superintendents see we're going to just start in with having an opening statement from dr mckenzie and then the school committee will be asking some questions so we're very grateful to the media center for arranging to have this broadcast  live thank you very much and to the work committee for giving up their meeting time so that we could have this so dr mckenzie as i think everybody knows is currently the executive director of the lower pioneer valley education collaborative she spent a week a half ago she spent a day here in the community meeting with students and staff and leadership council school committee had a lovely dinner and then meeting with the community then monday night the school committee met and chose to move to candidates for with so dr mckenzie is here and a lot of people thank you very much so good evening to everyone here and anyone who's watching and i just want to th many and thank everyone who's been involved in the process for inviting me to participate in this final states and i also want to specifically think the entire belmont community your faculty your teachers your students your parents everyone with whom i've interacted in this process has been completely engaged and i thoroughly enjoyed meeting and it certainly speaks to the care that you brought to this entire search process which also speaks to clearly your dedication to your school so the that and my in my opening statement i would just like to restate why i would like to be the superintendent of belmont i have really strong beliefs about what public education could and should be i strongly strongly believe that education should cultivate creativity and not curtail it and that an excellent education certainly has to include an emphasis on academic rigor but only too narrowly or solely focus on things like soley on grades academic achievement or test scores we that's just insufficient and that to truly provide an exceptional educational experience we have to focus on not only academic academic rigor and opportunities for high levels of academic achievement but we also have to provide opportunities for students to receive an education in the arts we have to tend to their physical wellbeing and we have to provide adequate social and emotional supports to ensure their emotional development psychological we and it's evident to me that belmont understands what it means to give a truly excellent education and that you don't have a narrow focus on what education on how you define excellence that you have an expectation that all students have access to a rich and diverse curriculum and access to all kinds of opportunities that attend to their physical needs their emotional needs and their intellectual development and to that end i feel is so the values of the district align well with my beliefs and my values which is why i would like to serv key areas the first one would be to fork focus organizational effort efforts and to allocate resources or ensure that resources are allocated to make sure that all students do have access to a rich and diverse curriculum that they have access to arts education  social and emotional supports and to that we're tending to their physical wellbeing as well and so when i think about an entry plan i think about pre entry actions and entry action cypriot reactions are what happened between signing the dotted line from then until june thirtieth and the entry actions happen on to live up to some of the pre entry actions when i'm looking at ensuring ensuring these curricular components and access for all students would review all instructional audits from various kinds of agencies whether those were department of elementary and secondary education reports and yesterday's reports pertaining to the curriculum instruction and assessment practices of the district i would review the programs of study for all of your schools and i would review the extra curricular options that were available to students i would also attend events in the community and at the schools in order to get a sense of how the district my perception of how the district was operating as it pertains to that particular focus area and then as an entry action so after july one in the first ninety days i would ensure that i met with the district leadership team with the instruction leadership team to have conversations about their perceptions of the strength of the curriculum where the curriculum was particularly strong in places where they feel as though the district could grow or could improve and how would they prioritize the need for improvement or the need for growth i would take time to also have conversations about the district's assessment system what there is the district using how effective are they in helping teachers to do their work and to help students and parents understand how students are fairing another focus area that i would have would be to ensure or contribute to a highly effective governance team and certainly first and foremost that's working with the school committee and pre entry plan would be providing you with my thoughts on an entry plan and requesting your feedback and also attending the school committee meetings as just a member of the public between now and the start date of july one to get a sense of school committee operations it's not just working with the school committee and this is also kind of feeds into another focus area which is about  building support and public support for the schools in belmont and building trust in the community and i believe we do that through transparent decision making and effective communication and so and i also believe that i can do that and that all of us can do that by advocating for our public schools so again pre entry actions would be to the extent that the school committee felt that it was appropriate identifying key officials and town key constituen groups community based organizations select board finance committees various committees and it to the extent that the school committee recommended that setting up meetings with people between now prior to july one and then identifying with the school committee how frequently it makes sense to meet with people the nature of those meetings what kinds of communication is most critical and hopefully have that regular meeting schedule in place prior to starting on to a lot of one and then making sure that there is frequent contact and the frequent contact with all kinds of folks in the community and this is focusing again more on community based organizations and local leaders in various kinds of constituent groups that frequent contact is critical one because it ensures effective communication and ensures dialogue but it's also critical because it provides an opportunity to advocate for schools i think you've heard me say before that we shouldn't limit our contact to budget season and it should be all around to ask but it should be constant can constant and ongoing because education is the most important investment that any town makes it is a long term investment and so in order for people to be kept apprised have their return on investment we have to constantly communicate with them and the fourth priority area an interest plan for me is ensuring that we have a positive and trusting relationship in the educational community with the staff with parents with students and so again pre entry activities to the extent that i was welcome to or or it was  acceptable i would be very interested in meeting with faculty prior to july one meeting with administrators meeting with parents if that's something that the school committee would be willing to organize so not waiting until july to get to know some of the parents in the community and hear what their priorities are directly from them what are their greatest hopes what are their greatest fears and what is really what are some priorities that they would like to see addressed at the outset and similar to working with officials establishing a regular establishing frequent and regular opportunities for parents to interact with the ministration and that does not necessarily mean that parents are always coming to a place with an important thing to do from appointment date until june thirtieth is also identify the ways in which people prefer to communicate do they like to use technology do they like to you social media do they blogs are they are they people who will go to a website or they prefer information to come to them through twitter or through other forms of communicating with people so getting a sense in  of the ways in which people would like you to communicate with them the