SchoolCEO Summer 2021

P OW E R E D BY A P P T EGY

SUMMER 2021

Raising the Bar

Engaging All Families Building a Culture of Hospitality Strengthening Your Board Relations

“You don’t earn loyalty in a day.

You earn loyalty day by day.”

- Jeffrey Gitomer

How can schools reinvigorate community trust?

In our three years of sharing your work here at SchoolCEO, we’ve seen the superintendency become ever more challenging. As if (still) navigating a pandemic isn’t enough, many school leaders are watching their decisions become ammunition in broader battles of the culture war. Formerly humdrum school board meetings are being televised on national news, and central offices are drowning in FOIA requests from people who have never even set foot in their districts. The truth is that schools, and especially their leaders, have become flashpoints as our country navigates the unpredictable growing pains of democracy.

Still, we are entering this school year in a spirit of high hope.

The path forward, as tricky as it may be, lies in the power of relationships. For schools to thrive this year, leaders like you must use the trust you’ve built—with students, families, business partners, and even your school board—to bolster your community against the siren song of outside agitation.

Our goal in this issue is to help you do just that—to reenergize the connections you share with your community by practicing hospitality and inclusivity. We’re bringing you stories of school leaders leveraging community relationships to accomplish the unthinkable—leaders like Dr. Trevor Greene,

OUR TEAM

who has led the charge to provide all his students with internet access, and Dr. Baron Davis, who has rallied his community around a shared belief in every student and staff member’s excellence. We’ve also pulled together advice from the thinkers behind Disney World and Shake Shack to help you bring their transformational best practices into your school buildings.

In many ways, our world is forever changed, and the future of education depends on the strength of our communities.

Whether you’re conducting a survey or planning hybrid family engagement events, we’re excited to share ideas that will help you build school communities where families feel valued and heard.

Our mission at SchoolCEO has always been to celebrate the good things happening in public education, to illuminate and share the innovative ideas that school leaders are bringing to fruition all over the country. In this celebration, we are reminded of the thousands of actions that school leaders like you take every day to help us work toward “a more perfect union”—for everyone.

Managing Editor: Melissa Hite Writers/Researchers: Barrett Goodwin, Brittany Keil, Marie Kressin, Corey Whaley Graphic Designer/Illustrator: Corbin Lawrence

Director of Media: Michael Cruice Art Director: Sebastian Andrei Video Producers: Ryan McDonald, Obatola Layiwola Apptegy CEO: Jeston George

IN THIS ISSUE Above & Beyond

King’s Gambit

To wow your community, customer service isn’t enough.

You need to build a culture of hospitality.

Dr. Baron R. Davis is innovating through the unpredictable and bringing teachers of color into the classroom.

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Derek W. Black, legal scholar and author of Schoolhouse Burning, discusses this turbulent moment for public schools.

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Customer service expert Dennis Snow offers tips from 20 years working at Walt Disney World.

Pursuing Digital Equity as a Community With the help of community partners, Dr. Trevor Greene is amplifying campus WiFi to cover his entire district.

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Based in Little Rock, Arkansas, Apptegy is an education technology company dedicated to helping school leaders build a powerful identity for their schools.

Learn more at apptegy.com

Published by:

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Education Under Fire

Making a Magical Experience

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The Urgency of Now In this time of transition, it’s more important than ever to engage your families in thoughtful, useful, and inclusive ways.

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Now Boarding Superintendent and former school board member Dr. Jason Andrews shares strategies for building board relationships.

Asking the Right Question Community input is essential to innovation—but is a survey the best way to get it?

Fit to Lead Through #FitSupts, Dr. Brian Creasman shares the transformative power of wellness for life and leadership.

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Would you like your ideas and experiences shared in our magazine?

Reach out to us at editor@ schoolceo. com

Vol. 3 No. 4 © 2021 by Apptegy, Inc. All rights reserved. Permission to reprint or quote excerpts granted by written request only. SchoolCEO� is published four times a year (November, February, May, and August) by Apptegy, Inc. 2201 Brookwood Dr., Suite 115, Little Rock, AR 72202.

Views and opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the magazine or Apptegy, Inc. Accordingly, no liability is assumed by the publisher thereof.

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Good News in Public Education Andrews, TX

Sanford, ME

Students in Andrews ISD have officially “buried” the year 2020. With help from librarian Shannon Lambert, Underwood Elementary fifth graders created a time capsule to remember the unprecedented year. Items chosen by students included a face mask, an empty roll of toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and a timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic, among several other momentos. The capsule is scheduled to be opened in 2027, when the participating students will be high school seniors.

(CBS 7)

When 16-month-old therapy dog Ory was diagnosed with severe hip issues, students and staff at the Willard School set up a GoFundMe page to get her the care she needed. The fundraiser, called Pennies for Paws, exceeded its initial goal of $20,000, which paid for a life-changing surgery for the pup. “The surgery will ensure Ory a long, healthy, and fulfilling life free from pain,” said one of the fundraiser’s creators. Extra donation money is being given to Project Chance, a program that pairs kids in need with their own service dogs.

(WMTW)

Troy, MI The Athens High School student council devoted their annual Community Week to helping young people suffering from drug addiction. Seeing the pandemic’s effect on mental health, Athens students raised $2,500 for a local nonprofit founded in memory of a former student who lost his life to an overdose. The money will go toward providing emotional support, financial assistance, and long-term recovery for young adults struggling with addiction, along with support for their families.

(The Oakland Press)

Macon, GA Thanks to the YouthBuild Program, students in Bibb County Schools are learning construction skills and changing lives.

The program is designed to offer a more personalized alternative learning path for students, teach them critical workforce skills, and help them graduate with a diploma or GED. Through a partnership with the Macon Area Habitat for Humanity, over 60 students from the SOAR Academy recently helped build a local single mother her very first house.

Bibb County Schools says it hopes to participate in more YouthBuild projects like this one in the future.

(WGMT)

Kings Mills, OH St. Augustine, FL A sixth grade math teacher at R.J. Murray Middle School is ramping up the fun for local students. Frustrated by his town’s lack of a skatepark, Brennan Gagnon built an 11-foot-tall and 24-foot-wide vertical skate ramp in his backyard—and he’s sharing it with the kids of St. Augustine. The community raised over $12,000 to construct the ramp, and additional funds will go toward providing a store of “house gear” for local skaters. The St. Augustine Vert Ramp is now open to all members of the community for free.

(St. Augustine Social)

San Diego, CA Francia Pinillos teaches at TRACE, a San Diego Unified school that helps young adults living with disabilities transition from high school to adult life. After the murder of George Floyd, Pinillos wanted to talk to her students about race and social justice, but she found there was no curriculum on the subject for students with disabilities. So she created two digital workbooks and a Social Justice League—a group of students who meet weekly to discuss topics like Native American land rights, gender privilege, representation of disabilities in the media, and systemic racism. Pinillos hopes the class will help her students recognize microaggressions and other forms of discrimination.

(The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Students at Kings High School have elected their district’s first openly queer prom king and queen. When 18-year-old seniors Annie and Riley won their crowns, they were met with a wave of support from their friends and school. Despite some negativity, the district has stood firmly by its students.

Both prom royals hope their historic win will show other queer kids that it’s okay to come out. “You will get hate from it, but there’s also a really big chance that you’re going to get so much love and support, like we did,” Riley says.

(NBC News)

Palm Coast, FL After a tumultuous year and a half for students everywhere, Principal Jeff Reaves of Matanzas High School decided to give graduates more than just a handshake. Starting in March, Reaves spent much of his free time handwriting notes for every graduating senior—all 459 of them. To make sure each letter was personalized, the principal pored over transcripts, student files, and yearbooks. He also reflected on past conversations with graduates over their four years at Matanzas. “You saw these students demonstrate tremendous energy and effort and enthusiasm, and persevere,” he says. “I wanted to acknowledge that and to encourage them that life goes on. Be positive and stay the course and stay focused on your goals and dreams.”

(NPR)

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King’s Gambit South Carolina’s Dr. Baron R. Davis is innovating through the unpredictable and bringing teachers of color to the classroom.

After working with kids through summer coaching and the Parks and Recreation Department of Columbia, Davis eventually decided to study counseling himself. “I really wanted to repair that wrong,” he says. “I wanted to be that counselor who tells kids like me, You can go to college.” Davis, however, had yet to understand the significance of this career choice.

“It wasn’t until I was actually in education that I realized this is where I’m supposed to be,” he tells us. ”It’s not just a passion; it’s my calling.”

Community Rich Davis first learned the true meaning of community as a child, growing up in public housing in Columbia. He describes his childhood as “economically poor, but community rich.”

Dr. Baron R. Davis In the northeast suburbs of Columbia, South Carolina, Richland County School District Two is proving that “premier” is more than an ideal. Through an inherent belief in every person’s value and potential, Superintendent Dr. Baron R. Davis is making this a reality.

For Davis, leading this richly diverse system has offered a unique chance to continue his evolution as an authentic and innovative educator. Not only is Davis making history in Richland Two—he’s the district’s first African American superintendent—but he’s also crafting a legacy where “premier” means community, representation, and authenticity.

Now that he has five degrees to his name, it’s hard to believe that Davis’ lifelong career as a student and educator almost never happened. When he met with his assigned high school counselor as a senior, she said college wasn’t even on the table for him. “It really was that direct,” he recalls. “You can’t go to college. You are not college material. And this was my counselor talking.”

As fate would have it, a second counselor overheard the unfortunate conversation and intervened. “His name was Mr. Robert Cleveland,” Davis tells us. “He pulled me into his office and said, Hey, you are capable of going to college. Let me help you.” This encounter would change the trajectory of Davis’ entire life. “I was so fortunate he did that because I was going to take her advice,” he says. “I decided at that point that I wanted to be someone who helps students.”

“We took care of each other,” he says. “My housing community met my needs of love and belonging. I felt loved by all of my neighbors. We took care of them; they took care of us.

And we also had a lot of opportunities for fun and freedom.

There was always safety in that community.”

Though he was raised by his grandmother, Davis remained close to his parents and credits his Uncle Tim for having a profound influence on his life. “My uncle really helped me find myself as a responsible, God-fearing man,” he says. In fact, mentors play a recurring and vital role in Davis’ life, from the intervening high school counselor to his friends’ parents who made him read books whenever he came over.

Support in Davis’ community was often as innovative as the schools he now runs. He describes a local grocery—Joe’s Store—where neighborhood residents could buy food and household necessities on old-fashioned credit. “They’d simply staple your receipt into a ledger, and my grandmother and other members of the community would pay on their debt,” he explains. “We were still able to meet our basic needs, whatever they were, without a credit card. That provided a sense of comfort and security for us.”

It’s no wonder Davis has devoted his life to fostering more supportive and inclusive communities for the children of South Carolina—it’s because he knows how far kids can go with the right kind of encouragement. “All the people I was around had my best interests at heart,” he tells us. “And this was long before all the research and before buzzwords like SEL—this is just what Black communities do.”

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Davis got his first degree in sociology and worked as a counselor for education nonprofit Upward Bound. Then, years before becoming superintendent, his impact on the area began. As he worked on his Ph.D., Davis was assistant principal at Richland Two’s Spring Valley High School. He later served two principalships before becoming assistant superintendent for the district. In that role, he successfully pushed to keep Richland Two in the League of Innovative Schools and helped to establish their Assistant Principal Academy, Administrators Development Series, Training Administrators Program, and Administrators Mentoring Program.

His transition into the superintendency would be unique.

Appointed by the school board as superintendent-elect in 2016, he shadowed his predecessor, Dr. Debra W. Hamm, for one year as she prepared to retire. The two worked closely together on decision-making, and she eventually became an advisor as he took the helm and started his superintendency.

Now entering his fifth year as superintendent of Richland Two, Davis continues to find ways to make his district one of the most acclaimed in the area. And with close to 28,000 students and 39 learning sites, that’s no small feat. But it’s also Davis’ chance to shape a community where kids learn their value and potential. Who better to do that than someone who knows the area and all its struggles by heart?

Premier Starts Here

“Richland Two is extremely diverse,” Chief Communications Officer Libby Roof tells us. “That’s one of the things we pride ourselves on: Our schools and our district look like the world

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In an effort to further diversify and offer more opportunities to local students, Richland Two is also a self-described “District of Choice.” Regardless of which school they’re closest to, Richland students can apply to attend any of the district’s nearly 40 magnet programs. From a business school to a fitness magnet to a zoological and botanical school, Richland Two has something to offer every student.

When Davis officially began his superintendency in 2017, he set out on a mission to solidify Richland Two as the premier school district in the area. “It’s not about being number one,” he says. “It’s about being true to your values and your beliefs.

So we started out by saying we weren’t going to let someone else define what premier means for Richland Two. What’s the best version of innovation for our schools? What’s our ideal version of an inclusive and diverse school district?

What does premier security look like for our facilities?”

“It’s not about being number one. It’s about being true to your values and your beliefs.

So we started out by saying we weren’t going to let someone else define what premier means for Richland Two.”

Carved out of Richland County in the center of the state, Richland Two is the largest school district in the South Carolina Midlands.

It’s made up of small cities on the outskirts of Columbia, ranging from urban to suburban to rural, making it a unique community to serve. The district is also home to Fort Jackson, the country’s largest Army training base, as well as a high concentration of military veterans.

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in many ways.” Black students make up 61% of the student body, while 19% are white, 12% are Hispanic, and 3% are Asian. About 56% of the district’s families fall at or below the poverty line.

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Davis admits that being premier means the district has to constantly grow and change. “You are continuously evolving because you will never hit that ideal version of your organization,” he says. “You should constantly be working toward improvement. Each individual in the organization has to strive to be premier, to be the best— whether it’s a classroom teacher, school administrator, student, parent, or business partner. We’re all working toward being the best versions of ourselves. That’s why we say, Premier starts here.”

The first step toward Davis’ vision for Richland Two was funding much-needed improvements and upgrades around the district. His solution was Pathway to Premier, an ambitious 10-year facilities plan focused on making all district schools

“21st-century safe and secure.” Davis knew he had to rally his community behind the measure, so he and his team started with a series of presentations throughout the district. They let stakeholders examine, discuss, and provide feedback on the plan and its effect on their specific schools. The team also met with faculty, parent, business, and faith-based advisory groups before the final plan was approved by the board in May of 2018.

