The Sweet Home School Board enters the new year with a big job ahead: selecting a new superintendent who will then hire a new principal for Sweet Home High School and play other important roles in crafting the future of our schools.
Our intent in saying this is certainly not to put excessive pressure on board members. But schools in Sweet Home do play a very important role in our community, so it’s pretty clear that what the board does next will affect us all at some level, whether we have students in our households or simply pay taxes.
Before we go any further, we want to acknowledge the contributions Don Schrader has made to Sweet Home during his 3½ years as superintendent and we want to emphasize that our “wish list” that follows should not be taken as specific criticism or reflection of Schrader or anyone else in our district. What we’re going to be talking about here is principles – what we should be shooting for.
Though it’s regrettable that Schrader’s departure is costing the district close to $80,000, Schrader has done some good things for us.
It may be easy to forget that his tenure has included some tough times, typified by the implementation of the four-day school week that has been in effect for the past three years, a result of recession-based financial strictures. That four-day week was on the table, if not in plain view, before Schrader arrived. Though he actually made it happen, it was the board that ultimately decided the district needed to save money in the face of budget strictures and which approved the switch to four days.
Schrader was methodical in achieving the goals he set for himself and the district.
Teachers tell us he brought a strong focus on improved teaching practices and what children need. He emphasized response intervention, using data to analyze where each student was at and having teachers meet to discuss each child’s individual needs. He assigned “teacher leaders” to tour other classrooms and make suggestions on how education could be improved. He worked behind the scenes to get some physical education into the elementary schools.
Under Schrader’s watch, test scores have risen and the schools have moved forward technologically. We appreciate that.
It has appeared that Schrader found it less easy to establish the relationships and build the bridges that kind of come with the territory of being a leader in a small community.
He was fairly regular seen at athletic and other events, and was a member of our local Rotary Club, but you didn’t run into him on the street or at the store too often.
So here we are, looking to find a new superintendent and we need to think about what we want. We assume this is a priority for our board members. The executive hiring process is challenging and expensive, particularly when you can’t offer the sun and the moon. The futures of 2,300-plus students and their families, as well as all of us who pay the property taxes that go to our local schools, will be impacted by this choice.
Of course, our district will seek what any community would require, dynamic, motivated educational leadership with a strong background in school finance, collaborative leadership style and excellent communication skills.
But we’d like to suggest a few other characteristics that should be included in the mix, which we think would help our community. They are:
n Character: By this we mean a superintendent who is more than just a supervisor.
He or she needs to be an example to the teachers and, by extension, their students in this district.
For too many of our students, school is one of the best things that will ever happen to them, given the poverty and other challenges we experience in our community. We need a superintendent who truly has a personal concern and investment in making the most of the opportunity to teach the local children values and skills that will help them be productive, engaged, happy citizens.
We want someone who can encourage the faculty and staff members at our junior high and high school to keep the values emphasized by our grade schools’ Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports programs squarely in front of the older kids. (We understand that they’re feeling their oats, but they can do it with responsibility and respect.)
As the old adage says, leadership starts at the top and if we want our kids to develop into the quality people we want them to, it requires backbone and engagement to draw such lines and enforce them, but that’s why this person is called a superintendent.
n Thrift and innovative thinking: We are not a rich district and we have the challenge of balancing the realities of today’s unionized education with the resources available to us. We can’t offer the big bucks a lot of larger districts, or those with more racial diversity (read English as a Second Language) can and do, but we can offer the opportunity to live in and contribute to a town that offers not only outstanding natural beauty and opportunity, but an unusual level of commitment to volunteerism and a resiliency that impresses many who come here.
We need a superintendent who enjoys the challenges of figuring out how to address the culture of poverty that afflicts many of our students and their families, how to energize his or her staff and, by extension, students to take Sweet Home to a better place.
The initiatives that are in place or in progress – the community forest, the Livability Initiative, the South Santiam All-Lands Collaborative – are all opportunities for Sweet Home to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps.
Having a superintendent, teachers and kids dialed in to this kind of thinking and these opportunities will go a long way toward building a future for the latter.
n That leads to another characteristic that is important in a community like ours: Understanding us and our values.
Obviously, we can’t paint the entire community with the same brush and our personal values may differ. However, our board members should have some agreement on what’s important to us. Getting back to that PBIS example above, we assume most members of the community want their kids to behave in a safe, responsible and respectful manner. Hiring a superintendent who has a demonstrated commitment to that approach to education would be a big plus.
The fact is, the best educators are invariably those for whom it’s not just a job – it’s a calling. We certainly want our superintendent to receive compensation commensurate to the responsibilities, experience and education necessary to do this job. But we want him or her to be someone who will be a leader and who will love our kids in the sense that they’ll do everything possible to help these youngsters develop into quality people.
That’s really what this should be about.