frequency with which they would like that communication to occur and then establishing what those are and setting up ensuring that that schedule is in place on july one  point in terms of maximum class sizes and how you would go about controlling that and communicating with the so i think it's important whenever we look at something that we are potentially going to define as a problem and certainly increasing in rome and there's a wonderful opportunity there and then there are some issues that ensue as a result of increasing in a moment and that means do we have adequate staff to have adequate space in your question what is an optimal teacher student ratio and i don't believe that that is a fixed number i mean here's why so i think first of all and i've said this before i think i've said it every time i've spoken to you it's probably getting a bit old now but that decision making authority should correlate with proximity to the learner so the closer you are to the learner the more he she drive decision making and so if if i'm if i am about to have a conversation with people about optimal class size i want to make sure that i'm having conversations with the people who are closest to learn or the teachers and and i wouldn't start with what is the optimal class size i mean i would i would want to know overall not just teacher student ratio but when you were able to do your best work describe to me the conditions in which you were doing enough work and certainly the number of students in the class has to do with that but that's not the sole determining factor of what creates an effective learning environment and that answer should also be i would also want to have a conversation about the rationale so the meaning that for very young children that might be much smaller i know we do career in technical education so it is art we've typically see class sizes of twelve thousand students sometimes you have two teachers and fifteen students it depends on the nature of the shop it depends on the kinds of equipment that students will be using and the level of supervision required for those students so it isn't a fixed number but the way in which i would get that information is to have conversations with the people who are providing the education and that's also part of the conversation i would want to have with parents is there and it's less about how many other students are in a class but more about when your child's learning experiences are exceptional when when they are most effective that has more to do with the the the the nature and the degree of attention from an adult right so how much is required and how much collaborative learning time because i think that their might tend towards smaller size classes than are fiscally they're realistic right so how do you how you go balancing this tension so and part of i think i used the same kind of decision making framework in the in the written response that that i had provided the committee early on so up front this goes back to why i would not necessarily just go in and say what's optim first of all let's describe the most advantageous advantageous conditions for learning right and now let's prioritize those conditions which ones let's prioritize where we want to start right and then and then we have to make a decision about what's our priority if we're going to address class us and if class size is something that we hope to reduce and it may not be in every single case but but for the sake of how would you get to the difficult piece of this let's assume that everybody says every class size needs to be reduced and as you say that's just physically not viable to do mediately across the board in a uniform way and so part of the conversation has to be as a result of making this change so we don't simply want to implement a strategy without being clear up front what we expect to be different as a result of having implemented a strategy so as a result salt of reducing class size to acquiring literacy at a higher level of literacy at a faster rate or smaller class sizes are better for the social and emotional development of a child depending on the problem that we're trying to solve and the outcome that we expect then we can prioritize where we start to do the work based on the priority of the outcome because that makes sense so if the outcome we're going to derive by implementing the strategy is a high priority outcome we have data that's not necessarily just want maybe we also have anecdotal data that says that we really need to attend to the emotional needs of a particular student group and this is where they are and that's a priority outcome addressing that need and we believe that by reducing class size for this population it will affect that outcome then now it's where we would start that conversation though has to happen up front in other words it's really critical when we know that not everybody is going to be equally satisfied with the rate of implementation which is a given in any organisation and particularly in education it won't come quickly enough or to come too quickly we're not i didn't get it first or or i wish i got it last whatever that is we have to be clear up front of how we're going to decide when we can't do everything at once what will get done and so that has to be clearly articulated people and then we can have a debate about whether or not the framework was applied so we have these the way in which we're going to make a decision we have a criteria for making a decision and an x and understanding up front sometimes some people will be dissatisfied dissatisfaction can happen we may not be all equally happy but our only real debate is did we stay true to the principles that we said we were going to apply the criteria that we we said we're going to apply when making the decision council the faculty the students at the high school or community members reported on feedback forms when you had your full day here as you mentioned you've stated that one of the significant roles of the superintendent is to create an environment that allows people to do their jobs to create conditions where talented people can excel could you please say more about how you would go about this trying to operationalize we just write what is really mean to create the conditions where people can do their best work is outlined in a lot of the work that they gallup organization has done around employee engagement and they've done significant research on what they refer to as the twelfth factors in the workplace that correlate with high levels of employee engagement one of those things and they also focus on identifying your our own strengths and being aware of the strengths of other people and that doesn't mean that we have in our weaknesses but people are far more productive when they're engaging in tasks a play to their strengths they're engaging in work that they enjoy doesn't mean that that gets to be every single day every workday of all of our lives but what what i have learned and i was really fortunate the superintendent that i had in west springfield public schools had all of us actually take is she she invested heavily as some of the work for the entire staff and so what i actually learned from direct experience is that very often and one person strengths are not the same as another person strengths so there are people who are very strong at a ranging and details and scheduling and and they are very good at that and they're  people who are very good at seeing strategically connecting concepts and ideas and seeing larger plans and there are very people people who are really strong at the interpersonal part and advocating for support so one of the key ways in  which i believe we create conditions where people can do really good work is one look for people strengths be very clear about what those are not just oh i like you and you're nice that's great but very specifically what are the habits the skills the knowledge  disposition that you possess that clearly is a strength of yours and make sure we're aware of that in each other try to identify when there are projects on which around which we need to collaborate consciously try to apportion tasks within a project in ways that play to people strengths gallup also talks about the importance which this usually sounds on to people but the importance of having strong interpersonal relationships at work as a matter fact one of their engagement questions talks about having a really close friend at work and so creating opportunities for people to build meaningful relationships in the workplace think it matters that i think it's an