To earn stakeholder buy-in, Davis and his team conducted nearly 50 separate presentations on the bond between August and November of that same year. Davis personally attended almost every one. “I shared the overall vision of where we were going and gave the reasoning behind what we were doing—why we needed to do this,” he explains. The Richland Two community would eventually pass the $468 million bond referendum with overwhelming support.

Well beyond the successful bond campaign, Davis’ premier vision holds enormous power in Richland Two, both for students and staff. “They see it everywhere: Premier. Period. We started out with T-shirts, and now even our board says it,” he tells us. “And that’s the expectation. Premier is displayed in every school and shared in every tagline on Twitter. We call our top 10 students at each high school our Premier Scholars.”

For Davis, it’s about believing in what you can do and how you can grow. Armed with this mindset, he’s nurturing a working and learning community where anyone can find their value.

“People who are committed to the idea of being the best are able to thrive and then evolve,” Davis says. “You have to have the belief, the mindset, and the heart for premier work.”

There’s no doubting Davis’ gift for getting others to believe in his vision. Over his four years as superintendent, he’s used that talent to help the district build strong community support—as well as rack up an impressive list of accolades. In 2019, Richland Two became one of only 250 systems nationwide to be placed on the College Board’s 10th Annual AP District Honor Roll. That same year, Davis’ strong commitment to supporting local military families also helped Richland Two become one of the few South Carolina districts to be named a Purple Star School District.

But more important than any district honor is the lasting impact Davis and his team are making on the students of Richland Two through their unified vision. In fact, Davis was recently awarded the 2021 Bob Grossman Leadership in School Communications Award, thanks in large part to his

success in sharing the #PremierStartsHere message to the district’s broad array of stakeholders.

“When you walk into our schools, I hope you see educators who are not only a family, but are also taking on the responsibility of developing students into global citizens who will lead and excel in whatever pathway they choose,” Davis tells us.

“You’re going to see us working to be inclusive in our practices. You’re going to see people focused on being the best versions of themselves. And you’re going to see people committed to and focused on helping students identify their gifts and talents.”

Innovative Inclusion According to a 2017 study from the Institute of Labor Economics, when Black students from low-income families have at least one Black teacher during elementary school, they’re less likely to drop out of high school—and more likely

Photos courtesy of Richland County School District Two

to be interested in college. But while Black kids make up roughly 15% of America’s K-12 student body, only 7% of the country’s teachers are Black, and just 2% are Black men. In Richland Two, Davis has been working hard to disrupt these statistics, specifically focusing on hiring and retaining male teachers of color through the Premier 100 Initiative.

“The data and the research have been very clear about the impact of young African American students, particularly boys, having a male of color as their classroom teacher within the first three to five years of their educational experience,” Davis explains. In a 2019 audit of Richland Two schools, the numbers showed that only 6% of the district’s teachers were men of color—so Davis set a goal to hire 100 more over the next four years. “The goal is not only to recruit 25 new men of color a year, but to retain them, as well as the other men of color we already have in our school district,” he says.

To kick off their recruiting efforts, Davis and the district reached out to Clemson University’s Call Me MISTER® program. This initiative aims to recruit male students of color to become elementary school teachers, especially in South Carolina’s lowest-performing schools and underserved communities. “In our first year of recruitment, we were able to hire 23 men of color,” Davis tells us.

Since the Premier 100 Initiative also launched during the global pandemic, sacrifices had to be made until in-person events could start up again. “We had planned for a practitioner’s conference for young men of color and current teachers,” Davis says. “It would have been specifically about teaching and being an authentic male of color in the classroom. We weren’t able to do it last year, but we’re planning to in 2021.” Davis hopes to eventually host a national conference, so teachers and students of color from all over the country can interact with practitioners and curriculum experts who look like them.

Before the pandemic sent everyone home, however, Richland Two was able to host what Davis calls the Get on the Bus Tour. “We brought all these young men who were in undergraduate programs around the state to our school district,” he explains. Davis and his team put the college students on a bus to a central location, where they hosted a kick-off breakfast before sending them out to different elementary schools around the district. “They got a chance to meet other men of color in the classroom and observe their teaching,”

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Davis adds. “Then we brought them back for a wrap-up lunch and talked about their experiences. We really wanted them to see what it was like to be in one of our schools, interacting with our students and principals and other teachers.”

For Davis, the responsibility to diversify his staff goes far beyond recruitment numbers—it’s about giving kids the teachers and role models they deserve. “It’s going to be important that we build a network and support system for these young men of color so we can help them be authentic versions of themselves,” he says. “I don’t think you can self-actualize if you are trying to be someone else, and I often feel that teachers of color—African American males in particular—suppress who they really are to try to fit an ideal of what a teacher should look or sound like. I just don’t think that connects or resonates with children.”

Davis shares the story of a middle school math teacher who helped him look past his assumptions and see the value of true authenticity. “When I first met him, he was wearing a hat in the building and had sneakers on,” he says. “And then I go into his classroom to watch him teach, and I’m blown away.

He was raw. He had to learn a lot of the pedagogical things, but his connection with the students was something that I could not teach. Watching the students’ performance and how much they loved his class, I realized that authenticity and genuineness are as important to an educator as anything else—particularly if you’re trying to resonate with students of color.”

A Conduit of Blessings Davis often compares the superintendency to playing one big game of chess on 100 separate boards at the same time.

“Every encounter, every situation we’re dealing with, is some sort of strategic move,” he explains. “So you’re trying to anticipate every move, because they all affect one another.” Davis even keeps a real game of chess going daily in his office— against himself. “I’ll come in and do a couple moves every day,” he says. “I try to put myself in difficult situations to figure them out.”

Of course, navigating his district through the COVID-19 crisis for the last year and a half was not the kind of difficult situation Davis could have prepared for. But it has forced him to play a new kind of chess—where the pieces are constantly moving in unpredictable directions and everyone is looking over his shoulder even more than usual. Despite the pressure and stress, Davis sees nothing but hope on the horizon.

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“This has at least given us an opportunity to reset and better position ourselves to serve all of our students,” he explains.

“COVID-19 shined a steady light on the inequities and systems that don’t work for our students, so I’m excited for the chance to move into a new house, so to speak, and to get rid of the stuff that doesn’t work. We don’t have to practice things the old way anymore, and that gives us the permission and expectation for innovation. It’s time to blow up the old structures and replace them with new practices that will better serve our kids.”

For example, Davis gleaned an important lesson from an impressive uptick in parent attendance at IEP meetings during the pandemic. “The participation from parents has been through the roof,” Davis says. “We never thought about doing the IEP meetings through Zoom, but now a parent doesn’t have to leave their job or take a half day to come and sit down with us.” Instead of missing work, parents and families can meet over video during a lunch hour or break, and because of the built-in time constraints, the meetings tend to stay more on task than before. “I’m excited about those types of things,” Davis says. “They create opportunities for access for those parents who were being left out.”

Davis was one of the first members of his community to get sick from COVID-19 last summer, but when we asked him about it, he steered the conversation toward his team. “Any good leader knows they are only as good as their staff,” he says. “I didn’t always do a very good job of being a sick boss, but I have an all-star team, and they really stepped up for me.”

Even with his staff’s support, Davis only lasted about three days at home sick before he started taking calls and scheduling meetings. “It was driving my wife and my staff crazy because I wasn’t resting like I should have been,” he says.

“That’s something I still have to work on.”

Through his tireless work to heighten awareness of inequality and to keep inclusion at the forefront of all the district’s conversations, Davis has already secured a legacy of genuine impact in Richland Two. Over the last four years, he has hired one of South Carolina’s first Diversity and Multicultural Inclusion Officers and led the district to write one of the state’s first equity policies.

Perhaps Davis’ most lasting legacy, though, comes in the form of his mentorship. He’s quick to discuss the many mentors he’s had in his own life, from his grandmother and uncle to Dr. Cheryl Caution-Parker, the former deputy superintendent of Richland Two whom Davis personally asked to be his mentor. And it’s easy to see the impact they’ve had on his leadership style—Davis has devoted his career to fostering the same kind of authenticity and sense of purpose in his

students and staff. “I believe we are all created to serve a purpose in this world,” he tells us. “And I think it has to start with your community. I didn’t just want to repair the wrong that was done to me by that high school counselor. I also wanted to be a connector—a conduit of blessings for other people.”

One of the oldest opening moves in chess is called the King’s Gambit. It’s frequently written off as weak, mostly because it leaves the starting player’s king open for later attack. But this is also what makes it such a bold move—the king’s vulnerability changes the character of the entire game.

We don’t have to tell you that Dr. Baron Davis has spent his prolific career making bold moves, taking risks, and sticking his neck out for others. What he’s done for students and budding educators, especially people of color, goes far beyond righting a past wrong. By maintaining a vulnerability that encourages everyone to be their true selves, Davis has proven time and time again that being premier isn’t about knowing all the answers—it’s about being willing to change and evolve for your students and their families. “This role is about transforming the lives of the community you serve,” he says. “You have to be courageous and authentic.”

Above & Beyond Transforming your school district with a culture of hospitality

If you ever get a chance to dine in one of Danny Meyer’s award-winning New York restaurants, you’re bound to be amazed. Whether it’s The Modern—the Michelin-starred eatery inside the Museum of Modern Art—or the more casual Union Square Cafe, you’ll find food that consistently garners rave reviews.

But Meyer, whose empire now spans 18 restaurants across the city (plus worldwide burger chain Shake Shack), doesn’t credit his success to his gorgeous locations, his business acumen, or even his food. He believes his restaurants do well thanks to a defining secret ingredient: hospitality.

Throughout his book Setting the Table, Meyer draws an important distinction between customer service and hospitality. “Service,” he says, “is the technical delivery of a product.”

It’s what you do to meet a customer’s needs, whether it’s bringing them another glass of wine or answering their questions over the phone.

Simple customer service, though, is no longer enough to wow your district’s families. “Today’s customer is smarter than ever before,” says Shep Hyken, a New York Times bestselling author and customer experience expert. “They know what good service is—because great companies teach them. They promise customers a good service experience, and they deliver. So whether it’s Amazon or Apple or any other place, they’re educating customers, and those customers are now expecting that kind of service from everyone.”

In a world replete with business transactions, taking care of your district families’ needs is the bare minimum. A server at a restaurant doesn’t impress guests by being polite or checking on diners; after all, that’s just their job. You won’t build loyalty, strengthen relationships, or boost enrollment by simply doing what your community already expects of you.

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What is hospitality?

As Meyer sees it, hospitality is closely entwined with service, but goes a step beyond; it’s “how the delivery of that product makes its recipient feel.” Service, in other words, is what you do; hospitality is how you do it.

According to Meyer, “virtually nothing else is as important as how one is made to feel in any business transaction.” This is true for schools, too—perhaps even more so. When families interact with your district, they’re not looking for something as low-stakes as a delicious meal and a nice night out.

They’re trying to ensure fulfilling lives for their children, not just in the future, but right now. In the end, it won’t matter if your food at a restaurant turns out to be just fine—but you’d be hard pressed to find a parent willing to settle for “just fine” when it comes to their child’s experience with school.

Providing hospitality is one way to show your community that you’re not content with “just fine”—not when it comes to academics, not when it comes to day-to-day experiences.

It’s not just meeting needs, but meeting them in a way that makes people feel like they matter to you. More often than not, that means going above and beyond what’s necessary in a given situation, making someone feel special not because you have to, but because you want to.

As you interact with your community members—whether students, families, or even staff—your goal should be more than just delivering services. Providing hospitality means meeting a deeper need: the inherent human desire to feel important, cared for, and valued.

Consider, for example, an elementary school nurse treating a sick child. You’d expect them to check the student’s temperature, ask what feels bad, and offer an ice pack if needed.

That’s service. It’s necessary, but it won’t impress anyone.

But suppose they do more: offering a piece of candy, maybe, or pulling out a sock puppet to talk to the child. That’s hospitality: doing more than you have to in order to make someone else feel valued. In practice, hospitality can take many forms, from a teacher showing up to a student’s dance recital to the superintendent bringing a sick principal chicken soup—anything that shows another person you care.

The benefits of practicing hospitality are astronomical. When you go out of your way to show people you care, you build loyalty and trust. You cultivate genuine relationships. You 18

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might even boost your district’s reputation with the outside community. You won’t reap those benefits working alone, though. To really make a difference, you need hospitality to permeate every school building and every staff member. You need a culture of hospitality across your entire district.

Practice curiosity.

In his restaurants, Meyer makes a point of observing his guests to collect as much information about them as possible. Sometimes, this intel gathering is more overt—making conversation and asking them questions about themselves.

Other times, it’s simply noticing subtle clues, like an impatient glance at a watch or an untouched plate of food.

All these details, great and small, are what Meyer calls “dots”—information that allows him to provide great hospitality. “The more information you collect, the more frequently you can make meaningful connections that can make other people feel good,” he writes. Asking a customer where they’re from or what they’re doing in town provides an opportunity to make a personal connection; maybe the guest shares a home state with their waiter. On the other hand, noticing dissatisfaction allows Meyer and his team to go above and beyond to make a bad experience a good one: comping a meal or sending over a free dessert.

In either case, hospitality requires curiosity: intentionally learning as much about your students, families, and staff as

possible. The more you know, the easier it is to create personal moments that show people you care about them as individuals. “If I don’t collect the dots,” Meyer says, “I can’t connect the dots.”

Practicing curiosity often leads to another crucial component of hospitality: empathy. As we learn more about other people, we often can’t help imagining ourselves in their shoes. This creates a kind of chain reaction. The more you know, the more you understand; the more you understand, the more you care; the more you care, the more you show it; and the more you show it, the more people feel that sense of importance and value.

As you interact with your community members, your goal should be more than just delivering services. Providing hospitality means meeting a deeper need: the inherent human desire to feel important, cared for, and valued.

Now retired after more than 30 years in public education, former superintendent Kelly E. Middleton continues to promote the power of genuine relationships in schools, training other educators to think about hospitality and service. He once took a walk in a student’s footsteps—literally.

Just after taking the helm at Kentucky’s Newport Independent Schools, Middleton received a call from a grandmother asking if a school bus could pick up her granddaughter, Lisa. Because she lived near the school, the second grader was expected to walk or ride a bike.

