District Administrator "Checklist" and Leadership Style

I choose to interview Cindy Zahrte, Superintendent in Tomah, a district that I previously taught in and was Assistant Principal at the high school for two years. We discussed the checklist month by month, which turned out to be mutually beneficial. She had not inherited a list from her predecessor and although she had started developing one some time ago, she had never found the time to complete it. In the course of our conversation, I wrote done the things we discussed and then shared it with her. She was thrilled to have had help completing the task.

She, right away, stated that the constants were the board meetings and the budget, which accompany a superintendent throughout the year. The board meeting preparations and the committee meetings are ever present. In fact, Cindy does not prepare a weekly update for her board, because she feels that between the monthly full meeting, the committee meetings and the board development and other communication she has with her board members, it is not necessary. She does provide a monthly update at each full board meeting.

We started with the summer and worked our way around the fiscal year. She explained that the summer time, unlike for teachers and some administrators, is quite busy for the superintendent. They make every effort to have the hiring completed by the end of June, July at the latest. She then personally meets with every new staff member to welcome them into the district. Summer also is the time for data reviews, program reviews and reporting on projects, programs and all the extra duties. Besides closing out the fiscal year, the audit, preparing for the annual meeting and planning for new teacher in-service and the full teacher back to school in-service and first day, there are continual media and political duties through the summer.

Once school starts, there is the state superintendent's convention, which is a must to attend for networking and getting up-to-date on trends. In Tomah they also take a measure of how the school year started using surveys and perception data to judge and make any adjustments necessary.

Later in the fall, there is testing, National School Bus Safety week and Cindy mentioned how important it is for all of those special weeks and months, to make it a point to thank and congratulate those groups. In that same vein, she mentioned the need to be seen and to see the events of the students, whether it is sports, music or other groups. Parents, students and community members notice this.

She mentioned that for her, October to December seems to the slowest months, yet she mentioned quite a list of tasks from setting the calendar to developing potential board members and reviewing all administrator performance with the board.

Moving into the new year, Cindy emphasized the important to attend the state school board convention with the board members so as not to be surprised with a ton of new ideas and tasks that they would pick up if not "guided" through the process. She outlined other things in the winter such as preparing for a referendum if that is on the docket for April, reviewing all the graduation plans such as honors breakfast, scholarships, awards and the ceremony itself. Finally, this time of year is very busy with staffing decisions, preparation for any non-renewals or terminations and something new, the mid-year SLO reviews with administrators.

Late winter/early spring this past year was a very busy time for Cindy as she dealt with a failed referendum, budget woes and calls locally and statewide for the scrapping of the Common Core. By April, she would like to get all open positions posted and start the hiring process, plan any summer PD and work through the board elections and any reorganization necessary.

In May, she cuts down the admin duties, by having only one admin team meeting, because she realizes the hectic nature of that month in the buildings. This points to her leadership style. She espouses herself to be a servant leader and I would wholeheartedly agree.

June is the month to wrap everything up, graduation, honoring retirees, finishing the hiring and nailing down preparations for the following school year.

In discussing her duties and her approach, as well as having known her for many years, first as a teacher in the middle school building where she was assistant and then principal, I recognize her as being solidly in the "Team Leader" quadrant of Blake and Mouton's managerial grid. I would say that earlier in her career, she may have tended to be closer to and at times in the "Country Club" region due to her true need to please as many people as she could. However, in our conversation she talked about her view of servant leadership being providing for and setting people up to be as successful as they possibly can, yet not being afraid to make the hard decisions about what is best for the organization, even when it may not please or may even upset a person.

As always, it was educational and enjoyable to spend some time talking professionally with Cindy.

School Board Meeting Analysis

On June 23, 2014, I attended the regular monthly school board meeting for Black River Falls School District. There were a few items on the agenda, which point towards continuous improvement. First, Stephanie Brueggen put together a report analyzing the State Testing Assessment. This is the data as achieved based on our WKCE assessments given last fall. She recognized that our achievement is not currently at an acceptable level. She also outlined that at the same time, we are making strides in the right direction and although we hope to be moving by leaps and bounds. She discussed that this is the last year that we will have this data for comparison, next year the Smarter Balanced Assessment kicks in and we will have all new baseline data. We will still be able to compare ourselves to our neighbors and the state, but we will not be able to measure growth from this school year to the next.

As evidence that our district does exhibit traits of continuous improvement, Ms. Brueggen explained that annually, we report out on our WKCE Scores. She explained that historically, it has been hard to draw concrete conclusions from this data or take a lot of stock in it because of when it was administered. We know from many internal assessments that our district annually suffers a great amount of summer loss. It is hard to put a lot of stock in an assessment given just 6 weeks after school has started, as we are still measuring much of that loss instead of student achievement made possible by our system.