add on a my experience has been that these factors actually they they're my x and they coincide with my experience helping people letting people know me talk about the leadership team district leadership team an instructional leadership team this is not just unique to gallup this i believe we've heard more and more and more and particularly well i'm not going to remember the names of folks and some of the colleges out here but this idea that we cannot be too risk averse if we cannot fear failure to the point of paralysis so letting people know that it's ok to take imaginative risks and intellectual risks the important piece is to communicate it's to communicate and make sure that you're communicating with your team with your employer so the other people can say ok as a result of pursuing this line of inquiry or engaging in this activity might be bias and do we need to have a conversation and then what are we trying to do why are we pursuing this path and what we hope to accomplish and if we don't that's ok a fear of failure can make it virtually impossible for people to do good work if they fear reprisals that they associate with failure whether they're students or adults they just cannot do their best work so understanding what people strengths are actively seeking to know what those are articulating them very clearly in terms of knowledge skills disposition and habits making sure that when we collaborate that we do our best to apportion tasks in a way that that what i'm doing plays to my strengths and encouraging people to voice their opinions i think that that demonstrates to people that divergent thinking is not only allowed it's krishi it dating and the more people practice asking questions and speaking up the better it is for an entire organization and i think it engender some people a sense of autonomy and a sense of accomplishment i say all the time i always want to hear the worst consequences of my best thinking because one of the i'm thinking and i'm in love with it it's a great idea and so i'm all so those are some of the very concrete ways and establishing encouraging people to have strong relationships at work good friendship and based upon that framework how would you describe your own strengths in terms of so i could you know i could list them according to the cemetery but some of my own strengths so i have a strong sense of personal responsibility when i say that i'm going to do something it is really important for me to do it and that so that's a strength and it's important when employers understand that about me that i if i have committed to following through is something i have got to follow through with it the stress that islander by not following through on what i said i will do is is too much for me to take so a strong sense of personal responsibility i am somebody who enjoys achieving i enjoy setting goals and i enjoyed meeting those goals i'm somebody who enjoys thinking and and learning that's a strength of mind so i'm somebody that if you put me on a project or are more thing in a group and there is a lot of unfamiliar information that we need to tackle in order to make a case for something i love that give me a ton of things to read nobody else wants to look at i love learning things and i enjoy it in this is been said to me i enjoy thinking i would describe it strategically and so when there are multiple ideas around when people are brainstorming i can very quickly and i enjoy seeing and making connections between seemingly disparate concepts and weaving them together in a way that is a bit more coherent and then allows people to move together collectively around a project yeah sorry i'm a little dizzy this evening so if my head movement seems odd that's the reason but i really want to be here so so i wanted to ask  i want to know a little bit more about your personal role in creating the innovative and sustainable financial model that led to your receiving the  award i wanted to know specifically what some of the most important elements of that model are and how you see them potentially translating into bill month's budget and comes from public school districts saying we need a program or service there's no guarantee of funding every year it's not based on the state doesn't give us money based on so that's a huge difference and the part of the reason that we decided to pursue a meritorious budget award is because in order to get people to invest in something they i believe that they want to be they want to understand the nature of the investment what precisely am i spending my money on and the meritorious budget of work requires that you provide a tremendous amount of information to in our case to seven communit about the organizational structure about the financial piece about the goals and objectives of the organization and the extent to refer to which a resource allocation aligns with that very often that's taken for granted when we create a budget so we say these are the things we want to do and here here's our budget and very clearly making the alignment between you can see there was an increase in investment in the following line items directly relates to the strategic goal and objective and as a result of this investment this is what we expect to change now that last part of it is very difficult to do and to do well and accurately and with  i guess almost to say empirically it's hard to do that but my experiences it's very common for organizations not to do it at all so they say this is important so we need to go spend this money and we don't say up front as a result of spending this money this is what we expect to be different so some of those differences that we're looking for in the beginning stages are identified solely as outputs rather than outcomes that means number of teachers who will be trained or number of students who might participate in something because we had to develop them we're still developing over time to develop very clear outcomes associated with the men's and sometimes those are tricky the innovative aspect of it goes back to the fact that we did not state aid and so that means that we have to there's no guarantee it isn't and sometimes public school districts are facing this depending on the community there's no guarantee that that we will be the choice and so we have to actively and constantly go out to our communities directly ask them what do you need although i've learned over the last eight years that sometimes people don't know what they need or they can't think of it at the moment they are asking them so we are strategic listeners we are in relentlessly in pursuit of accidental information so it's also sometimes identifying the spaces where you can gather this information about something that is a bother or trouble in a particular district and then you hear the same thing over here and that goes back to the innovation is around saying how can we tackle some of these and actually and how i might we develop that collaborative develop a program or service that enhances regional capacity so the innovative part of it really comes from the fact that we constantly have to go out looking for what what do the districts need and sometimes trying to think in advance of what they only need of what they're not even thinking about i think i gave this example to the students i give this example to the students i said i can still remember and i may have given it to you as well i can still remember reading an article a few years ago now at least three years ago now reading an article that talked about how prior to twenty twenty one of the fastest growing industries in this country would be leisure travel in space i mean try to get your head around what does that mean and i thought that that's crazy and then now the gentleman from is it virgin atlantic who wants to have twenty fourteen first fun trip into space i won't be on that i have i don't even know who would be the but so that's that seems way out there but i really step back and say so what are the implications for education when you really think about that what does that mean in terms of the kinds of technological knowledge and stem capacity that students need to have our districts in a position to give it immediately and started dressing them are they even ready to define it and so that's an example of looking for opportunity and then seeking partners outside of public education when it interests you mass dartmouth and mit whoever might have an interest in that and say have you been thinking about this do you know what the implications might be through k twelve  twelve education would you be