Middleton could easily have cited the district’s transportation policy, closing the case there. But instead, he was curious; he visited their home to look at the path himself. What he found was a series of busy streets, abandoned buildings, and an unmanned crosswalk that would have been terrifying for Lisa to navigate alone. After learning more about this student and seeing things from her point of view, Middleton made an exception. Lisa mattered more than the transportation policy.

Had Middleton not practiced curiosity—and opened himself up to empathy—he might not have reached the same conclusion. But by taking the time to see things from this family’s perspective, he did more than was expected of him. As is so often the case, that made all the difference.

Hire with hospitality in mind.

You’ve probably visited a restaurant or store whose employees all reply to every “thank you” with a rote response, like, My pleasure. By training waiters and cashiers to parrot these scripted answers, companies are often attempting to systematize hospitality. But here’s the problem: Hospitality can’t be scripted, and it can’t be expected. When we get a response that we know is required, it falls flat—because to be impactful, hospitality must be genuine.

As a school leader, you can set an expectation of hospitality, of going above and beyond for students and families.

You can model hospitality to your employees, showing them how it’s done. But you can’t force anyone to be genuine. The

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impulse to do more than necessary, to seek out opportunities to make others feel important, has to come from within.

Meyer refers to this impulse as the excellence reflex: “a natural reaction to fix something that isn’t right or to improve something that could be better.” People with the excellence reflex aren’t necessarily experts at hospitality right away— it’s a skill that can be “honed through awareness, caring, and practice,” he says. But “the overarching concern to do the right thing well isn’t something we can train for. Either it’s there, or it isn’t.”

Let’s take this knowledge and turn to your district’s hiring process. As you evaluate candidates, you’re probably prioritizing technical skills, academic prowess, or previous experience.

But you may be neglecting to look for the excellence reflex, that inherent desire to provide hospitality—and that may well be the most important skill an employee can have.

Harvard social psychologist Dr. Amy Cuddy argues that when we evaluate a first impression, we base our judgments on two primary factors: warmth and competence. Most of us tend to think it’s most important to prove that we’re competent, that we know what we’re doing, but Cuddy’s research suggests people actually focus more on our warmth. They want to know that we care. School-specific research corroborates this claim. The team of researchers behind Beyond the Bake Sale, a book on increasing family engagement with schools, says that a family’s sense of welcomeness—in other words, the degree of hospitality they’re receiving—is “the number one key to their connection with a school.”

In Setting the Table, Meyer shares his formula for the ideal employee: “Potential for technical excellence would count for 49%, and innate emotional skills for hospitality would count for 51%.” Academics and experience should still play a huge part in your hiring decisions, obviously—but the skills someone needs to be a teacher, counselor, or custodian can, to some degree, be taught. The excellence reflex can’t be; someone either has it, or they don’t.

If you fail to account for hospitality in your hiring process, you might find yourself with a district full of what Meyer calls whelmers. Whelmers aren’t noticeably bad employees— they’re not underwhelming—but they aren’t noticeably good ones, either. A whelmer will be up for the technical demands of their job, but they’ll never go out of their way to make a student or family feel special.

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Whelmers are poison to a culture of hospitality. Because they aren’t doing anything egregiously wrong, they often fly under the radar—but along the way, they “infuse an organization and its staff with mediocrity,” Meyer explains. “They send a dangerous message to your staff and guests that ‘average’ is acceptable.” But if you want a culture of hospitality, average isn’t acceptable. You need overwhelmers: people who consistently look for ways to go above and beyond.

Before you hire someone for any position in the district, from custodian to principal, put aside their technical skills for a minute. Does your candidate seem to have the excellence reflex? Are they the kind of person who enjoys making others’ days? Or are they just a whelmer?

When everyone across your schools—from custodians to bus drivers to administrators— provides consistent hospitality, it boosts the reputation of your entire district.

Communicate hospitality as a priority.

Unfortunately, building a culture of hospitality isn’t as simple as hiring great people and letting them run free. Even if every employee in your district has the genuine desire to provide hospitality—and the emotional skills they need to make it happen—it’s still crucial for you as the school leader to communicate hospitality as a priority for your district.

Explicitly prioritizing hospitality serves two purposes. First, it shows your employees exactly where you want to go— allowing them to opt out if they’re not willing to come along.

“A critically important role for me, as the leader of the company, was to define upfront what was non-negotiable,” writes Meyer. “That way, if employees were not comfortable, they could choose to walk.”

But perhaps more importantly, communicating this priority helps willing staff members intentionally hone their hospitality skills. We’re not suggesting that you give employees a hospitality flowchart, showing them how to respond in each and every situation. Remember, hospitality has to be genuine. You can’t manufacture it. But you can explain the concept to your staff, encourage them to practice curiosity, and make it clear that they should look for opportunities to make students and families feel special.

This is the point at which hospitality becomes not just an idea, but a part of your district culture. Instead of a goal that exists in your head, it’s now a mindset permeating your schools. That creates consistency, a critical part of gaining your community’s trust and respect.

“There’s so much more that educators deliver than just grades,” says customer service expert Carla Johnson. “What they’re selling most is the experience along the way, and a big part of that experience is trust. When you send your child to school every day, you want to trust that they will be treated with respect.” Even if a student receives exceptional hospitality from her teachers, poor treatment from a bus driver could ruin her experience with your district, damaging your relationship and reputation with her family.

But the opposite is also true. When a teacher shows a student she cares, it makes a positive impression on that one family, and that’s valuable. But when everyone across your schools—from custodians to bus drivers to administrators— provides consistent hospitality, it boosts the reputation of your entire district.

Of course, establishing hospitality as a priority isn’t a onetime endeavor. As with any other part of your culture, you’ll need to reinforce the expectation again and again. In his restaurants, Meyer refers to this process as “constant, gentle pressure.” He understands that because nobody’s perfect, his high standards won’t always be met. But when his staff goes off course, he consistently pushes them back onto the path to great hospitality—gently, but firmly. It’s an ongoing process that keeps his restaurants not only on track, but slowly improving over time.

All three elements of this strategy—constant, gentle, and pressure—are crucial. “Leave any one element out,” Meyer says, “and management is far less effective.” If you fail to be gentle, your staff is likely to burn out or lose morale; but without any pressure at all, they’re unlikely to change anything about their performance. Apply appropriately gentle pressure, but only sometimes, and you’ll confuse your team—is hospitality really a priority or not?

At least one of these aspects will probably be difficult for you, and that’s okay—as long as you’re self-aware. “Leaders must identify which of the three elements (constant, gentle, or pressure) plays to their greatest natural strengths,” says Meyer, “and, when necessary, they must compensate for their natural weaknesses.”

Working together, those three elements will grease the wheels of your hospitality machine—so it’s imperative to use them all to your advantage.

Turn mistakes into opportunities.

Often hospitality is a way of playing offense; you’re making a great experience out of one that was fine to begin with. But in situations where you’ve made a serious mistake, it’s also an incredible form of defense. By providing hospitality in the face of failure, you can actually flip a mistake on its head, using it as an opportunity to reassure students and families of your concern for them. As Meyer writes, “The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.”

According to a study from the Journal of Marketing, nearly 25% of the positive experiences customers cite with companies stemmed from an initial failure on the company’s part.

Going far above and beyond to fix their mistakes allowed these companies to recover and then some, turning negative experiences into net wins.

Disney parks, for example, are pros at this. Say your child waits in line for an hour, only to find she’s not tall enough for a particular ride. Staff will make sure you receive a free pass that bumps you to the front of your next line. In the excitement of skipping a line, the child’s initial disappointment dissipates; in fact, she’s probably happier than she would have been if the whole incident hadn’t happened.

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This general principle applies in a school setting, too, as Middleton notes in his book Competing for Kids. “Most people understand that mistakes will occur,” he says. “Recovering well gives us the opportunity to change a customer who may be lukewarm toward our organization into a customer who is extremely supportive. We must see mistakes as opportunities to win favor with customers.”

While he served as Newport’s associate superintendent, Middleton faced what could have been a major crisis for the district. A kindergartener spilled hot chili on herself in her school’s cafeteria and didn’t make it to the nurse right away.

The child ended up with blistering third-degree burns.

The child’s mother texted Middleton from the emergency room. She was livid—understandably so! But Middleton and his staff sprang into action. That same night, he and the food service director paid a visit to the family’s home, bringing three new outfits for the child. They offered a sincere apology and explained their plan to prevent situations like this in the future: new, non-spill lids for chili containers. The family never filed charges against the school. Nothing made it into the local media, and the incident never came up again.

Recovering well from mistakes doesn’t take Herculean effort.

It just takes a reaffirmed commitment to hospitality. After all, most people don’t expect you to undo whatever damage has been done; they understand that’s often impossible. They just want proof that they matter, that you care enough to do something. Failures—even extreme ones—provide meaningful opportunities to show students and families that you care. And sometimes, that’s enough to win them over.

Model hospitality for your employees.

As with any aspect of your school culture, hospitality starts with you. “The superintendent needs to become the role model,” says Hyken. “They need to treat their employees the way they want students and parents treated.” That behavior is going to trickle down through the school system.

Just as your families choose where to send their kids, your staff members choose where to work. If you’ve hired topnotch teachers, administrators, custodians, or bus drivers, you have to assume they could easily find jobs with comparable pay at other districts. “I have continued to view people who work for me as volunteers,” writes Meyer. “It’s up to us to provide solid reasons for our employees to want to work for us, over and beyond their compensation.”

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In his many years as a superintendent, Middleton understood this concept well. “You want that service all the way up and down your system,” he says. “You can’t expect your people to give great customer service if the leaders don’t give it to the staff.” Middleton expected his principals to check in with teachers who’d been sick for a few days, or even visit them at home—and he’d do the same for his direct reports.

“Giving up nights and weekends for employees’ funerals and weddings is the price you pay for being a leader,” he says.

Middleton made chicken soup for his teachers, took employees out to lunch, and personally greeted staff members every day for years.

Showing hospitality to your employees, proving that you care, also means going above and beyond to reward them when they intentionally make others feel important. Over the course of his career, Middleton found his own unique way of celebrating hospitality wins, and one situation stands out in his mind as worthy of particular celebration. On a freezing night after a football game, he witnessed a district custodian changing a woman’s tire—even though she was supporting the opposing team.

During a staff breakfast, Middleton diverted from the day’s agenda to tell the story of this man’s commitment to hospitality. He even presented the custodian with his signature award: a stuffed moose. Later, Middleton says, as the custodian got up for more coffee, he took the moose with him, not wanting to leave it for a minute.

There’s a lesson in this simple story: When someone goes above and beyond to make us feel important, it stays with us.

In that way, the culture of hospitality you build now affects not just your current reputation, but the way people will think and feel about your district for the rest of their lives. Long after your staff members retire, long after your students learn calculus and dangling participles, they’ll be left with the memories of how your schools made them feel. Let’s make those memories great ones.

Education Under Fire A conversation with Derek W. Black, author of Schoolhouse Burning

What’s more, it’s becoming easy for nominal gripes with curriculum choices or administrative policies to serve as stand-ins for larger, more closely held beliefs within today’s complex culture wars. Over the past year, the line between substantive debates over education and outright political conflict seems to have blurred to a significant degree.

Derek W. Black

If you feel like school board meetings have been a little more contentious than usual lately, you’re not alone. A worldwide pandemic, a divisive election cycle, and a renewed national dialogue around social justice have all contributed to increased tension.

But even as we get further away from the tumult of the past year, division and controversy are actually increasing in public education. School boards are becoming politicized in a way we haven’t seen before. While conflicts have always emerged over districts’ financial situations or academic offerings, they have usually stayed within familiar bounds: an emphasis on student learning outcomes and on the health and success of schools.

Today, there is much less consensus around these boundaries of debate. Distrust of local school districts—and public education in general—is growing. Board members who’ve recently seen public meetings and forums go off the rails have learned this firsthand. Oftentimes it’s not just their character being called into question, but their very motives as part of the larger public education system.

Social media and the internet—avenues that have frequently fueled controversy in school districts—are now amplifying grievances against the state of schooling in America. With the click of a mouse and the stroke of a keyboard, a misunderstanding or mischaracterization at the local level can go from grumbling in the town diner to national headlines.

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Few people have followed these challenges—and championed the value of public education—more than Derek W. Black, the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina School of Law. Black is the founder of the Education Rights Center at Howard University School of Law and a former litigator for the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Over the course of his career, he’s both challenged school leaders and worked alongside them on important issues such as school funding and desegregation. In addition to his law review articles and appellate briefs, his work has appeared in publications such as Education Week and USA Today.

In his 2020 book Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy, Black chronicles the role of public schools throughout our nation’s past, emphasizing the historical importance of a strong universal education system as the bedrock of our democracy. He argues that efforts to weaken or undermine support for public education threaten our governance structures just as much as they harm our schools.

We recently featured Professor Black on our podcast, SchoolCEO Conversations. The following is taken from our discussion on the state of education in a time of growing political pressure and ever-shifting public discourse.

Listen to our full conversation wherever you get your podcasts or online at podcast.schoolceo.com

How did you get into education law?

Growing up, I went to a lot of different schools.

It wasn’t until middle school that I finally stuck at one school system: the public schools of Clinton, Tennessee. Clinton High School was the first in the South to integrate after Brown v. Board or to graduate an African American student. This was before my time, but that sleepy little town had a lot of history. I think that influenced me.

“Public education is the intergenerational inheritance that we give to one another, that we pass on, that we’ve been passing on for 200 years— and it is the only inheritance that disadvantaged children really receive in America.”

But as I reflect back, I fully appreciate that I wouldn’t be a professor if it weren’t for the public school teachers who didn’t let me fail—even when I wanted to. Even when I tried to undermine myself, I had people who kept me on track. As I point out in the book, public education is the intergenerational inheritance that we give to one another, that we pass on, that we’ve been passing on for 200 years—and it is the only inheritance that disadvantaged children really receive in America. I got my inheritance, and I feel obligated to pass that on to others.

In your book, you approach the history of American public education through the lens of value choices. How can this approach reshape the way we talk about education policy?

The Founding Fathers were quite adamant that if we’re going to create a democracy as our form of government, we have to make sure people cast their votes intelligently. The only way to make that happen is through the education of all the people, and the only way we can hope to have that level of education is for the government to take responsibility as part of the self-preservation of democracy—to make sure the people who show up to vote are well educated.

