Leadership Successes, Accomplishments, and Achievements
Leadership is about empowerment, it is about mentoring, coaching, and guiding others in their work so that good things can happen. The leadership successes, accomplishments, and achievements that I have been a part of throughout my career would not be possible without the help of my peers and colleagues. The single most important part of a leader’s responsibility is to hire the right people, surround yourself with competent and capable staff and provide them with a set of clear expectations. I often highlight my successes, accomplishments, and achievements using a diagram that I refer to as “Our Circle of Success.”
Principalships
I became a building administrator at a very young age and now have collectively 19 years of experience in middle management. During my career as a building leader we accomplished many wonderful things. I believe I am perceived by others as innovative, creative, and collaborative. Center Grove Middle School received the prestigious Blue-Ribbon Award and I received the Principal of the Year Award for the work we did and the changes we made. While I was a Principal, we continually tried new things that were out of the box for that period of time in the 1980’s and 1990’s and now they have become past practice and tradition. Examples include:
Under my leadership I wanted to assure that Title IX requirements both in academics and extra-curricular were met according to the law. We developed a master academic schedule that provided equal opportunities for all children to take electives of their choice regardless of prior gender bias that existed at the time and provided an equal number of extra-curricular activities for young men and women to participate. All family consumer science, industrial technology, and physical education classes became co-educational. We were early innovators of the “no-cut” and “everyone plays” rules so that more students had an opportunity to experience the middle school philosophy of “exploratory.”
As Principal we collaborated with middle school staff from other innovative school corporations and created schools within a school concept that included Interdisplinary Teams which was not a popular idea at the time. This concept was not new on a national level but new to Indiana educators. Teaming as we called it, was a way to break down large schools like mine (1,300 +/- students) into smaller communities where teachers had an opportunity build relationships with students. This concept also provided time and opportunities for teachers to plan lessons together and improve communication with parents.
I discovered quickly that with a staff of over 200 in my building I needed to establish a set of clear expectations. Late one afternoon in 1987 I invited a teacher to meet with me regarding her performance. I proceeded to tell her that she was perceived as the most negative influence in the building and that she did not meet my expectations. At the time I did not have a clearly written set of expectations. Following that meeting I went home and spent the night writing my “Twelve Expectations” with a narrative explaining exactly what I met by each. These have been the focus of many presentations that I have made during the past thirty-two years and they have been published many times since.
Leadership Successes, Accomplishments, and Achievements
Superintendency
Many years in the principalship prepared me well for the superintendency. My school improvement teams never became comfortable with the status quo. We continually strived to make things better. Change for the sake of change is not a good thing, we used research and data as part of our strategic plans. Stephen Covey is quoted, “as good as we are, how can we become better.” Change takes time, I believe you do it with people, not to them. Covey also reminds us that “the process is as important as the outcome.” As much as we would like on occasion to tell people what to do and how to do it, we need to take time to process ideas and lead by listening. My leadership style is collaborative and that is why I believe I have been successful and able to work within twenty miles of where I lived as a young man. As superintendent of schools I was met with many challenges, none of which my staff and I could not overcome. Examples include:
As the Superintendent of Schools for 21 years I faced many financial challenges. One rule I assured my Board of School Trustees is that I will always have enough cash balance to meet our monthly expenses. I never lost one night of sleep worrying about whether we would make payroll or pay the bills. Fiscal responsibility is at the top of the list as far as I am concerned.
While Superintendent at Franklin Community School Corporation through strategic planning and community involvement we closed an elementary school, built a new elementary school, renovated a 1950’s elementary school, renovated and tripled the size of a middle school, built a new transportation center, improved athletic facilities, designed and broke ground on a new high school, and started plans to renovate the old high school for a middle school, and made the quantum leap into technology starting with the installation of fiber optics. All of this was at a cost of around $300 million dollars without a petition or remonstrance.
Negotiating contracts with teachers for some school leaders is a challenge both in process and financially. As the Superintendent of two larger than average school corporations we were able to negotiate fair contracts and settle quickly without straining the school corporation. This was accomplished with openness, fairness, and communication.
I am extremely proud of the fact that both school corporations had healthy cash balances in their general funds (operations fund now). During my last audit as a Superintendent I was told that we needed to spend some of our cash. We were told that we were not a savings and loan bank. My rule of thumb was if we had a $30 million-dollar general fund budget, we should maintain and protect our cash balance at 3.5-4 million dollars. We had nearly $5 million dollars at the time the auditor suggested we reduce the cash balance.
Strategic planning has always served as our roadmap to progress. Whether the issue was student achievement, technology integration, facility improvement, or branding the school corporation we would ask for volunteers who were representative of all stakeholders to serve on a strategic planning committee where we would design and draft an “action plan” that would serve as a living document. Action plans served as our map, though we often changed direction when inflight correction was necessary. We would use the Vision of the Board of School Trustees as our compass needle to assure that we were going in the right direction. The next step would be a discussion and reflection of our “core values” and/or “belief statements” as benchmarks for the “why” we have a perceived need for change. Once we gave critical thought to the vision, the why, and the core values we would write a “goal action plan” that included:
Vision
Mission
Values & Beliefs
Plan
Time Line
Responsibilities
Benchmarks
Data Tools
Evaluation
Celebration
More often than not it would take three, four, and sometimes five years to complete one of these goal action plans. We would review our progress and collect our artifacts during monthly meetings with committees and/or administrative meetings and make quarterly reports to the Board of School Trustees. This became a part of our culture and everyone knew they had a responsibility to these goals, held accountable, and were evaluated accordingly.
Additional successes we were proud to have included in “Our Circle of Success” were: “Quality Schools” by the Indianapolis Monthly Magazine, National Blue Ribbon High School, 1:1 K-12 Technology, Pre-Kindergarten Program, IDOE District Letter Grade of “A”, Listed as a Best High Schools in the country, Indiana Chamber Best Buy, Energy Star Award for all Schools, eLearning Innovation Award, 95% Graduation Rate, and 90%+ Passing English and Math State on Assessments.