willing to partner with us and help us think about curriculum partnerships opportunities what do we need to be thinking about that we're not thinking  right all right so you've decided to initiate a lunch with the superintendent opportunity for students in the district could you please describe the first lunch meeting between you and one belmont student what grade or school is the student and what are one or two questions you would ask and what would you hope to achieve as a result of this lunch experience so i have one student right  hear with the senior wishes they knew in kindergarten or wishes they had paid attention to it they got to do it all over again and i'd like to hear the questions at the kindergartner had for the senior about what this whole experience was going to be like and how the senior described that but if i personally had to just pick a student wow that is tough i'm assuming i get other lunches so i just start with in this case i would probably there there is some of the questions that your students asked me when i was on my site as a there are students with whom i would want to follow up so i would want to understand more clearly the motivation behind some of those questions were there opportunities that they feel as though they weren't being afforded or that they wanted more and so from those students they were extraordinarily thoughtful to get a better sense for them of what is working really well what have been some of their best experiences educationally and what aspect of the experience made it so good what what contributed to their sense of it being an excellent educational experience i would absolutely but at every level i would want to hear from students at every single grade what's what's the best part what's the most troubling part is there is there a time that things shifted dramatically that things went from find a stressful are there and are there several students who identify similar spaces and i would also be very interested in looking at data to identify students who may be struggling with schooling gauge meant as evidenced by perhaps low attendance or other things and i would be very interested in reaching out to those due to especially if a pattern emerged over time so i had students in the past that really ran into some struggles around schooling gauge met in high school and every time i've asked those students so i have had tea with those students in my office and i have because i'm genuinely curious when when did things to rail you know it's amazing i can still remember a girl sitting in my office a young lady she sensed graduated from our place this was a couple of years ago and i said and she was having some trouble still reengaging with school and i said when did when did and she had a lot of strong opinions about how she felt about school and wasn't very positive and i said when did this happen and she could tell me the exact day in interaction it was third grade third grade she tell me exactly what happened and how how that shaped her view which hadn't changed throughout her entire educational career so it would be important for me not to just speak with one preface it something that i've expressed to this group that i have a little bit of frustration that the mode of kind of a certain kind of dialog produces certain kind of results and you can't really learn certain thing without other kinds of interventions so i intend to create us a circumstance i'm going to create a little roleplay sure and i want to see i want to hear your reaction surely what it is so i'm actually going to may i come into your personal space absolutely myself as well but i will just go and launch into it and just see what you can give me absolutely right i'm sixty five years old and i've lived in belmont my whole life thank you i went through the back of my school system yes i even went to the c high school all my high i love our town of homes but i want to fix income and my taxes are already too high so i was really disturbed when i heard they're trying to get an override passed this year why do the schools need more money final test scores are great practically everyone goes to college what is the problem i hear the class sizes are in the high twenty's well so i went when i went to school we had thirty to thirty five people in a class and look at me me and my classmates turned out fine when you were invited to be superintendent i thought well here's a good experience school leader who's going to strike a balance between spending and revenues it's going to be realistic not wasting our money on unnecessary frills but all this money we spent on special programs and wellness and concussion training and yells and i pads never mind the teacher salaries for still over the one these frills are being paid for my hard earned tax dollars and now they want the town to support an override and a vote for a debt exclusion for a new high school in the same year and we can't afford it so with all these new initiatives not these new plans i'm beginning to wonder are you really the person i thought you were is going to have a balance or you kind of a progressive in a moderate outfit you know who are you can distress i really am sorry that it's clear to me that it's incredibly stressful when people are looking at their finances they have limited resources and there's a chance that they're going to have to spend more of those resources in  thoughtful presentation that you just provided in that presentation you indicated that you had gone to school here the schools were excellent when you went to school here and it seemed like we were able to do really good work for far less money and i would say that's probably the case with most things that we we historically have a minute been able to do and i know that we could do more but we were historically able to me whatever goal that we had educationally without spending as much money as required today and in some cases those goals have changed that we we have i believe i will leave that to all of us that we have a moral obligation to ensure that students have access to educational experiences that will ensure that they're successful now you said well our students all graduate and they all get really high marks and they all go to college so what are these other things that students need and then i think it's professionally reckless again if we only define success by these quantitative indicators of achievement and i you know i'm i'm sorry if i'm using language it sounds like two edges speak so i don't think it's enough to just say these students got good grades but if we have evidence and what i'd like to show based on our meritorious budget of work that i encourage the school committee to pursue when i got here what i'd like to show you is that the outcomes that we expected as a result of spending this money and the problems that we were hoping to address when we decided to invest the money because i agree with you just spending money for the sake of spending money because somebody said they read this was a good idea or this sounds like a great program or let's go out and do it i don't believe in doing business that way i don't believe in running any kind of budget that way that what's important is that we first identify is there a problem or trying to solve just taking action for the sake of actions getting money for the sake of spending money that's foolishness was there a problem we were trying to solve was there an issue that we needed to address we have defined that problem or that issue so it could be that we realized that we had students who were beyond intellectually capable they were just downright brilliant but but they did not speak english fluently and so what i believe is that we have an obligation to help those students speak english at a level that will allow them to exercise their intellectual capacity and to contribute fully to our learning environment so we had an issue we had a problem we made an investment that was called education for english language learners in order to make that investment we train teachers that they can do really good work and as a result of making that investment this is the change that we predicted would happen anticipated that this particular cohort of students for whom it was a significant achievement gap that that particular cohort of students was going to move that achievement gap was expressed in terms of the english fluency and we expected that it was and what i can show you is that it did and so i believe that that investment was strategic and it was a good investment now there will be people who do not feel