She also explained that beginning last year, with the 2012-13 school year, Wisconsin established performance standards (cut scores) comparable to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) cut scores for the WKCE reading and mathematics content areas.These WKCE performance levels were revised to more closely align with national and international expectations of what is required to be college and career ready. This change did not happen for Language Arts, Science and Social Studies. Unfortunately, this paints our performance in Reading and Math in a less desirable light.

Stephanie then explained then showed charts and further explained the results, which were, unfortunately, somewhat disappointing. She went on to discuss the continue steps we are taking as a district and individual schools to address the achievement issues. 

She explained that for Reading and Math the Smarter Balanced Assessment will be replacing this assessment. We are pleased that this assessment is being given in the spring of next school year, as we hope it will be more indicative of our educational system’s impact on student achievement. She talked about how we have been working hard to increase student achievement in Reading and Language Arts through our work with the Literacy Collaborative Model. We know that we have not yet reached our goal in terms of student achievement and will continue to work with teachers on fidelity of implementation as they now have more training under their belt at the elementary level. Middle School will be beginning down this path of training next school year as well. In Math, we know that we have slightly higher data, but still continue to strive toward higher student achievement. At the secondary level, we adopted new math materials 2 years ago to provide more rigorous learning. Additionally, at the High School level, teachers in the areas of Reading and Language Arts and all areas have and will be engaging in professional development in effective strategies in Reading and Math. 

Finally, she referred back to our mission statement saying, "As a district committed to “Inspiring Excellence”, we continue to set goals around student achievement and regularly monitor our progress towards these goals. This year, individual teachers monitored their data across the system more than we have in the past because of educator effectiveness. As you have heard/will hear in the update on the strategic plan, we continue to make gains in the area of Student Growth and are beginning to close our gap toward desired student achievement. We still have more work to do, but we have a lot of great things in place that with time, will help us have a true and positive impact on student achievement." This is just one example of how our district is making the continuous improvement cycle "a habit of the mind" as described in "The Key Work of School Boards".

Another item on the agenda was a report from our community facilities task force. This is a group of mostly community members across a broad spectrum who were assembled earlier this year to look at our current facilities and address any needs that they found. The group has been working with the administration, a construction management team and a team of school architects. They progressed through a series of tours, meetings and discussions about needs, costs, options and a community survey in order to put together a proposal that was presented at this board meeting.

As the book states, "continuous improvement thrives on good information." This process was filled with good information from the tax impact of a potential referendum to the first-hand information that group got from touring and meeting at a different district site for each of their meetings. Using that information allowed for an efficient and effective timeline to move this along. The recommendation that was presented to the board calls for the demolition of a very old and outdated elementary building, the building of a new building and some other upgrades across the district. It does not address all the needs identified, because they surveys showed that the community is not ready to take on that much tax burden and the committee really wanted to let the data lead them. 

These two examples show that our district is in that mind-set of always looking for ways to better serve our children by constantly improving the educational experience that they are receiving. It's all about "Inspiring Excellences!"

The three steps that I would take as a superintendent to improve the board focus on continuous improvement would be the following:

1. Hold an annual board retreat each summer to review data and set priorities for the coming year
2. Adopt a board document management system that would allow for efficient and secure sharing of documents and communication between the board and me, the superintendent.
3. Seek out targeted professional development for the board president and me to solidify our working relationship and best serve the full board and the district.

Community and Belonging

I have to admit that the Community book by Peter Block, was not my most favorite read. I found that he belaboured his points and was quite repetitive. It is actually unfortunate, because his premise is absolutely solid. If we "build the social fabric and transform the isolation" in our communities we can create more supportive, positive and effective outcomes for all members of the community.

My take-aways would be that as a leader of a large community (school district) within a larger community (town or towns) I would need to make the building and strengthening of that "social fabric" a priority. Block uses quite flowery language and more "touchy-feely" speak than I am comfortable with, but the idea of focusing on the gifts and talents that each member of a group brings to the table is important. It is also key to frame meetings ("gatherings" in Blockese) in terms of defining the positive change that we wish to create.


Block's assertions about the "inversion of cause and accountability" do fit well with educational institutions. If we are functioning properly as a professional community of educators, then students would be at the center of our operations, much the way Block states that communities need to shift their focus from leaders to its citizens. Many of the steps that Block outlines for making this shift are similar to what we, in education, have been doing for a number of years now through Defour's PLC (Professional Learning Communities). I plan to integrate things such as using the power of small groups and framing powerful questions to move forward with our PLCs in the building and in the district. This coming year, I have carved out time to set up regular small group conversations using powerful questions, using "dissent conversation" and hopefully leading to "commitment conversations" in solving some of the sticky issues of improving student achievement and improving classroom instruction.