Detractors of the right to education say, Well, the word education doesn’t appear in the Constitution, so states should be able to do whatever they want. My response is that, actually, the federal government made a commitment and mandate for public education before we even had a constitution. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 required that the land outside the existing states be carved up into lots, and that in the center lot of every town be placed a public school. That is a plan that predates the United States Constitution.

What we have today is an attack on the theory of public education itself. We have people saying, This is the nanny state; these are government schools; they’re depriving people of freedom; and on and on. I’m not going to tell you there aren’t any flaws in public education, but if we go back to the original founding, the idea is that the nation must do this to preserve itself. Otherwise, we’re going to have vast disparities.

John Adams reasoned that it’s actually in the interest of the elites that we have public schools. Public education is the common experience of the highest ranks of society with the lowest. Education lifts everyone to an equal plane, and that will ensure that this democratic project doesn’t devolve into pitchforks and chaos.

Although you’ve never shied away from discussing the shortcomings of American education, you’ve also been clear about the value of public schools.

Has our current discourse surrounding education lost this nuance?

Right now, we have what I might call the dueling frameworks of the 1619 Project and President Trump’s 1776 Commission—different perceptions of history. Both of them are quite often talking about the same underlying facts but attributing different meanings to them.

Here’s the reality that I think exists in the middle: America began as an incredibly ambitious and wonderful idea, and at no point in its history has it ever lived up to that idea. But the story that I tell in this book—and the one I think we need to tell in our schools—is about an America that’s been forever reaching for that great idea.

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That may often mean oppressed people reaching for the idea of America and oppressors trying to stop them. Abraham Lincoln once pointed out that even when the Founders wrote that all men are created equal, they knew very well that at that very moment, men and women were in chains. They knew there wasn’t going to be full freedom in America anytime soon. But Lincoln is saying that the Founders wrote those words not because they were true at that moment, but because they could be at some point in the distant future.

In my career, I try to point out that while these old guys weren’t perfect, they really did have a great idea—so great an idea that they themselves were not willing to live up to it.

We say the same things with our state education clauses; they’re fantastic ideas that call upon the government to do more than it’s ever done in its history.

What do you make of public education becoming a new flashpoint in our national culture wars?

I think this is coming from a very dangerous place because, if we look at history, we see that public education as an institution is the most bipartisan public project that we have.

You look at local school boards—they’re nonpartisan. The idea is that you’ve got a job to do and it’s not a political one.

Historically, public opinion about education hasn’t diverged that much between parties. Even in the South, a recent study found that there were only three or four percentage points separating Democrats from Republicans on questions of school funding and teacher shortages. This is just what America does—we support public schools.

“Public school is the singular experience that 90% of America has shared together. It’s part of our roots.”

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What’s dangerous about the critical race theory conversation is that it’s trying to politicize the public education project, to divide people and their commitment to public education based upon ideology. That really has nothing to do with public education at all. My understanding is that these folks are pushing this issue not because they’re actually worried about what’s being taught in schools, but because they want to rack up more wins in the upcoming midterm elections.

That has nothing whatsoever to do with what’s taught on a day-to-day basis. But as a side effect, whether they’re making a mountain out of a molehill or promoting a bold-faced lie, they’re creating and expanding this anti-public education rhetoric. Either way, it divides people in a very problematic way. That scares me.

At the local level, these current debates over education issues seem to have really struck a nerve. What do you think is going on?

People who cannot have their way in the real world tend to try to have their way in the microcosms of schools. You don’t like the way society’s morals are going? Well, rather than trying to convince your friends or family or neighbors or elected officials to see things your way, you try to shove it down some kid’s throat or make life hell for the superintendent or the teachers. It’s a lot easier sometimes to push educators around because schools don’t want controversy. People think if they go down there and raise a big stink, maybe they’ll get their way. At the same time, there’s also this issue of hypersensitivity: They weren’t having a debate in class—they were indoctrinating my child.

I do think there are groups trying to achieve their overarching political objectives. But there are also people who are just worried about the direction of our culture, who are very susceptible to taking their fears out on their local schools.

What advice would you give school leaders trying to navigate protests at board meetings or questions about critical race theory?

Unfortunately, I think they have to carve out some time in their calendars for relationship building. I say at the end of the book that we need to be willing to have uncomfortable conversations. We’re not necessarily going to change our policies as a result, but we need to understand and appreciate the fact that people have anxieties and different opinions. We need to bring those people into the schoolhouse for town hall meetings, individual talks, whatever it is, so that we as a community can deal with this.

No matter what complaints show up on your doorstep, the public survey data shows that there’s a very deep well of support for public education and for public school teachers.

Public school is the singular experience that 90% of America has shared together. It’s part of our roots. We should strive to come together on that common ground.

Image courtesy of Hachette Book Group

One challenge I have found is that teachers, principals, and superintendents are moving to new school districts so frequently now. That makes it tougher to build trust. But that’s the good, earnest work we have to do—on top of the 101 other bureaucratic things superintendents are tasked with doing every day.

When I think about public schools, we really are a community.

We are a family, and we cannot close the door on our family members. Now, if we have politically motivated outsiders trying to interfere with our community, I think it’s appropriate to shut those people out. But within our school community, we need to have conversations. Maybe we leave that meeting just as upset with one another, and in just as much disagreement, as when we walked through the door. But if we understand one another a little bit better, if we respect each other a little bit more when we leave that room, hopefully we can agree to disagree about some issues—or at least give each other the benefit of the doubt.

Do you have any additional advice for superintendents navigating this contentious moment in education?

As they find themselves in these incredibly tricky situations around false claims of critical race theory and ineffective teaching, my advice is to just put your best foot forward. I think we take for granted what brings us together. Talk about the values that we all hold common, and focus more on what brings us together than what separates us.

If you enjoyed this conversation, check out Professor Black’s book Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy, available wherever you get your books.

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Tips Top from the

If you’re just starting out in the superintendency, here’s a helping hand.

After the last 18 months, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that school leaders are leaving their districts at record rates. According to data from EdWeek’s Top School Jobs, the number of open superintendencies nationwide was about 10% higher between July 2020 and April 2021 than over the same period last year. Some states are seeing even greater rates of turnover; Idaho Ed News reported that nearly 20% of districts in the state are starting the 2021-2022 school year with new superintendents. In the last two years, one-third of Idaho districts have seen a turnover in leadership.

Of course, we could focus on the negative here, but think about this: With an increase in retirements comes an increase in first-year superintendents, bringing fresh viewpoints and 28

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passion. These brand new leaders are beginning not just their school years but their careers in the superintendency— and we figured they could use a little help.

Here, we’re sharing a few words of advice from veteran school leaders for those of you just starting out. These leaders have already climbed many of the mountains you’ll face in your career, and they—along with other current and former superintendents—are a great resource for you. If it’s your first year, good luck out there. We’re rooting for you.

“Be cognizant of the fact that every interaction you have is going to either increase or decrease trust. You want to walk away from each interaction with the hope that you’ve maintained whatever trust your community has in you. Trust is built through competence, reliability, predictability, and integrity. Be mindful of that—of how critical trust is and how you can work to build it over time.”

Dr. Frank Davidson, retired from Casa Grande Elementary School District, AZ “If you want to build community support, go everywhere.

If there’s a family reunion, get an invite. If there’s a chamber breakfast, you need to go. You want to be very visible, very engaged. Don’t wait for people to come to you—go to them.”

Dr. J.R. Green, Fairfield County School District, SC “Don’t go for a job; go for a match. You need to find a district that believes what you believe, because you can’t do this job by faking it, being someone you’re not. So don’t jump so fast. But future superintendents—you’ve got to get into this.

We’re going to have a leadership void, and if you have character and purpose and meaning, you’ve got to do this. You just need to find your own match.”

Dr. Bob Baldwin, Fairhaven Public Schools, MA “The best thing a good leader can do is hire good people and let them do their jobs, because we don’t know everything. As superintendents, we certainly don’t know the kinds of things that a teacher, a facilities person, or a transportation person on the ground does. We need to provide them support and encouragement and let them work because, boy, do we have great people working for us here—and I bet a lot of school superintendents can say the same.”

Dr. Roger Catania, retired from Lake Placid Central School District, NY “Have enough humility to recognize that you don’t have all the answers—and then have enough wisdom to reach out to people who can help you. Every morning, my wife prays for me to have humble confidence, and I love that phrase. I want to have enough humility not to think I have the answers and enough confidence to engage with people to figure things out.”

Russ Adams, MOC-Floyd Valley Community School District, IA

“Keep the things that you stand for at your core. Don’t be afraid to make bold decisions. Schools are traditionally very difficult institutions to change, and so often, you do have to make simple moves to give an organization the shake-up that it needs. Ultimately, when you’re following your values, you’ll know you’re making the right decision. Those bold moves show the people watching that you are truly an authentic leader.”

Elizabeth Kirby, Cleveland Heights-University Heights City School District, OH “I think this job comes easier to folks who have a growth mindset. They don’t get bothered and rattled by problems as much because they understand that this too shall pass and they’ll learn from it. People who already have a growth mindset and think ahead are able to see the silver linings in challenges like this year.”

Dr. Victor Simon, Gower School District 62, IL “As a superintendent, I often try to be the last person to speak on an item because I don’t want to create an echo chamber. I want to hear people’s perspectives. I want to encourage that discourse—or even disagreement—to happen.

Sometimes when you speak too early as a superintendent, you stop that dialogue. But when you hear and affirm other people’s viewpoints before giving yours, it makes your perspective more meaningful.”

Dr. Jamie Piraino, Franklin Regional School District, PA “Remember that your biggest job is to lead and drive the culture. If you communicate and love your people, you can create a culture that will withstand all the outside pressures.

Whatever comes, we want to build a culture so strong that nothing outside can sabotage it.”

Jon Laffoon, Farmington School District, AR “This is always a people business. If relationships aren’t the core of who you are, it’s going to be very difficult. You need to appreciate students, from the kid who struggles just to get through every day to the scholar who’s headed off to Harvard. You need to appreciate your staff. If you want success, you’ll invest in people and empower them to help transform things.”

Dr. Robert Hunt, Barrington School District 220, IL

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Making a Magical Experience Customer service tips from a 20-year career at Walt Disney World 30

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If you’ve ever visited a Disney theme park, you know they set the gold standard in customer experience. Few people know the secrets of crafting that experience better than Dennis Snow, a 20-year veteran of the Walt Disney World Company.

Beginning as a front-line attractions operator in 1979, Snow worked his way up through the organization, learning the ropes of stellar customer service along the way.

He later started a successful consulting division of the Disney Institute and taught business best practices at Disney University, the company’s global training program for its employees, or cast members. In his final year with the company, Snow’s performance ranked in the top 3% of Walt Disney World’s leadership team.

Today, Snow, the author of two books on the subject, is one of the world’s leading experts on customer experience. Here, he shares his best ideas on how schools can give their communities a little of that Disney magic.

What are the key elements of a great customer experience?

A great customer experience is one where the customer feels valued. They don’t feel like they’re just one of many people that an organization is dealing with—they feel valued as an individual. That’s true whether it’s a school, a restaurant, or a theme park. When people feel valued, that drives loyalty.

So how do you create that feeling? A theme park is obviously different from a school or a restaurant, but there are certain foundational qualities that make up a great experience.

First, great organizations practice looking through the lens of the customer: doing things with the customer in mind, rather than their own convenience. Many organizations are not actually designing their processes around their customers’ needs. Think about what often happens when you need a service like cable or internet installed at home. You call the company, and they tell you that someone should be there between 8 a.m. and noon. How convenient is that for you as the customer? That’s a mistake on their part; they’re designing that experience for their own convenience.

members will call them by that character’s name, like, Oh, Princess Jasmine! I can’t believe you’re here today! You look wonderful! That doesn’t cost anything or take any time, but it creates a moment of wow.

In a school, think about how many points of contact happen for the student, for the parent, for the guardian. Those are all opportunities to create little touches that wow people. When I attended parent-teacher conferences or sporting events for my own kids, teachers or administrators would say, I saw Danny playing basketball today. He was doing great, or, David’s doing a wonderful job in the band. Those little things made a big difference.

Think about the organizations you’re most loyal to. Odds are, they follow these three best practices: They design everything with the lens of the customer in mind, they pay attention to the small details, and they look for opportunities to create those little moments of wow.

World-class organizations ask, How do we make this convenient for the customer? Whether it’s how a theme park manages wait times or how a school manages the challenges of the first day, you have to look at things from the perspective of the people you’re serving.

Second, it’s critical to pay attention to the small details. I always say that everything speaks. Every detail—from the appearance of the facility, to the layout of the website, to the tone of voice someone uses on the telephone—is either enhancing the experience or detracting from it. World-class organizations notice and control those details, no matter how small. For example: The most common compliment that Disney World gets is how clean it is. It’s not about how great the rides are—the first thing that people say is, Man, that place is so clean. That’s because Disney really makes cleanliness a priority.

Finally, great organizations create moments of wow, exceeding expectations in a big way. At Disney, when a cast member is talking to a child, they’ll often get down on one knee.

A small child spends most of their days looking up at people, so it means a lot when someone gets down on their level and talks with them eye-to-eye. Lots of those kids come to the park dressed as their favorite characters, so the cast SUMMER 2021

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How can districts weave customer experience into their culture?

First, you have to define the experience you want to create.

Most organizations just leave it up to chance, but if a company has 500 employees, they’re going to have 500 different definitions of great service. Great companies—or in your case, schools—understand what they want their customer experience to look like.

Here’s an exercise I do with a lot of my clients: In the middle of a big piece of paper, write the product you’re selling—in your case, the education itself. In a circle around your product, write all the touchpoints you can think of that customers have to go through to get that education. You might think about registration, the classes themselves, the online platform the school uses—every situation where someone interacts with the school.

Now look at everything you’ve listed: not just the product, but the touchpoints, too. That’s the overall experience. That’s really what you’re selling. So how do you make all of those elements surrounding that product excellent? That’s what’s going to drive loyalty.

Overall Experience Touchpoints

Your Product

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Once you’ve defined that experience for your schools, you need to train your people on it. I think many organizations get this wrong. They might talk about it in new hire orientation, but that’s it. In the best organizations, messages about the customer experience are everywhere: in every meeting, on posters, in one-on-one discussions, in company newsletters. You’ve got to be relentless about keeping that message in front of people.