the same sense of what i call professional urgency and moral obligation around some of these issues and i completely respect that divergence of opinion and i'm not the sole i'm not the decider i'm one of a team that makes recommendations around this and we communicate with various town departments and we seek input from the community so some people may disagree with with my stand and my share and stand because i got to this position a way of thinking by communicating with others that this is something that requires investment in urgent action so some others may not characterize it as a problem i don't expect that people should agree with me they don't have to agree with encourage people to disagree with me i learned far more from that what i'm obligated to do is to show you that i didn't just race out and spend money because i went to a really good conference and the speaker was great and he signed the book that's not why i spent money that as a result of communicating with people analyzing conditions or quantitative and qualitative data all of which i should be able to show you what i looked at i can define the problem or issue we were trying to address with the investment the change we predicted we don't tell you after the fact oh yeah it worked because we're going to decide now what the outcome was whatever outcome we got it's going to be the why we say that in advance and then we publicly and transparently share with people this is what we expected this is what actually happened as a result of this we believe that the investment is worth continuing or clearly it isn't so i know you transparent logical decision making i cannot expect you to necessarily agree with all of us and some of those if you want to line by line teacher salaries  would say let's let's pull let's pull the data from the region that in order to have educational excellence we have to pair pay a competitive wage that's not just a public sector mindset that's certainly a mindset of the translates into the private sector and i would argue that if you looked at regional pay that you may not be as disturbed as you are at this moment thinking that perhaps there's that that somehow something here is inconsistent with what's happening regionally you mentioned educator pay you mentioned looking for a debt exclusion there is no way that certainly we can go down that path without the support of the community and the support of taxpayers is these are things that have to go to vote and we don't get there without having many many conversations about people and even a facility a facility is an investment and so it isn't enough to say we need a new space because it's the twenty first century and everybody needs to have the jetsons as a high school or we need to be clear that this is a huge investment what will be different as a result of this investment and i think that learning environments matter and i've come to that conclusion as a result of having conversations with people in higher education in industry when we build our budget part of what we look out when we develop our district priorities is we communicate with people in industry we communicate with people higher education and we ask people what are the intellectual social habits and mindsets and skills that you expect people that order to succeed in these environments those environments are changing and so we have to change we are successful in order to continue being successful and we are successful and we will continue being successful doing the exact same thing if nothing changes that has not been my experience in my life many things have changed and so i'm going to be successful in a changing environment there's a chance and need to change what i'm doing and how i do five i have a second question you don't want public school leaders as i'm sure you know have developed a mission statement as well as a vision statement which focuses on goals and priorities that we hope to meet by two thousand and seventeen so i think this she did all of the supporting continuous improvement in overall program matic and fiscal stability by engaging in ministers teachers students and community stakeholders in generally accepted practices of long term strategic planning and that's resonating with me right now because of the conversation that i just had this month conversation over here so how do you know it's probably why i selected this right now is obvious from from the conversation t small conversation we just had but how i might work with the district leadership team the school committee and the instructional leadership team in order to realize this particular goal  i like strategic planning i believe sometimes that strategic plans can end up just sitting on a shelf but i like doing the things that i claim to have done enough a conversation i actually enjoy doing those things so i enjoy understanding with people and i'm i'm relentlessly curious about how people made decisions how they got to where they're at and when they originally and initially started down a path  idea i keep coming back to is what were they expecting to change what were they expecting to observe what was going to be a different different as a result and so i would be particularly interested in not only reviewing the current strategic plan but getting an understanding from from all stakeholder groups of the extent to which they feel as though that that actually represents where they feel the district needs to be i would be interested in evaluating the data that was used to determine the objectives and goals within the plan i would be very curious as to how the data may have changed since the inception of any previous plans or district improvement plans what data do we look at how has how have things changed or have they changed and what do we need to do again this idea of what's our vision where do we want to be right now to what extent do we feel we're there what is the data that we're consistently looking at to make determinations about our performance relative to where we say that we have to be when we evaluate that data what we believe it's telling us what what does it mean and then what actions can we take what investments are going to make as a result of what we are observing and when we make those investments purchase training invest in professional development adopt a new curriculum whatever that is when we make those investments and we take those actions clearly delineate upfront outputs who will be impacted to what extent duration frequency outcomes what will change when we check what we expect to see and what it to the extent that we can what how we going to decide whether to continue or whether to stop that is one conversation that rarely happens in education at all what will be the what will be the indicator that we stop investing in this practice that we stop engaging in this activity sometimes you focus very much on these these data tell us that there's a problem over here we failed to define the problem clearly we failed to translate the problem into a question how do we know what would it look like if if we were performing at a higher level what might we expect to see we make some decisions about action we're very good at making decisions about actions and engaging in activity it's not as good overall i'm talking about my experience overall in the planning with  districts strategic planning with districts and i've done a lot of this with districts because of the nature of my job now i'm a school committee so very good at identifying activities not as good as clearly stating what's how the evaluate the impact of the activity and rarely if ever do people say and this is this is when will stop even in private industry doesn't do that very well and when you read literature about management private industry they say that is critical no i wonder if you could speak a little bit about your own vision if you wanted to talk about that currently are of not just how do you craft it but what is your vision so that vision that vision is captured very well in the vision statement the mission statement rather as the belmont public schools and also in the vision statement and so these ideas of learning and thinking creating and serving very important and topics that i've touched on  i'm going to go back to my opening statement so my vision is that we were framed from narrowly defining education so that creativity and that isn't just about arts creativity is about taking risks it's about exploring technology it's creativity is an important component i believe stem subjects of literature of all subjects my my vision i put a high