sit there so that's where i would come from i'm going to add this one and then we've got three that really are about you and your leadership but this one i think goes with it with all the challenges again over the past two years um how do you address the increased learning gaps in a time of also constrained limited budgets yeah well we do that the way professional educators do we make sure that we keep track of each student um each student is an individual in our eyes i know we have a whole classroom or a whole grade or a whole system of students here but really when it comes down to it you ask any teacher they know for sure every child that they come in contact
055with each day where their performance level is them as a learner their needs moving forward um i i get pushed back on this from some parents sometimes when i say it but i even know this about my own child my my child's teacher knows my child as a learner way better than i do why because they have him more waking hours in the day than i do they spend their time developing that child on my behalf for me and so what i what i try to do is i try to remember that and i try to support them because they are the professionals who learn how to do that who know the ins and outs of my child and they will they will find a way to reach that gap we just have to keep
056supporting them until they can and then from a curriculum instruction standpoint i have to make sure that they have the appropriate materials they have appropriate time they have perfectly a professional development that they form connections with each other as a group so that when the student my child is not within their classroom but within others classrooms that they can take care of him as a whole a group and within a structure that that's supportive and make sure i keep the lights on or rough over their head those kind of things so how are we going to close the gaps just by doing all of that but it first has to start with trusting in our professionals who know our children's learning way better than we do great thank you so coming from the richland center
057community which is a small town community where everyone knows everyone what impact do you feel you had on that district and what kind of grade do you think that community would give you oh it depends on who you talk to and that'll be the same here you know some people will give me an f and some people will give me an a what kind of impact have i had well i i can i can share only through metrics because you know i i'm a data person and i like to go back to that when i was hired in the richmond school district our fund balance was at 11 i was told within the first three months of my hire that we drastically needed to go to a referendum that was that referendum i referenced to
058earlier the recurring part was part of that but we also had a building's part and a site safety and security part all three questions passed the borrowing part for the the physical nature stuff of the security as well as the roofing and everything else um that came to 8.7 million um yeah it was like 8.7 million um and then um we went from passage to getting the work done and we found out that getting some of the work done was going to be way over budget and so we had to cut some things out of the budget and we did and we moved forward um but uh that probably wasn't communicated out as well as it should have been that's a learning issue that i found as well as our board because as we tried
059to do future referendum a lot of that discussion came up well i thought we did the roofs in the last referendum what happened i thought we were supposed to take care of some of this you know ventilating in the last referendum what happened and so then we had to kind of go back and talk about you know here's what it is and no there's no absconding with money we get audited every year here's our auditor if you want to give them a call and talk about the audit paper if you want to come review the audit that's fine we'll walk you through that in our business official well those kind of things but we were able to do some things with that money fast forward we are now at a 24 fund balance in our
060school district um we don't have to short-term borrower for money short-term borrowing was costing us about 90 000 a year we transitioned that into curriculum dollars we realigned our administrative work we transitioned from a five building model to a three building model to be more efficient that made us or helped us utilize the staffing from those other buildings that were you know considered surplus staffing once we closed the building right i said we don't have surplus staff we have the right size staff but the wrong amount of buildings and we were able to fill in gaps that we had cut over the years so a guidance counselor that we cut at the high school we took one of the elementaries that were closings counselor and we put that at the high school you know and
061and so on um middle school librarian was cut we took the other elementary library and moved it those kinds of things that we did so did i have an impact yes as a part of the whole you know as a part of an administrative team as part of a board as part of the community i had a great impact over the last seven years did that come with some strife and would some people give me a failing score maybe but there are a lot of people who support me support the board and the school district and they would give us a really great score i'm going uh to probably combine these last two because i think it'll lead into your wrap-up okay um i'll put these together those of you that are listening for your
062questions um and i'll do that right after this question how much you go about holding staff and administrators accountable when they are not fulfilling their responsibilities as outlined in their job descriptions um well i that's the part of the job that gets you know um it's it's the not so glitzy part of the job right when you have to make sure that you're looking at somebody who you respect for many reasons but maybe they did something inappropriate i try to give chances because i i don't believe that there's truly evil doers in school and if there are we get rid of them right away and it's easy to because it's just so easy when you know like somebody did something so egregious you have to take care of that issue right um i had two