Another thing that organizations get wrong: They don’t hold their people accountable for the level of service that they provide. Unless something really bad happens, they let mediocre and poor service go unchecked. Well, what you accept is what you perpetuate.

To correct that mediocre or poor behavior, you’ve got to be the coach. Never let a coaching moment go. If you see someone failing to deliver the experience they should, take the opportunity to train them in real time. That’s as good as training gets because they’ve got a specific example to learn from.

You also want to recognize strong service performance when it occurs; then, you’re locking in that behavior.

How has technology changed expectations for customer experience?

The biggest change technology has brought is the demand for speed and convenience. It used to be that when a customer sent you an email or left you a message, great service meant responding by the end of the day. Now, people expect you to respond in the next two minutes. If you don’t reply right away—or at least acknowledge that you received the message—people are going to move on to somebody else.

Other than that, customer service in general is so bad out there that simply adding those little personal touches, those moments of wow, puts you ahead of just about everyone else. People don’t want to feel like they’re just an item on your to-do list, and I think that’s one of the things that families are always concerned about—that their child gets lost in the shuffle at school. As a parent, when I could tell that teachers and administrators really knew my sons, it gave me a sense of confidence. That builds trust, which, in turn, builds loyalty. They didn’t make any grand gestures; they just knew my kids, and they cared.

How can school leaders start reevaluating their customer experience?

Why is customer experience important in a non-sales context like schools?

If you’re struggling to get started with raising the bar of service, ask yourself, What do we want customers to say about their experience with us? Zero in on three things. It really makes you think about what your brand is. For Disney, it would be something like, It was a magical experience; they paid attention to every detail; they made us feel special. We knew that if our guests could honestly say those things, they were likely to come back.

People have choices. When you look at schools today, the landscape is changing so dramatically. Whether it’s charter schools or homeschooling, there’s all kinds of nontraditional opportunities out there. So the quality of the education has to be excellent, but the experience surrounding it has to be excellent as well.

Discuss what those three things should be with your team.

Then, once you’ve defined them, ask yourself: What has to happen for our customers to say those three things? What are the behaviors that we need to exhibit? If we want our guests at Disney to say we paid attention to every detail, then as cast members, we need to pick up any trash we see and throw it away. If we want people to say we made them feel special, we need to talk with guests whenever we can.

In a school, you’re looking at it from two perspectives. What three things would you want students to say about their experience? What would you want their families to say? Asking those questions gets your team thinking about the experience versus just the task.

This doesn’t take much time; it doesn’t necessarily cost any money. It’s just the way you do things—not the things themselves, but the way you do them. It’s very easy sometimes to fall into a task mentality the longer we do what we do. That’s why it’s so important that leaders are relentless in keeping that message of the experience in front of their people.

I don’t necessarily remember everything that was taught in my fifth grade social studies class—but I remember my fifth grade teacher, and how wonderful she was, and how she kept me engaged. I remember how the custodian from my elementary school, Mr. Beaupre, would welcome us as we came into the building. The education has got to be excellent, absolutely. But those surrounding things create the experience—and the memories that students and families are going to talk about for years.

“Think about how many points of contact happen for the student, for the parent, for the guardian. Those are all opportunities to create little touches that wow people.”

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Superintendent Perspectives: Dr. Trevor Greene, Yakima School District

Pursuing Digital Equity as a Community Schools have never been more integral to our communities. They served as bastions of support for neighborhoods and entire cities as COVID-19 shuttered the doors of normalcy and ushered in a period of isolation and trepidation. Recognizing exacerbated inequities, Yakima School District here in Washington state immediately reached out in proactive partnership to provide sustainable supports to our community.

If there is such a thing as a normal year at Yakima, I have not had one; the pandemic began in my second semester on the job. But even though I’ve only been superintendent since 2019, Yakima is my home. I found my way back here after spending years serving students and families in other Washington districts. It was Yakima where I grew up as a student and started my teaching career. Now I’m leading my childhood district through something that none of us could have predicted.

Our district is nestled in the greater Yakima Valley and surrounded on all sides by agriculture. It’s about a three-hour drive from Portland and only about two hours from Seattle.

While we’re in a rural setting, we serve a diverse array of students with the same issues as those in any urban district.

Plus, we’re fairly remote, so I don’t have to tell you that even 36

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before COVID-19 hit, our kids needed a lot of support from their schools. Of the nearly 16,000 students we serve, almost 80% are Latinx, and many are first-generation English speakers. In fact, about 30% of our kids are classified by the state as migrant students. To add to our unique challenges, we’re also a high-poverty district.

Our parents do the same as parents all over the country— they entrust us with their greatest treasures. We owe it to them to provide equitable opportunities, addressing our students’ needs by putting greater supports in place for all of them.

Of course, when the pandemic struck, we worked hard to support our families. We provided over one million free meals for children in the community in the first six months— leading food distribution statewide—and even created daycare spaces for first responders and essential workers.

But when school buildings closed to in-person learning in March of 2020, it became clear that we didn’t have a plan to focus on our hidden—or perhaps overlooked—equity issues. Specifically, the pandemic forced us to confront the realities our students face in terms of technology. We knew we had to do something.

Our Path to Sustainable Digital Access By the time I took the helm in Yakima, I had committed to sustainability and resiliency in schools. This means centering the district around sustainable systems, not just a dynamic leader. A system dependent upon one person is no system at all. What happens when that dynamic leader leaves?

I’ve always had success engaging others in the building of systems that sustain themselves, no matter who’s in charge.

This belief led me to collaborate with the community in the development of a new six-year strategic plan. Within my first year, I spent a significant amount of time building and reengaging relationships. I also developed my leadership team, aiming to assemble a cohesive cabinet focused on systemic inequities in education.

However, technology was not specifically addressed in this new plan. We didn’t even have a one-to-one strategy in place.

Fortunately, our Director of Technology Services, Andy Gonzalez, and I were classmates in middle school, which helped us quickly establish trust in each other—something essential when you’re plotting out new systems from the ground up. Together, we started planning a sustainable, equitable technology access program for our students.

Photos courtesy of Yakima School District

Dr. Trevor Greene

Before I became superintendent, Andy had already laid the groundwork by creating Safe Harbor Educational Access Portal, or SHEAP. The district placed technology labs around the community, targeting the areas with the highest need.

These computer and resource labs served as a bridge between our school libraries and students’ homes. The program was also designed for community education, particularly parent resources. Technology shouldn’t be an additive process; it should be an inclusive one with robust family participation. Through SHEAP, we’ve been able to show parents and families a glimpse of their children’s online lives, allowing us to educate them on tech safety and help them understand the social and emotional aspects of technology.

For a while, SHEAP’s primary challenge was securing enough reliable funding to keep it operational. Then, COVID-19 happened. The greatest benefit of this program was that it existed closer to where students lived, embedded within the community—but during a pandemic, managing multiple brick-and-mortar locations was no longer a feasible option. How else could we ensure access to reliable Wi-Fi and technology for all of our students?

Even before the pandemic, Andy and his team had already noticed an odd pattern in the way students were logging into the district’s online platforms. They weren’t accessing our schools’ software at home; they were going to commercial areas around town at all hours. This made it clear that students needed better access to computers and the internet.

Keeping libraries open later into the evenings for community use did not resolve the problem; students still needed access

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on weekends and before school. Additionally, traveling between home and school outside of standard commute hours proved to be a significant barrier—kids had to walk uphill both ways, often in the dark, during our cold winters or long, hot summers.

After conducting empathy interviews with students to learn more about their online habits, Andy and the team recognized that the problem was even worse than they’d thought.

Some students said they often accessed Wi-Fi from outside local fast food restaurants, unable to buy food and do their schoolwork inside. It was clear that the district had fallen into the common practice of addressing issues on our terms— not according to the realities our students and families faced.

At first, we were operating under the assumption that we could reopen with the same processes we used before going remote. We quickly realized this wasn’t equitable. Why? Because it’s all temporary— hotspots, federal emergency funds, all of it.

We needed to provide ongoing equitable access for every student.

After distributing nearly 16,000 computers to meet our one-toone needs, we started broadcasting our own Wi-Fi signals. But we were still concerned about where students were congregating to reach these signals, especially if they were having to work outside in extreme conditions. To keep safety a priority, we had to make sure that our solution worked well for students and families, not just for the district.

Thus, Project Gemini was born.

Project Gemini To deliver Wi-Fi access to each of our 16,000 students, we needed to expand our reach—literally. A signal broadcasted from a school campus can only reach about half a mile in any direction, leaving many of our students outside our range. So instead of relying exclusively on campus signals, we asked our community to help.

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Yakima began to establish a network of long-term community partners who could help us create what’s called a mesh network. In a nutshell, if our partners were willing to host hardware in their buildings to boost our signals, we could expand our Wi-Fi network to cover the whole district. We started out by looking at local businesses, churches, nonprofits, and even farms that could host technology in town and farther out from the city center.

To make this all work, we also needed the support of private tech companies. We began working with groups like Ednetics, Cisco, and SpaceX to consider how signals could be cast and what devices could power the districtwide network we were proposing. These conversations evolved into public-private partnerships to develop technology and services to support our host partners. As Andy would say, “The baked-in philosophy is that it’s not just hardware—it’s a service delivery.”

The Gemini network is a twin to the district’s existing network, so students have the same experience on Gemini as they would in their school buildings. Nodes strategically placed at several school sites relay our Wi-Fi signal, which is then strengthened and expanded by our community partners’ networks. In order to expand the network with a large and diverse community support system, the project is also technology agnostic—meaning a student can use any device to access the service. From phones to iPads, Project Gemini is accessible no matter where a student is or what tools they’re using.

With our strategic planning process, we were able to lay a solid foundation with several community partners who are now personally invested in the success of our schools. We also forged strong relationships with community leaders in locations we might use in the future by discussing the need for these support structures.

We built Project Gemini on a membership model, so the architecture is modular and allows us to add future community partners at any time. These members maintain secure, regulated network environments and can share as much or as little bandwidth with us as they want. This model provides unlimited scalability and security best practices. Not only is this a sustainable, community-driven program, but because it’s managed at the local level, it allows for the fair and equitable distribution of underutilized resources.

Whatever the case may be, my vision for the future includes a stable at-home model. This requires the kind of ongoing digital access that Project Gemini can provide.

Even though the technology we’re working with may not be the first of its kind, I believe our process of developing deep community buy-in, offering tech support, and establishing collaborative partnerships really sets Project Gemini apart. It takes a community to solve this kind of problem. We can always build something with a big donation or grant, but this is about building partnerships.

Walking, Listening, Learning

The more a community is involved, the bigger the win. And that buy-in ensures that the project will be long-lasting and sustainable well into the future. The pandemic has revealed to many of us that we can’t reopen and approach education like we did before. We are seeing our students and communities in new ways through their struggles and successes in this digital world.

It takes a community to solve this kind of problem. We can always build something with a big donation or grant, but this is about building partnerships.

After initial startup expenses, we estimate that Project Gemini will run at an annual cost of no more than $30,000.

This makes in-home, high-speed Wi-Fi an affordable reality for our district and a source of sustainable tech access for our students and families.

Yakima School District once lacked clearly defined and sustainable technology plans. Today, we have a robust, modern, and community-supported infrastructure system empowering us to fully achieve our vision. My goal is to expand our initiatives to serve our school community to the fullest— moving from one-to-one devices and Wi-Fi for everyone to community co-designed programs that unravel the inequities so prevalent in our current systems.

On the whiteboard in my office, I’ve written myself a note: “Create the conditions for people to speak truth to power.”

As Yakima’s superintendent, I recognize that I am in a position of power, and I can use that power one of two ways. I can choose not to listen to the people I serve, or I can create conditions to give them a voice—especially those who are considered voiceless. After all, in the words of novelist Arundhati Roy, “There’s really no such thing as the voiceless. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”

After the events of the last year, we’re determined not to let our students and community go unheard. As a dual citizen of the United States and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, a big part of this philosophy comes from my heritage: You walk with people, listen to people, and learn collaboratively to make the best decisions for everyone. I’m proud to say that in Yakima, we are listening to our families, working with our community partners, and building equity for every student—together.

While we’ve returned to in-person learning, we recognize that many students showed tremendous progress in a virtual learning environment. Teachers tell us that some students who were previously disengaged in school excelled online. My goal, and that of our strategic plan, is to create a more flexible system that serves the diverse needs of all our students, no matter where or how they choose to learn.

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The Urgency of Now Planning for family engagement in a time of transition

One of our writers recently handed off a letter of recommendation to a former student. When asked if it was bittersweet to have her senior year take place during a pandemic, her response was surprising. “It was honestly my best year ever,” she said. “For once, it felt like we were all in the same boat.”

This student is somewhat unique in that 2020 was not her first year of virtual learning—she has attended school online for years to accommodate her complex disability. The sense of community that she and her family felt during the pandemic, however, is not unique at all. In fact, in a mid-pandemic survey, family engagement nonprofit Learning Heroes found that out of over 1,500 families, 67% agreed they felt “more connected with [their] child’s day-to-day education than ever before.”

The truth is that schools haven’t always kept up with best practices when it comes to family engagement. As a result, many families have felt left out, especially the 82% of households with adults who work outside the home. But as schools shifted gears early in the pandemic to engage their communities virtually, many families felt fully in the loop for the first time. Parents could attend important meetings online or meet with their child’s teacher without having to miss work to carve out time for a conference.

Going forward, it’s crucial to keep those previously underserved families engaged, even when the days of mass virtual learning come to a close. After all, established research shows that when families are engaged, students are less likely to struggle with academics or attendance. Additionally, schools with high levels of family engagement are more likely to garner community support, including higher voter turnout during bond initiatives.

You’ve heard it said so many times it’s practically a cliche: As the pandemic subsides, we can’t return to a “normal” that didn’t serve all students and families. Your end goal— increasing student success by leveraging family support— should remain the same. But what should this new normal look like when it comes to engaging families? How can we combine the accessibility of virtual engagement with the in-person experience so many of us missed?

In this moment, your district has an opportunity to rethink how you engage families and create systems that better serve your community. Just as you’ve adjusted during the pandemic to meet students’ needs, you can now work to

solidify these increased levels of family engagement and build practices that include all families. Specifically, hybrid models of engagement—ones that provide parents and guardians with rich, purposeful opportunities to participate in their child’s learning both in person and online—could result in more effective and engaged school communities.