premium on creativity there was a great article about the creativity crisis in the united states that collectively our scores on measures for me that vision means that we recognize that we define education in a way that is extensive as i said in that opening statement that we don't solely evaluate the quality of education based on the presence of  academic rigor that is a critical component and in the absence of academic rigor i do not believe that you can call education excellent so it is a critical and it's essential component of an excellent educational system but when education is  evaluated soley by that criteria then i believe it is insufficient because you must have you must speak as as theirs and educational there's a gentleman who  often talks about this guy named serkin robinson who talks about the importance of speaking to the parts of students that art has often spoken to and in some educational experiences so it must include an appreciation for the arts not just appreciation for the arts but encouraging students to foster and to increase their capacity to express themselves creatively at some point physical wellbeing social and emotional supports and  really important for me there are students who can be extraordinarily high achieving and they still are not gauged with school so that they simply come to school do their work disengaged from school and i believe that it is important for students to engage with school i believe is important for parents to feel as though they have a choice in what happens in their public schools and that's a critical part of the vision it's not only what we will do but a vision should also be thinking about and how we decide what's important and that we ensure that we bring voice and i've said this throughout my visits here and it isn't just obviously parents are critical but i said in my opening statement that education is the largest and i would argue most important investment of any town and not a municipality and not every person in that town or municipality has children so it is absolutely not just parents this is a collective investment so making sure that they have ways in how we set those priorities but that every student have access every family and what's particularly important to me is that that children aren't left out of the conversation so that no one is left out of the conversation what i mean is like actively seek look for the outliers who when everything is going particularly well look for the outliers who are who who seem to not be getting as as completely served by the system as they could be and they could be outliers in either end but look at outliers who feel as though they're not getting as much from the system as they could or they should and ask how can we do that  sure i want to ask you about that as we know the demands on the superintendent's time are extremely high certainly within the workday and as you mentioned there are all kinds of events that one might choose to go to or there are lots of evening meetings and so i just wanted to explore a little bit about how you would manage your own work life balance and what your expectations would be on the others of your leadership team so the balance part is really important that balance purpose extremely important i have said to one of the groups with whom i've had a conversation here are groups of which i've had a conversation here that even now in my hiring and i've said i don't hire a lot of people have very few direct reports  but one question i always ask is what aspect of your life brings you the greatest joy to talk to me about that part of your life and invariably it's a spouse a child it's family or some experience sometimes it's a career it's never a job sometimes it's a vocation it's not a job and when somebody describes sad i tell them in the in the interview stage or at the end this is clearly somebody that we're looking at choosing i make it clear to people that i believe that work should enhance our ability to show up in those parts of our lives that are most important and not detract from it it's a very important thing so if it feels as though members of the leadership team or anybody this is work has turned into something that is detracting from their ability to show up in the parts of their life that are really important they're not going to have a conversation with that person a private conversation to try to help them adjust and and i don't know kind of recalibrate how they spend their time one of the ways and i think the team with whom i work with say this one of the ways that i try to do that now with people is remind them let's define the work before the expectation gets handed down to us from some other place before the state education agency tells us about the new mandate of the expected initiative before before some sort of agency tells us that there's an expectation that we have to fill let's define the work before that i think i asked the people who work with me to tell me what their work is i tell them don't tell me what your job is i know what your position is i pay you well what is your work the work that you do regardless of where you find yourself some of the answers i get are absolutely amazing that you know in career and technical education that that every that every student that this part their goal is to inspire students around what happens when we create and we build me imagine see the effects of our work in the world so people talk about what their vocation is it's a whole different answer and then when we start to feel stress i try to remind people remember what did you say your work was so stop talking about it as task execution the extent to which this piece of work this expectation is in service to what you believe  shift your focus that that helps considerably and if you tell me it is absolutely not in service to what you believe and it's really just about some sort of compliance expectation then i'll tell you honestly i often do it i mean inspired people back to the original question or when i believe that you asked me of how do you really create those conditions to these steps that it's possible to allow people to do the work that they find most inspiring and to take away those things that are inherently an inspiring that's a lot of what i do a lot of what i do and i've said by way of example sometimes what one person finds inherently onix inspiring words getting in the way of what they need to do is really something i want to do to use that example of busty  minded but they have multiple points throughout the day to have contact with students so this feels like a duty totes described and for me it's not it's an opportunity i have very i have far fewer opportunities for one one contractor students i'll read them when they get off a bus is a wonderful opportunity so those are some very specific ways and then i mean that doesn't speak to well this i guess speaks to my own balance it's all of those things so i'm i'm the work is not the job that the work is i stay pretty motivated because i really do approach every day intending to make a contribution intending to to do something that is of service to somebody else or so in service to something else a greater ideal in it and it keeps me motivated it's not just a list of tasks and when we do feel stressed out this is this is a foolish little thing but now it's caught on in the office so when somebody walks into your office and they just they are decomposing they are overwhelmed and we say alright tell me right now what's the date today december eleventh two thousand and thirteen seven  nine ok you have thirty seconds tell me what you were stressed out about on december eleventh two thousand and twelve and seventy five and the reality is you're probably stressed out about something you just don't remember what it was it didn't matter and the things you do remember those big impact events that really knock us off our game we were never stressed out about it because nine times out of ten we didn't see him coming right so that's one of the common ways that we keep each other  pass pass and how we think about the work and how we talk about the work directly influences how we experience the work so talk about your task in a way that demonstrates that you see the alignment between the activity and what you believe in and if you cannot make that alignment that's where i say superintendency about stewardship bring it to me because i'm motivated when i help other people experience a student what do you envision your typical work day to be as superintendent sure so i envision a typical workday is to preferably