063very publicized issues this last year within our local community one is a teacher who is a really good teacher and i can say that because i've seen him teach and the way he reaches out to kids and the way he connects with them um was good um but a lot of the community didn't see the other things that weren't happening correctly following the policies and procedures when there was an issue that that person maybe was fighting for didn't use the communication systems within the district and actually went outside the district or used access to certain information that they weren't allowed to which is against ferpa or illegal to try to forward their cause we had to not renew that teacher and that became a huge community issue because how could you you know do that
064with such a popular such a great teacher um and and you know it's hard because you you as a as an administrator know both sides of the story and you have to make a call i'm not afraid to make the call um especially when i i know all of the facts um the the thing about the situation is that there was enough public outcry that we had to do the balancing test what i mean by that is the protection of the individual's rights to keep that hiring information private versus the community's will or need to know about what really happened and holding me accountable in the board of council for our decision that we made and i think once the community saw the information that came out most of them were like oh yeah okay
065we understand now but there still are some people who care about that person and respect that person just like i do um who want to support them um but but uh you know again that's where it has to be a non-glitzy part my outlook is always how can we try to use that so it's the best of the situation second situation i had to deal with uh was we had a middle school principal and again this is public knowledge so it's not me going against our privacy for our individual a middle school principal which is now our intermediate school principal this year ended up getting into a relationship with his assistant and they were meeting during the day in the basement of the school that's hard because we're talking about a man who is a
066very good leader who had a very much support of his staff and even when staff found out they were like can't you just find a way to to just help him through that and make this happen and i'm like you can't they were basically stealing from the school district an hour hour and a half of their salary each day for the last however many days and you know that that becomes a difficult thing because when you get right down to it that means also that they weren't supporting you or the students and remember when i say we take care of the most valuable asset that our families have i take that really really not very lightly at all and so when those things happen i have to make a call i give the board all
067the information that i can so that they can decide whether or not they uphold my recommendation and for the most part they have i'm going to combine these because i think they will be a great wrap up but feel free to add you're so inclined um why do you want to work in watertown what are your priority priorities in coming here and what would you say is the number one most important attribute you bring as a leader why [Laughter] uh so i think my strongest leadership attribute is i truly am a very collaborative person and i i try to seek the answers from as much data or as much involvement as i can get how that doesn't mean i can meet with everybody all the time because we would never get anything done um but
068i am very collaborative you know i i i try to um you know i one one of my strengths uh through the strength finder is a ranger i arrange the people or arrange the budgets or what yeah i try to get the best i can from all of those resources right to to make a decision or to further so this that's me as a person i also operate out of a place of high integrity you know i try to really make sure that i mean that's a core of mine um and so you know what what are what are the priorities uh uh coming here um well i'm i'm looking for a place where my my children can can grow and there's a lot of opportunities i've seen them throughout your programming here and there's
069a willingness from this community that i understand that's willing to grow those opportunities for our students and i'm not saying richland doesn't have that but richland is a great small town but they aren't growing they're they're shrinking rapidly and we're having to cut programs and deal with those things and i know that there's some declining enrollment issues here but i also see great opportunities for my family uh especially for my children here um it's situated in a great area my wife and i i grew up in la crosse which is a bigger city i i like a lot of things that bigger city has but i also like living in a small town so one of the reasons that brought me to richland center was it was a nice small town where i get to
070know my neighbors and i get to know people and everywhere you go you can say hi to at least five people because i i like people and so i i say hi to people um whereas you know in a school a school district besides the lacrosse or um so on you know sometimes you can get lost in the bigness of it so it's just the right size and located near or off of those places that we can go get what we want we can come back to our community and it's still a big enough community where my kids can get things so that's what's bringing me here hopefully i've introduced myself to you through this forum as well as i could and hopefully you give me a chance to think about leading this school district
071and and see where we can go together and if you have any more questions i'd be happy to answer those for you i would suggest you know just sending me an email to my school address and then i give you a personal phone number or address from there forward so other last minute questions if not we'll thank everybody for attending tonight in person as well as online we were able to ask all of the questions by combining a couple of them so i hope your voice was heard i hope you feel satisfied and join me please um in thanking dr burke please for now you can move right is that true you have permission to leave your x marks the spot please go ahead thank you thanks everybody