Learning during the height of the pandemic wouldn’t have been possible without the help of students’ families—now, it’s about keeping them involved.

Changing Expectations Over the past few decades, family engagement has moved far beyond teachers sending notes home in backpacks. After No Child Left Behind required schools to maintain “regular, two-way and meaningful communication,” schools worked quickly to connect what happens in the classroom to families at home. Within a decade, districts would begin harnessing technological tools, such as apps and learning management systems, to provide families with quicker, more up-to-date feedback. Still, until the pandemic, family engagement typically took place through traditional outlets—phone calls, newsletters, and face-to-face meetings.

But these types of outreach have left some guardians, especially those who work outside the home, with fewer opportunities to engage with their child’s school. In 2018, Pew Research Center estimated that only 18% of children had a parent who stayed home during the day—a number likely much lower for children in public school. Unfortunately, engagement practices often fail to reflect this reality. While most working families are highly invested in their child’s learning, many can’t attend in-person events, such as parent-teacher conferences, or volunteer in their child’s class.

This can lead administrators and teachers to assume a family is disengaged—when in reality, they simply aren’t available when schools usually want them.

As much as the pandemic has shifted what classroom instruction looks like, it has also shifted the expectations of family engagement. Many families found themselves supporting their children through busy online learning schedules full of back-to-back Zoom meetings. As challenging as this was, they are now accustomed to being deeply involved in their child’s learning, and that isn’t likely to change. They also know their children better as learners—a fact educators shouldn’t overlook as they seek to understand how best to reach their students.

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So what can be done to keep families in the loop now that kids are back in school buildings? In order to reach all students, family engagement must be thoughtful, inclusive, and useful to all families. What works for one district may not work for another, but here are three things to keep in mind.

Thoughtfulness Educators may often feel like they’re beginning each year with a blank slate, but parents and guardians carry over their expectations and experiences—whether positive or negative—from year to year. To make sure families hold onto positive experiences, family engagement must be thoughtful.

Thoughtful family engagement is all about hospitality and customer service. In Beyond the Bake Sale: The Essential Guide to Family-School Partnerships, the authors stress that to fully participate in their child’s learning, many families must feel a strong sense of invitation. This is even truer for families who participate in a virtual or hybrid model—their lack of familiarity with the face-to-face environment may dampen any connection they have with the school.

Families are much more likely to feel welcome if they receive a regular stream of positive messages from their schools.

This means you and your staff need to lead with thoughtfulness as you plan for interactions with your students’ families. For Dr. Maria Ortiz, Assistant Superintendent of Newark Public Schools in New Jersey, this means always recognizing families as human beings first. “The first thing you must always ask a family is if they need a glass of water,” she says.

“They need to view your support as authentic before they open up.”

Thoughtfulness also means approaching families with encouragement rather than judgment. “What we don’t need to do is fault them or make them feel wrong because of what they’re not doing,” Ortiz says. “Instead, let’s start with what they are doing and build a connection so that we are starting from an asset mindset and not a deficit mindset.”

It is vital to approach inclusive family engagement with a focus on what is working rather than what’s not. While it’s often tempting to focus on what families aren’t doing to support their children at school, this outlook creates a vicious cycle.

Approaching guardians with judgment only makes them less likely to participate in their child’s education—perpetuating the idea that they’re disengaged and fueling even more judgment. In reality, many parents of children with behavioral or 42

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academic challenges may be avoiding schools precisely because they feel judged. To build true partnerships, schools should focus on working with families to solve problems rather than holding them accountable for the challenges they face.

Inclusivity Inclusive family engagement ensures that interactions are welcoming to all families, regardless of race, age, ability, socioeconomic status, or anything else. This goes deeper than mere accessibility— just because a family has access to a space doesn’t mean they feel welcomed there. If any families in your district seem disengaged, your team should actively seek out the reasons why.

This kind of honest feedback is hard to get; you’re unlikely to find it through a survey. Instead, you must rely on fostering strong, purposeful relationships with all the communities represented within your schools. These can be built either through connections with families themselves or with the help of organizations that already have established influence in your community. Candid conversations can go far; creating safe spaces to discuss barriers to participation can provide valuable information about how welcome families feel in your schools.

Sometimes the fix may be as simple as adjusting the time of an event—but other times, you’ll need to look deeper into how to make your families feel safe and included. This may involve having heart-to-heart conversations with families or analyzing data about who attends which events and when.

To make sure families feel welcome, work to foster a community of “belonging and delight.” As Dr. Ernest Morrell, Director of the Center for Literacy Education at the University of Notre Dame, stresses, “It’s not a community if it isn’t equally accessible to both parties.” Both educators and families should feel comfortable in your schools. Families are much more likely to feel a sense of belonging in a school that celebrates them and their children. All families love to see their children shine.

Once they see that their school loves their kids as much as they do, they’ll want to be part of that celebration.

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just as welcoming.

Usefulness Finally, family engagement must be useful; it must support student growth. At the height of the pandemic, schools across the country transformed into community centers, often providing meals and other services. While these wraparound supports may change as the pandemic recedes, schools must continue to think creatively about how to meet the needs of their communities. This will require you and your staff to listen closely and be observant. If you notice holes in your support for students and families, find ways to address them. Fostering useful family engagement means facilitating relationships that make things easier and more productive for everyone.

Useful family engagement could also mean listening to families who prefer virtual meetings and events to in-person ones.

This is especially true for interactions with required attendance. Some school leaders have reported that IEP meeting participation has increased during the pandemic, simply because virtual participation is more accessible. If this is true for your district, you don’t want to miss the chance for potential engagement by phasing this option out completely.

Planning Hybrid Events Even after the pandemic subsides, most industry experts agree that hybrid events are here to stay. Joanne Dennison of the Boston University School of Hospitality Administration thinks this has been a long time coming. “Hybrid meetings will be the norm as opposed to the exception,” she says.

For schools, hybrid events make sense for several reasons: They’re less expensive, they require less space, and they’re more accessible. Additionally, increased registration for virtual academies nationally suggests that public schools will need to keep working to support virtual learners, even as most students return to the physical classroom.

What does this have to do with family engagement?

Consider this: Virtual events are not only more convenient but also more inclusive. Many students have support networks that extend far beyond the traditional nuclear family.

While you may not have the capacity to invite a 10-person team of parents, siblings, extended family, friends, and neighbors to a small award ceremony, they can all easily tune in on Zoom. Think of the large family and friend groups that show up to football games—imagine if all school functions were

Going forward, your family engagement plan should involve some hybrid events: ones that involve both physical and virtual components. But even though you’ve long since mastered in-person events, and the pandemic gave you a crash course in virtual ones, combining the two is a more complicated endeavor.

While it may be tempting to simply record and post your physical events, this approach won’t engage your audience. Some districts, for example, post recorded school board meetings on YouTube only to find that almost no one watches them. This low-effort approach to a hybrid event not only runs the risk of boring your virtual audience, but could also deter families from engaging at all.

Coordinating a hybrid experience that will wow your entire audience is difficult—and undoubtedly takes more resources than simply recording your event. But if you’re working to build a future that engages your entire school community, it’s worth it.

Guidelines From the Private Sector Luckily, you can turn to the private sector for lessons on planning equitable and engaging hybrid events. First, consider the desired goal of an event and be willing to adjust the format accordingly. For example, if you are planning a hybrid event to help high school seniors fill out the FAFSA, it may not make sense to execute it in the same way for both audiences. Virtual attendees aren’t as able to take cues from other participants as their in-person peers, and they’re also more likely to be distracted as they try to follow along within a group. Since the FAFSA requires people to provide personal information, they may not feel comfortable asking questions in front of others.

To be more engaging all around, you might hold the in-person event in a large group and conduct the virtual portion separately, with families signing up for dedicated online appointments with a counselor. That way, virtual attendees have someone to help them through an admittedly tricky process.

What’s important is to make sure that all participants feel valued and comfortable, and that the event accomplishes its goals—even if it means doing things differently than you have before.

According to Cvent, an event planning software company,

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blog vFairs also recommends hosting live Q&A sessions that include questions from both halves of your audience. This keeps your event inclusive while also heightening awareness of the different participation methods available. . you should also consider the factors that may motivate someone to choose a virtual event over an in-person one: “They may be more safety-concerned, budget, and/or time-constrained than your in-person segment.” Understanding this motivation will help you tailor your events to meet the needs of both audiences. You should also be aware of how to prevent technological barriers on your end, though you have likely had plenty of experience working through those issues over the past few semesters.

Preserving the Experience

Cvent also recommends having at least one person at your physical event dedicated to ensuring your virtual audience feels included and has a good time. This person can handle technical problems and encourage enthusiasm by engaging directly with your online participants. The more points of contact you can make with all audiences, the more successful any event will be.

Some events might seem impossible to pull off virtually— prom, for example. But last spring, California’s Hawthorne High School proved that any event can be made more accessible and inclusive with a few adjustments. When Hawthorne realized they couldn’t have a traditional prom because of safety concerns, they launched into planning a hybrid event that would preserve the magic of the experience while keeping people safe. Their dynamic hybrid prom included drivethrough photo stations, an interactive Zoom event, and a DJ who fielded virtual and in-person music requests.

Finally, think about which traditional aspects of virtual events could be helpful for all attendees, including those participating in person. For example, after attending a virtual event, participants usually receive a follow-up email highlighting key takeaways. Why not send a similar email to your in-person participants as well? Not only does this give you an opportunity to reiterate important information, but it also fosters a sense of unity between virtual and in-person attendees.

To further build this sense of connectedness, event planning

Because many school events serve as rites of passage for students and their families, it’s important to make sure virtual participants still feel like they’re getting the “whole experience.” Some events may be hard to replicate in a virtual setting, but a little creativity can go a long way. Let’s say you’re giving out swag to students attending a college fair in person—you’ll want to make sure virtual attendees get their own goodie bags, too.

Of course, this isn’t the only way to throw a major hybrid event. Other districts made prom-in-a-box packages for virtual participants that included memorabilia, supplies for athome photo booths, and, of course, snacks.

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applies to everyday events where family engagement is highly valuable, such as parent-teacher conferences or IEP meetings. If families understand that you want their input no matter how they participate, they are much more likely to engage.

Making family engagement work as part of a hybrid model means no one gets left out. Although your strategies may look different than before, the future you’re working toward has a chance to be more inclusive and engaging for everyone. From planning hybrid IEP meetings to finding ways for students to attend prom virtually, hybrid events allow leaders to build stronger, more cohesive school communities.

The Urgency of Now As this school year begins with a renewed focus on social-emotional learning nationwide, it’s never been more necessary to ensure that all students and families feel valued and included. This means blending the lessons you’ve learned during the pandemic into your previous best practices—engaging students’ families in new ways that are accessible and beneficial to everyone.

Recently, family engagement scholar Pam Allyn, reflecting on this moment, quoted the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.: We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. “Now is always,” Allyn added.“It’s not just post-COVID. We have to think of what was there during COVID. It was the grandmother sitting beside her grandson on a Zoom. It is the beauty of that love that we witnessed this year.”

Families have already adjusted how they relate to your schools—they’ve had to. As a leader, you can take advantage of the many opportunities presented by this shift to foster a thriving community that supports every student’s needs.

A future brimming with inclusive family-school collaboration is more within your grasp than ever before—why wait?

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Learning during the height of the pandemic wouldn’t have been possible without the help of students’ families—now, it’s about keeping them involved.

Get your ready for takeoff.

Join us for a new kind of education conference.

LANDING SPRING 2022 SEATS ARE LIMITED. RESERVE YOURS AT: apptegy.com/conference

Image courtesy of Derek W. Black

Now Boarding Tips from Dr. Jason Andrews on getting your board relations off the ground

While most college freshmen were pledging fraternities or settling into dorm life, Dr. Jason Andrews was driving to his hometown of Harpursville, New York, to serve as the youngest member of his district’s school board. As the Harpursville Central High School class president, Andrews became interested in the broader politics at play when his school district’s superintendent was forced to resign. In the debate that followed this abrupt change, Andrews felt that his own voice, and that of students in general, was being ignored. Vowing to change that, Andrews was elected to his first term as a school board member at the age of 18, a position that he would hold for over seven years.

This choice would serve as a springboard for Andrews’ long career in education. Since then, he has served as a teacher, coach, middle school principal, school board president, and superintendent. Currently in his 16th year leading New York’s

Dr. Jason Andrews Windsor Central School District, Andrews also works as a consultant with Solution Tree, where he leads professional development sessions about school and administrative culture all across the country.

Given his unique background, Andrews is now a leading expert on one of the trickiest aspects of the superintendency: board relations. To gain insight into this complex relationship, we talked to Dr. Andrews about the impact of board relations on everything from school culture to student learning.

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How do you maintain a positive, productive relationship with your board?

There’s a quote from Mike Schmoker: Clarity precedes competence. Part of it is being really clear on roles; I think it’s critical that people know their lanes. It’s also really important to define what the mission, vision, values, and goals are for the school. When you haven’t been clear on those things, it’s really easy to get into the weeds and fall into micromanagement. In a worst-case scenario, a school governance team can feel like they are dealing with issues on a case-by-case basis or just putting out fires. All too often, this can happen between a superintendent and a school board when something has soured within the relationship, or when there isn’t a clear process for handling a specific situation.

I think it’s also important to have some basic communication skills. You have to be able to communicate very clearly and at the appropriate level. If you want the board to be at the governance level, then you have to provide them with governance-level information. If you provide them with management-level information, then you’re going to get management-level questions.

One of the big problems with communication is that people listen to reply rather than to understand. When working with a board, everyone needs to understand not only their roles but also the communication protocols. As superintendent, you must spend time defining both of those things. This way, you will help your board members be successful in their roles—which will help you be successful in yours.

How do you balance board members’ different viewpoints and priorities?

It all goes back to the four pillars: mission, vision, values, and goals. You must ask yourself, Are we clear on our core purpose? Do we have a shared mission to ensure that all students are learning at high levels? As a team, we have to decide what we want our district’s reputation to be. It doesn’t matter if we have differing viewpoints or interests—as long as they are consistent within the shared vision and values that we have already established.

It’s our job as superintendents to make recommendations; it is the board’s job to decide whether or not to approve those recommendations. Sometimes, that feels like a weakness.

We take those decisions as a judgment of us and our expertise. We have to learn not to take things personally so we can work together to move forward.