start a building this is assuming of course that there aren't any traditions that are that i have to absolutely uphold for example there may be some standing meeting that if it didn't happen every week at this everything would fall apart but assuming that none of that exists i would like to start at different buildings each day and i would like to start at different buildings on besting i think you learn a lot there and parent drop so you have a great opportunity to interact with students and interact with parents also learn a lot about potential potential issues or problems that you might be unaware of whatever building i started and i would hope to or i would go into the building and do walk through is in various kinds of walk through it depending on what the district leadership what the instructional leadership team and what the faculty had determined were the most effective ways of getting feedback formal and informal feedback so some of those who walked through might be walked those that are really about getting into classrooms and observing the instructional corps and having conversations with people informal conversations about what i'm saying and i can say i am really always looking for where people are most successful part of that is it's important to me to exhibit and express my appreciation to the faculty for what they do because here's here's one thing i know a perhaps not well and perhaps this is the best thing to say when you're really trying to get a job but truly any district could lumber along with superintendent and if every teacher didn't show up you would have a bit of a problem right so it's important to me to go out and tell the faculty that i appreciate what they're doing so walking through buildings having informal conversations with faculty and looking for opportunities in which i could that i could speak i have wished to speak with students that were not disruptive to the learning environment and i'm assuming when you say typical day i've already had an opportunity to talk with the building principal and with the faculty so that this is not disruptive it's just common place so start with bus duty spend time walking through the building where i started have a chance to check in with teachers informally or formally depending on what was schedule and have an opportunity to talk with students  i would see perhaps a typical day having something scheduled where meeting with somebody from the community looking for opportunities to get out and meet with either community organizations or town officials or people in the community looking for ways because that idea of advocating for schools means seeking opportunities to tell people about what's going on in the schools why it matters to the community as a whole but also  found that people are much more inclined to listen when you show up and say how can i help you how can i help you accomplish something or do something how can our public school district be of service to your how can i individually help you and well then i'm helping that provides kind of a and attentive easier to how great schools are so meeting with the community and getting out in the community if i'm lucky there's something going on in the schools or immediately after school in terms of an extracurricular activity or a game or an enjoyable way to to watch some of the things that students do outside of academics along the way there i would eat something and inordinate amount of candy probably i'm the bad habit of mine and yeah and that would be that would be a great day and of course checking in with district leadership staff but i would also i mean i'm not i'm not implying that district leadership staff would be you know be recruited into involuntary bus today i'm not saying that i want the record but hopefully that district staff that the district leadership also has an interesting getting out to schools and seeing having conversations with people so that we're we're not just central office that many people are unaware of entirely what the function is and i'm not saying that's the case at all but certainly in some of those you know meeting with the district team individuals or collectively on a day at central office or perhaps structuring the day in such a way that work together that a building and meeting with folks out there because i've also said in multiple conversations with with the folks in belmont that i believe that superintendent's office the central office should be a central service agency if you're going to be a service agency you have to get out and ask people what what you need how can we help what's working how can we build on it what's getting in the way how can we push it out written that it was really important to you to work with a team that shared a compelling vision and i wanted just to hear you talk a little bit about how you see that  working in a district like ours where the leadership team has been working for quite some time now on crafting their vision  belmont schools and so you would be walking into a sort of an existing vision and so how do you then meld that with your own vision and what do you see as the sort of happen i guess is the balance between fostering that existing very hard herd working the division that was worked on and is being promoted and then but also having putting your own stamp on things that's a really good question so i i want to make sure that i'm clear that i i really like absolutely believe in imposing an individual individual agenda or you know laterally imposing my values on anyone or a group of people i do think that i have a responsibility i have an obligation to make those values very transparent and that's feedback i've even gotten from my team there were grateful for is that they can pretty much g where i'm going to fall on any issue because i've they know what i stand for they know they may they may misjudge what my decision will be but they can almost tell you and here's what she's going to say like this is because they just know what i stand for and that's important to me not only so that is so as not i don't have to impose that on them necessarily but they know what i stand for and in some cases we come to a decision through consensus but there are times where i have made you know level decisions that was the expectation and i've made difficult decisions maybe as around an employee issue or something else and they're very clear on what i stand for it's also important for me that they know that because when my actions are disingenuous when they perceive a lack of alignment between what i spouse in terms of values and beliefs and what i'm doing i expect i actually demand that they call me on that i just don't want to be that person  so in a in any organization i mean the clamor to have had absolutely no way of the collaborative when i arrived there were some folks who had a very different idea of what our obligations were in terms of providing in terms of the students whom we serve so there was some very there was some we didn't have a shared opinion  of who whom whom we should which students should be attending our programs or which students should be should be attending our program two is never shared vision around and even though in some cases every fiber of my being said i can't do this i can't do this what i asked people was help me understand help me understand why you believe that help me understand why you think that why you think that only a student with this profile would be successful in this learning environment what has led you to that belief and not in a confrontational way really and that's part of this discussion and can you show me and it doesn't all have to be perfect excel supergrass quantitative data launch a two nil studies just how did you get to that decision with quantitative data you analyzed it anecdotal doesn't mean it's wrong it was a subjective how did you come to the determination that this is the profile the student who would be successful in this program and what i found was that it was built off of a few people kind of the collective wisdom of an in an entirely other group i'm speaking ambiguously on purpose but it was built off of the collective wisdom of other professionals in a similar field who thought who would say repeatedly we a student must have the following profile to be successful in this type of educational environment and so what i did was just invite around this issue i said would you be opposed to testing that assumption would you be opposed to testing the assumption so could we say let's let's pretend that that criteria let's let's come flexible with