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Even with the relationships you’ve built, has it ever been challenging to work with board members?

Absolutely. You have to accept that it’s bound to happen.

Sometimes you have smart, well-intentioned, supportive people, but there’s a particular interest that they feel really strongly about. We have to go back and work through what aligns to our four pillars.

Even when things are really tough, remember to listen to understand. Your board members have to know that you understand their perspectives, and, more than that, you value them. It’s also helpful if they know your values and have some expectation of what you are going to do.

How does setting expectations help you be more proactive rather than reactive with your board?

Honestly, that’s how you build trust, right? Imagine you’re at a crowded four-way stop and you’re unsure which car is going to go next. Everyone ends up spending way too much time second-guessing themselves and carving out their own rules rather than being able to rely on a clear, familiar pattern. It’s the same when it comes to navigating a crisis. That predictability and consistency allows people to trust one another, which helps them feel more comfortable having autonomy over their own actions.

I think that helps a lot with being a strong leader. If your team knows that you are not going to follow a flavor-of-the-month approach but rather stick to your mission, vision, values, and goals, then it’s easier for them to trust you. Everyone won’t always agree with you, but people are more accepting if they understand why you made a certain decision.

Do you think maintaining a relationship with your board gets easier over time?

Some parts of the job definitely do get easier. By the time I got to my 16th year of the superintendency, there were few things that I hadn’t dealt with before (besides a pandemic).

Once again, if you have that strong moral compass and those four pillars, then no matter what problem you are dealing with, people generally know how you are going to handle things before you even weigh in. That makes a lot of the day-to-day issues easier to handle, which can free up some space to innovate and try new things.

This sense of stability trickles down, setting the tone and direction for everyone. It allows you all to focus on more than just promoting your special interests or putting out fires. Just as stability can positively affect student learning, instability can have a negative impact. If you’re having constant upheaval in the board and superintendency, that can translate into high levels of turnover in your school buildings, which absolutely affects kids. When you think about that, it’s easy to see how turbulence on the governance team can result in academic challenges as well.

How can districts better clarify the roles of superintendents and their school boards?

But, of course, this is a role where you can never be complacent. In 2005, our high school had a 78% graduation rate. Last year, our graduation rate was 97%. I’m really proud of that, but we’re not hitting the mark for all kids. Getting to 100% is going to be a really heavy lift—it will require us to think of things we’ve never done before. It’s always challenging.

How do you hope to see board relations shift in the future?

Moving forward, I would love to see more work go into continuous professional development for school board members, both individually and as teams. In many cases, they have little to no formal training about some aspects of their jobs, including the procedures of boardsmanship. These are very real, very specific skills. You don’t automatically have them.

You have to build them over time.

I have recently partnered with a group called SuperEVAL, which builds capacity in governance teams through self-evaluations. It’s a great way for board members to consider whether or not they are growing, and whether they are being proactive or reactive. We do this for almost every other profession, so it makes sense to do it for school boards, too.

How do these relationships contribute to better student outcomes?

Once you are focused on the right things and have that relationship with your board, you are better able to communicate your policies and strategic plan through your budget. That budget is the numerical expression of your four pillars. I believe every district in the country should have the same mission: to ensure that all kids are learning. If we’re clear on that mission, we can use our resources to support what we value.

The thing is, you’ll never find the time to clarify what these roles are. You have to make the time—it’s that important.

Establishing relationships isn’t just a one-and-done thing.

Just as we have to provide maintenance to buildings, relationships require regular maintenance as well.

Sometimes, maintaining your relationship with your school board—and constantly returning to your district’s mission, vision, values, and goals—can feel redundant, but that’s okay.

You really want to get to a place where it feels automatic. You can’t wait until there is an issue to establish those routines; you must create that system ahead of time.

Finally, you have to consider that you are managing and reporting to a group—not just one person. That can be pretty tricky. Your board members may have very different interests, agendas and backgrounds. But you have to work with them using the fundamental human principles of honesty, respect, and kindness. This goes a lot further than people think.

Remember to listen to understand. Your board members have to know that you understand their perspectives and, more than that, you value them.

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In Case You Missed It Highlights from three years of SchoolCEO You can view these articles online at schoolceo.com/ICYMI

As always, thank you for reading SchoolCEO. Here at the end of Volume 3, we’re taking a walk down memory lane, revisiting the articles our readers have found most useful.

Whether you’re a new reader or a longtime subscriber, we’re glad you’re on this journey with us. We look forward to many more years of hearing your stories, celebrating your successes, and sharing your most effective strategies.

What Do Millennial Teachers Want?

The

Advocacy Marketing Manifesto A radical new system for transforming how people talk about your schools

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What Do Millennial Teachers Want?

The Advocacy Marketing Manifesto

According to Pew Research, more than one-third of adults working today are millennials. They make up the largest segment of the U.S. labor force. In 2019, we conducted a survey of more than 1,000 millennial teachers across the country to answer two questions: What are educators of this generation looking for in a job, and how do they make decisions about where to work?

We’ve often given you tips on how to market your schools— but the truth is that your community members will trust the opinions of their friends and family far more than anything coming out of your district office. That’s why you need to grow advocates: people who organically spread positive stories about your schools. It just takes building intentional, personal moments that show people you care.

Spring 2019

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Summer 2019

Owning Your Digital Spaces How your district’s user experience determines the strength of your brand

Storytelling

Owning Your Digital Spaces

All successful marketing has one simple factor in common: It tells a story. In your district, you should be looking for stories that reinforce your brand, grab your community’s attention, and move people to action. Here, you’ll learn to build an overarching narrative for your district, then find and share smaller stories that reflect your values.

Each time your community members interact with your district, their experience contributes to their feelings about your schools. But in the digital age, most of those touchpoints take place online—not in your school buildings. To protect your brand, you need to take control of your district’s digital platforms, ensuring a good user experience for everyone.

Winter 2020

Winter 2021

Tie It All Together The importance and power of creating a seamless, unified online identity

Tie It All Together

The Five Stages of Bond Success

Especially since the onset of COVID-19, your district’s reach is more widespread than ever. But most districts have trouble building a consistent brand across all their platforms, from websites to social media channels to learning management systems. These tips will help you create a seamless, unified identity—and win the trust of your community.

Like most monumental tasks, the intimidating process of a referendum proposal can be broken down into smaller, more manageable steps. We’ll walk you through the five stages of a bond, from start to finish, each with a different purpose and goal. These build on one another to produce a successful overall campaign.

Winter 2021

Winter 2020

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Asking the Right Question Are your surveys serving you?

In the Spring 2021 edition of SchoolCEO, we showed you how engaging your community helps you create lasting change. What we’ve learned is that inclusive innovation stems from the different needs and experiences of your school community. Their combined ideas push you toward meaningful, long-term change.

As you work to involve your stakeholders, you might be tempted to issue a survey. You wouldn’t be alone. We’ve seen schools issue surveys on everything from curriculum decisions to strategic planning priorities to the use of a mobile app. It’s not just in education, either. As the private sector has moved toward being more customer-centric, businesses have begun to rely on surveys to assess their employee engagement, marketing impact, and customer satisfaction.

While surveys were once incredibly time-consuming and expensive, tools like SurveyMonkey have made them cheap and seemingly easy. And when the global pandemic hit, this strategy only became more popular.

Many of the issues with surveys start before you write a single question. Plenty of strategies can help you improve your survey design and distribution, but before you worry about all that, ask yourself: Should I run a survey in the first place?

Surveys are snapshots.

Look, we’re not saying that surveys are never useful. They can be incredibly helpful—but only in very specific circumstances. Unfortunately, most school districts issue surveys without first considering whether this approach will actually help them discover the data they want.

As Cokeley points out, surveys can only help you “know what people are currently thinking, feeling, saying, seeing, and doing.” They’re snapshots. But just like a photograph, a survey is a static glimpse of the past.

This means that by the time you look at the data, it may already be outdated. What’s more, a single survey can’t tell you much without some context for comparison. After all, how can you measure whether or not your community’s feelings toward your district are improving if you don’t know how they felt a month or a year ago?

Just because you can issue a survey doesn’t always mean you should. While surveys have their uses, we’ve also seen schools stifle their innovation processes by relying on them too heavily.

“We live in a survey-centric world, especially since COVID-19,” says Sandy Cokeley, APR. Cokeley, a former school communications professional, is the founder and CEO of SCoPE, an organization that helps districts issue communication surveys. As the pandemic made communication more difficult and created a multitude of new problems in education, “districts were surveying everybody about everything,” Cokeley tells us. “All of a sudden, surveys became very popular for schools.”

But just because you can issue a survey doesn’t always mean you should. While surveys have their uses, we’ve also seen schools stifle their innovation processes by relying on them too heavily. The purpose of innovation is to discover previously unknown solutions to the problems your district faces—but when you create a survey, you often define possible answers before they reach your families. This limits the degree to which your community can participate in the innovation process—and may even keep you from finding the best solutions.

“One of the biggest challenges schools face with doing their own surveys is that when they get their results, they have no comparative data,” Cokeley explains. If you want to see how you’re getting better or getting worse, you can’t run just one survey; you need to run multiple.

Say you issue a survey to gauge your staff’s general feelings on the school district. If 70% of teachers are “satisfied or very satisfied,” is that good? Are staff members happier now than they were when you began your superintendency? Are your principals’ one-on-one meetings helping? Who knows? That single data point can’t tell you how your initiatives have impacted your staff’s perceptions; it only assesses how your team felt on the specific day they filled out the survey.

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Cokeley learned this lesson firsthand at New York’s Pearl River School District, where she served as Director of Community Relations and Quality for more than 20 years.

“When I did my own homegrown survey, I would share the results with my superintendent—like, 87% of our parents say we do a really good job of communicating during a crisis,” Cokeley says. “But when he asked if that was good, I had to say that I honestly didn’t know. I thought it was pretty good, but I really didn’t know.” As Cokeley learned, in order for any survey to be useful, you need an established baseline within the population you are surveying so that you can compare results over time.

To build an effective survey strategy, you should view each individual survey not as a singular snapshot but as frames in a film reel, where still images are strung together to show complex scenes. One still gives you a good image, but you can only see the story once the images are played in order. To tell if your initiatives are working, you need to regularly check your results against relevant surveys you’ve run before. That way, you can see not just how your community members feel today, but also the impact your choices are having.

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Surveys take time—and money.

Before you get started, you have to decide whether or not you’re willing to invest the time and money it takes to run several surveys over an extended period of time. After your baseline survey, you’ll need multiple iterations of data to accurately assess the impact you’re having. This will get time-consuming and expensive, especially if you’ve hired an organization to help.

With the availability of free or cheap tools, which make the process fast and easy, you may think you can avoid expenses and save a little time. However, even if you build your survey without spending a dime, you’re nowhere close to done. You’ll still need to promote it to ensure you’re getting the reach you need.

This promotion can get expensive. Whether it’s gift card raffles, advertisements, email campaigns, or simply the cost of your time, you’ll need to devote adequate resources to getting your survey out to families. After all, surveys are only as good as their responses, so you’ll often need to incentivize participation to get good data. All those costs add up quickly.

Surveys are based on assumptions.

Even if you’re willing to commit the time and energy needed to effectively administer multiple surveys, your commitment isn’t over. Before you run your baseline survey, you first need to ensure that your questions are designed to give you the data you need. Why bother to run surveys if you can’t count on your questions to give you accurate answers?

Before you get started, you have to recognize that your questions are based on assumptions and biases. Take, for example, this true/false statement from a school climate survey run by CU Boulder’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence (CSPV): “My child’s teachers have made efforts to establish a relationship with me regarding my child’s academic progress.”

CSPV thoroughly tested this question for clarity and based it on the best available research on school climate. But even this question reinforces certain assumptions. Is academic progress the only reason a teacher should establish a relationship with a parent? What about students who are cared for by someone other than a parent? Even using the phrase “academic progress” assumes that there should be some defined progression of learning.

If you ask your community what they want to see from your schools in the future, they will only be able to answer through the lens of what they’ve experienced in the past.

Another question in the CSPV survey asks for a true or false answer to the following statement: “Adults in the school make sure that all students follow the rules against insults, teasing, harassment, or other verbal abuse.” If you’re trying to innovate how your school handles bullying, this question could certainly help you chart how your faculty and staff are improving. But because the question places responsibility only on the adults in the school, it’s unlikely to help you consider how to get students involved in bullying prevention.

You won’t ever be able to remove all biases and assumptions from your surveys, and that’s okay; many of them are harmless. But any assumption is a potential limit on your innovation. To get the full story of what your community is feeling, you need to understand the inherent biases in your questions and use other methods of evaluation to account for them.

Surveys can’t predict the future.

It’s extremely common for schools to run a survey to find out if families will support a new initiative or program. However, this misguided strategy is actually one of the biggest obstacles to true innovation.

Because a survey is a snapshot of one moment in time, it can only describe what people were thinking or feeling at that particular moment. It cannot tell you how they will behave or react in the future—because they themselves don’t know. Here’s the problem: Humans are really bad at knowing what they want before they experience it. We are all bound by

the contexts in which we exist. But if you’re running a survey, you’re likely trying to innovate in some way—which means bringing your community something they’ve never experienced before.

The private sector learned this lesson in the grocery store aisle. While there are now seemingly endless varieties of spaghetti sauce on the shelves, that wasn’t always the case. In the early 1980s, Prego was struggling to compete against Ragu, so they brought in market researcher Howard Moskowitz to help. To figure out what the industry was missing, Moskowitz created 45 different sauces and conducted extensive taste testing with the public. He found that Americans were evenly divided among three preferences: plain, spicy, and extra chunky.

But until Moskowitz conducted this research for Prego, no company had offered chunky spaghetti sauce; through years of consumer research, customers had never asked for it. They didn’t know they wanted it until it was right in front of them. Prego soon launched a line of extra chunky spaghetti sauce that took over the industry, making the company $600 million over the next 10 years.

When Prego simply asked customers what sauces they preferred, respondents only thought to mention the types they’d already tasted before. They didn’t have a frame of reference for anything else. It wasn’t until Moskowitz put a new sauce in front of them that they knew what they liked. In the same way, SUMMER 2021

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if you ask your community what they want to see from your schools in the future, they will only be able to answer through the lens of what they’ve experienced in the past.

Imagine you’re considering a mobile app for your district. You might be tempted to ask families if they would use such an app. But how could they know? Perhaps they’ve had a bad user experience with another school’s mobile app, coloring their views on the idea. Or maybe they have no experience with school mobile apps at all—meaning they don’t know what to expect. In either case, your community members can’t know for sure how they’d react to an innovation until you actually roll it out.

Remember, innovation is about solving problems with previously unknown solutions. While it’s tempting to simply “give the people what they want,” if you let a survey prescribe a solution, your innovations will be restricted by the questions you’ve asked and your community’s past experiences.

Surveys tell you what—not why or how.

For innovation to be lasting and impactful, you have to get your community involved in discovering the solutions. But even Cokeley understands the limit to what surveys can contribute to the innovation process. “It’s hard to do this work without surveys, but it’s not all you should do,” she says. “It’s only one component of your research.” While they can’t effectively prescribe solutions to problems, they can help you discover issues that need to be addressed and places where you should innovate.

Survey data is actually a lot like student assessment data: It’s just one of the many indicators of how your district is doing.

Assessment data might tell you that a student struggled on a reading exam, but it will never tell you why they had trouble or how to help. However, that data does give you a place to start.

It shows you where to dig in, to go beyond the hard numbers and discover the root of the problem—and its solution.

The same is true for survey data. While it won’t tell you what to do, it will tell you where you need to dive deeper and investigate. Once you’ve determined which issues need more attention, approaches like empathy interviews, focus groups, and other in-depth interactions can help you get to the why and how.

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Surveys are crucial to innovation.

We’ve gone through some of the flaws in the ways schools often approach surveys, but make no mistake—they are still critical to the innovation process. While they cannot tell you why your problems exist or prescribe solutions, they can still show you how your innovations are impacting your district. “That’s why surveys are so essential in communications planning,” Cokeley says. “They help you identify your starting point and determine whether you’ve reached your goal. I can’t imagine doing this work without them.”

Let’s go back to the app example from earlier. Surveys won’t tell you how to successfully implement an app for your families, but they can help you evaluate its success once you’ve rolled it out. If you aren’t satisfied with the number of downloads you’re getting, you can ask families if they’ve even heard about the app. If they haven’t, you’ll know that your

What are empathy interviews?

Empathy interviews are all about having open-ended, one-on-one conversations, discovering how someone feels about something and, more importantly, why. You use neutral language, avoid simple yes-or-no questions, and encourage your interviewees to share stories about their experiences—not just their opinions. Most importantly, you continually ask why, drilling down into the underlying reasons people feel the way they do. This is why empathy interviews are so effective—they uncover insights and feelings participants might not have been consciously aware of beforehand.

Because they’re much more nuanced and openended, empathy interviews can counteract many of the limitations and flaws inherent in a traditional survey. Using both strategies together will help you not only determine what problems your district is facing, but also why they’re occurring and how you might handle them.

To learn more about empathy interviews and how to create lasting innovation, check out “CommunityPowered Innovation” at schoolceo.com/innovation

problem is a lack of adequate marketing. Of course, that poll can’t tell you how to promote your app better, but it can tell you if you need to do so.

As we move beyond the pandemic, schools across the country are trying to figure out how to better meet the needs of their families and students. It has never been more important to include your families in this innovation process. But just because you want or need to get your community involved doesn’t mean a survey is the answer.

Surveys are just one tool, and like any tool, they have specific uses. If you want data that will help your innovation process, you need to first genuinely ask yourself: Can a survey tell me what I need to know in this situation? If the answer is No, then that poll will only waste your school’s time and money while producing useless information.

The hard truth is that engaging your community in innovation is messy. Other investigative strategies, like empathy interviews and focus groups, take a lot more time, effort, and planning than a simple survey. But in the end, it’s the combination of both approaches—well-timed surveys and more personal ways of collecting data—that will help you discover a more nuanced picture of your community’s needs and produce lasting innovation.

If you want data that will help your innovation process, you need to first genuinely ask yourself: Can a survey tell me what I need to know in this situation?

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Superintendent Perspectives:

Fit to Lead Dr. Brian Creasman, Fleming County Schools, KY

Throughout my career, like thousands of other school leaders, I have regularly worked long hours. As a high school administrator, I developed gout in my feet and even visited the emergency room twice with heart issues due to the stress of my 80-plus hour workweeks. During my first year as a superintendent, I gained unwanted weight, started experiencing knee problems, and caught more colds than normal—all related to stress.

For years, I took an on-again, off-again approach to my overall health and well-being. I’d occasionally work out for a month or two, then stop when things got busy. I never truly understood how my wellness impacted my effectiveness as a leader.

After losing my father to a stroke in 2019, I knew I had to make a change. He had experienced multiple strokes before his death, and my mother also suffers from several medical conditions. I knew that although I couldn’t change my family medical history, I could change my lifestyle.

I wish I could say that I have always liked to work out, watch what I eat, and stay physically active. But making my wellness a priority has been an acquired passion, one that’s taken a lot of concentration and commitment. In January 2020, I started running on a treadmill for just five minutes at a time.

Now, I’ve worked my way up to 45-minute runs, four times a week. Some mornings, I still don’t really want to work out.

Some days, it’s too much. But I know that if I don’t squeeze in my workout, I’ll be struggling by the end of the day—not just physically, but mentally.

For me, well-being has never been about developing a sixpack core or massive biceps; it’s all about finding a work-life balance. Like so many other school leaders and educators, I let my health take a back seat for a long time—but not anymore. Since January 2020, well before COVID-19 made underlying health conditions a widespread concern, I’ve made wellness a major driving force behind my leadership.

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#FITSupts In December 2020, I posted a short message on Twitter encouraging school leaders to set an example by sharing their journeys toward better health. The tweet contained a simple hashtag: #FITSupts. That hashtag spread like wildfire overnight. The next morning, I woke up with nearly 400 more followers than I’d had the day before. #FITSupts is a network of current and aspiring school leaders who have come to recognize the importance of wellness.

Through each social media post, we bring attention to an issue that is often overlooked or simply ignored. While we recognize that the nuts and bolts of leadership are important, we take care to remember that our wellness is just as crucial.

Modeled after #FITLeader and #FITPrincipal, #FITSupts encourages educational leaders to share how they are taking care of their health. I try to post daily about my cardio and strength training. Other leaders post about their diets, the importance of sleep, ways to relax, or hobbies that help them clear their minds. Leaders who post on #FITSupts do not subscribe to fancy workout routines or “as seen on TV” weight loss gimmicks—just simple strategies that are transformative for the mind, body, life, and leadership. #FITSupts is about accountability and education. As school leaders taking part in this movement, we hold ourselves accountable for our own well-being while teaching others how to do the same. Every educator struggles with maintaining

#FITSupts offers an opportunity not just to share personal accomplishments, but to support others in their wellness journeys.

a work-life balance and taking care of themselves. These posts not only offer an opportunity to highlight the struggle, but also connect leaders with others from across the country facing the same challenges. The journey to better wellness is a marathon, not a sprint, with many setbacks, obstacles, and detours. #FITSupts offers a glimpse into real leaders’ journeys and accomplishments—and gives us opportunities to support and encourage one another.

A Simple Message The idea of #FITSupts stems from the fact that too many educators are leaving the profession due to burnout, exhaustion, or even stress-induced health problems. Too many of us retire only to live a confining life due to overall poor health.

Nothing is more important than our well-being. Students and staff need us to show up as our best selves each day. When we are stressed, depressed, and unhealthy, they also feel the negative impact. Likewise, when our staff members see us prioritizing our personal health and wellness, they will follow our lead.

We hold the key to our own health. Just as we spend countless hours discussing class sizes, teacher effectiveness, or financial contingencies, we must also dedicate significant time to our own well-being. Our students and staff need us to model the way for them. #FITSupts is part of that modeling.

We must change the conversation and decrease the number of educators leaving the profession because of burnout or poor health. Ultimately, by focusing daily on wellness, we aim to lower stress, reduce exhaustion, and help educators stay engaged.

We need to normalize taking time for our personal health. If we make well-being a daily priority, we actually miss fewer days at work.

We’re more productive, more engaged, and less stressed.

It’s Okay As superintendents, we are trained to show up at work each day and lead until the job is done. For most of us, the role is nonstop; though we take vacations, we’re never really away.

To change that narrative, we must give ourselves permission to take time for personal wellness.

Too often, educators realize the critical importance of wellness only after an anxiety attack, a knee replacement, or even a near-death experience. As superintendents, we need to normalize taking time for our personal health. This is not to say we should abuse sick days or vacation time. In fact, if we make well-being a daily priority, we actually miss fewer days at work. We’re more productive, more engaged, and less stressed.

In my weekly message to staff, I provide strategies not only for educating students, but also for practicing self-care.

Academics aren’t compromised when teachers prioritize their own wellness; in fact, when teachers are healthier, they are more effective, which leads to more positive outcomes for students. Nothing says that educators—regardless 62

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of what subject they teach—can’t shoot hoops, throw a Frisbee, or jump rope with students during gym or recess.

Think about the positive impact these opportunities could have not just on educators themselves, but also on their relationships with students.

Just by thinking outside the box, educators can find multiple opportunities throughout the school day to squeeze in time for their health. Instead of sitting around a table for a PLC meeting, why not hold a mobile meeting and walk around the school building? Why not go for a stroll outdoors during a planning period to get some fresh air and Vitamin D? You could even invite staff to participate in a districtwide fitness challenge, where they can engage in physical activity through after-school aerobic sessions, walking clubs, running groups, or pickup basketball games.

Disconnect With each passing school year, the need for school leaders to be connected to the job only grows. We often feel that we must always be accessible. We know all too well how an email at 9 p.m. can keep us up at night, throwing off our sleep patterns for days. We respond to texts or social media messages during breakfast, lunch, and dinner, never being truly present for our families. In essence, we have become victims of our own schedules and job descriptions. We are too connected, and that only leads to more pressure and stress.

As a 20-year veteran of education, I began my administrative career before smartphones and texting became integral parts of the job. As a young administrator, I only checked email a few times throughout the day—and I felt better back then. But after I upgraded to an iPhone as an assistant superintendent, I started checking my inbox nearly every 15 minutes and responding to texts almost instantly—while also responding to messages or posting on social media throughout the day.

Then, in November 2020, an automatic update disconnected my email from my phone. I tried everything I could to reconnect it with no luck. But after a couple of days, I quickly noticed how liberated I felt. Even now, I don’t have my school email on my phone­, but I have not missed one important message—and I have more time for face-to-face communication.

There’s no doubt that communication is a key component of leadership—but we need to choose which communications

to prioritize. To build stronger relationships both at work and at home, we must disconnect from technology and the pressures of the job more often.

Finding 20 Minutes School leaders today are being pulled in so many different directions. Though the job has always been challenging, modern-day superintendents are dealing with rapid change, stagnant budgets, increased pressure for student achievement, and an alarming shortage of teachers and staff.

Each day begins with a deficit—it feels like we don’t have enough time in the day to do everything we need to do. Like all leaders, we often struggle to control our schedules. But if we don’t intentionally budget time for ourselves, the risk of burnout, stress, and long-term health problems only increases. No matter how packed our schedules are, we can all afford 20 minutes each day to focus on wellness.

As a superintendent, my day begins early in the morning and lasts well into the evening. If I am not careful, my schedule could push my mental and physical health down to the bottom of my daily to-do list. I could easily find an excuse each day not to find time to work out, breathe, or relax.

To make sure you get that 20 minutes, you must schedule it into your days. I prefer to reserve some time before work every morning to exercise; I like starting the day off focused.

Plus, I’m probably the only one awake in the district, so there are fewer distractions. Others prefer to schedule that time after work as they decompress from their day.

Spending 20 minutes a day on yourself will lead to huge benefits in the long run. Just a little time each day jogging, walking, crafting, lifting weights, reading, journaling, or listening to music will lead to more energy and less stress.

When I don’t take any time to myself during the day, I feel disconnected from both work and my home life. I’m physically there, but my mind constantly wanders. Working out helps me focus not only on the key issues of my workday, but also on the more important things in life. Now, I can concentrate better at the office and be more present at home with my wife and seven-year-old daughter. It just takes 20 minutes.

#FITSupts highlights the importance of both physical and mental health.

One Last Thing As school leaders, everything we do should benefit the students we serve—and that includes taking care of ourselves.

After all, improved student wellness starts at the top. When we keep our health a priority, we are modeling the essential skills students need in order to grow into healthy adults.

As the 2020 Kentucky Superintendent of the Year, I’m often asked why I’ve made health and wellness my initiative.

The answer is simple: Before we can actually focus on academic gains, we must first ensure that student well-being is a priority.

Too often, we undervalue wellness as a key educational component. This can have long-lasting negative effects on student health. But since the push for high-stakes testing began in the 1980s and early 1990s, opportunities for students SUMMER 2021

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#FITSupts is all about self-care, whether through exercise, meditation, or even time with friends.

to focus on their physical and mental health throughout the school day have decreased exponentially. Some school districts across the country do not have any health or physical education teachers. Furthermore, many schools have reduced or completely removed recess time.

According to research from the CDC, physical activity actually improves concentration and attention—key components of high academic performance. But in pursuit of higher test scores, we have phased exercise out of our school days, contributing to lasting health issues among our students and possibly even impeding their achievement. If we prioritize test prep sessions over opportunities to socialize, play, or engage in physical activity, are we teaching students that a test score is more important than a long, healthy life?

Students today have the chance to avoid the mistakes we sometimes make as adults: developing an unhealthy worklife balance full of stress, anxiety, and poor wellness. But as leaders, it’s up to us to show them the way. With COVID-19 came a new national emphasis on health. That means that we have an unbelievable opportunity to reengage our students in their journeys toward better well-being—and recommit to wellness ourselves. The key is to make time each day for our own health, so we can better lead and serve our school communities. See you online at #FITSupts!

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If we prioritize test prep sessions over opportunities to socialize, play, or engage in physical activity, are we teaching students that a test score is more important than a long, healthy life?

We know superintendents learn best from each other.

Every day at SchoolCEO, we talk with the nation’s leading superintendents about the amazing and innovative work happening in their schools.

That’s why we launched the SchoolCEO Conversations Podcast—to provide a platform for school leaders to share their best ideas with each other and the world.

The Speed of Trust SchoolCEO Conversations - Season 1, Ep

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