that criteria for a specified amount of time and see what happens and see test the assumption that that only one kind of student can be successful here and let's expand that and what i can tell you honestly in this wasn't like this is about monitoring the experience testing the assumption being clear about how we would do that having a how we decide if it doesn't work can't just be two opinions or if it is working what are we going to look at and i kid you not one of the other administrators is one particular administrator he and i adamantly disagreed eight years ago about the profile of the student that would work and another administrator came in i just it was it wasn't that long it was in the last month and said oh my gosh like i don't even recognize he was advocating for this student to stay here and i was sayin no you know this is not working like the data shows something and he was saying no we've got it like a complete one eighty around this issue and all it was it wasn't about imposing that my vision of access was about imposing it i i wanted to understand how the person arrived at their set of assumptions about what would work and what would work and just invited them to test that assumption and so and when there's a when things are working well i mean this is one thing that i think that leader leaders are often tempted to barge into a place and and just engaged in a multi year one act play you of one one person play so the soliloquy of leadership right that look at me and all the things i'm going to do and that's just not my experience if there's you know what is our vision and is the vision is is a vision that we can all believe in to what extent are we making progress what's the evidence that we're meeting it are there gaps in what we expect and what's happening what do we attribute those gaps to what are we going to do about it but not necessarily imposing i would probably be more adamant if i felt that people had a vision that was in some way intentionally harmful and obviously not the case so you have a high functioning school district that's doing great work my responsibility would be is there anything getting in the way of you continuing to maintain a high level of inspiration around this work and let me do that thing let me get rid of that thing i can for  time yeah ok all right so i recently was rereading an old copy of radical school reform from one nine hundred sixty nine and the editors of that book were can text realizing the critics critiques of schools at that time stating quote what they find in the classroom is suppression irrelevance inhumanity manipulation and the systematic still to fixation of what of most of what is promising in children and youth so over forty years later the education landscape is mired in standards and accountability how would you communicate to belmont citizens that teaching and learning are first and foremost human endeavors what a lovely question thank you for that all these questions have been wonderful that's really lovely i i would just say what you read from that journal in one nine hundred sixty nine so that would be an example of that word district's vision that i might be a little more in positional and trying to move them off of it that we're aiming for and inhumane and stole  adamantly disagree with the notion that we can narrowly define education that if we just get we just figure out exactly what content we're going to teach and exactly what skills and we write them down on a piece of paper everything is going to be ok i think that things change far too rapidly for that and i think the importance of standards is to ensure equitable access to records content that there is there is a place for that is to say how is that what i believe standards are trying to address is how can we assure that there's equitable access for all sorts of stuff to equally relevant and rigorous content and learning experiences so they have a place teaching learning is absolutely a human endeavor so how would i help people understand that teaching and learning as a human endeavo well i would probably point them in not to too boring and dry research or scholarly articles but even things that are far more accessible around emotional intelligence around statistically the kinds of people that are most successful in life and it has far more to do with our capacity for for meaningful interpersonal relationships and how we treat people and how we engage with people and that's certainly it isn't enough just to have those skills it is it is very important to have skills to have knowledge of content and to have very specific intellectual skills and habit but you can be brilliant and if you're you don't know how to interact with people that the really sad thing is that the world will never benefit from that brilliance and really for them it would be less likely that the world would benefit from the billions and so i think that people can relate very easily to the idea that it isn't just that what we know is not nearly as important to our success as our ability to relate well with others and in order to develop in not only that the other thing that will ensure our successes i am a big believer in resiliency and in the importance of resiliency so that means do we have do we know how to handle failure and disappointment do we know how to get up from a setback learn from that dust ourselves off and move on and and so in order for that to happen teaching learning not only has to be a very human experience it has to be a very humane experience people aren't going to they certainly don't want to experience failure if if the outcome is going to be they're going to experience overwhelming shame as a result of their failure so we have to we have to create environments that are emotionally supportive otherwise people will be incapable or unwilling to risk we have to create environments where adults and students collaborate with adults to students and and within their own group because that builds opportunities to increase our interpersonal or relational capacity and then of course we have to build our knowledge and our skills  because the also what we know is i said it's not the only thing that is important but what we know certainly influences the degree influences agreed on which we can be of service because knowledge provides us with opportunities to be of more service i believe others models structures things like that if any i'm not sure what problems or anything else like that just what is your experience in that same short so most recently i would say the west bring field innovation school that we  we partnered with them to create and what alternative about that is that we provide students we try to get away from carnegie units so seat time and really look at how we would evaluate competency that was critical because the this particular school was designed for students who were not all in track to graduate on time so they were they wouldn't complete high school if we didn't find ways to measure competency rather than see time and some of that the company sees that we look at our career readiness so we have really placed a high premium on on career and technical education service learning work based learning so connecting actual jobs and evaluating when they work it's not just i want to work but what are the specific skills that we hope that they will acquire while they're out work we've integrated a considerable amount of online learning opportunities each student really has and individual eyes to learning plan and so the concepts that we've used around alternative education we've put that human part at the forefront particularly with in this particular school with this population by i think this is true for all students is really making sure that every single student is connected well known by an adult  that they have access to mentors outside of their teachers and we believe that mentoring is important and that students to benefit from formal and highly structured mentoring programs  they have good experiences and it bodes well for them in the future we have integrated online learning opportunities from an instructional standpoint when the teachers are working with students we've also been training our teachers a great deal in that program in what we describe as new literacies and that's a kind of a buzz word to talk about what are the ways what are the things and the methods and the ways of thinking we need to teach when students are accessing so much information online when they're constructing a great deal of content online not just for school but for social purposes what kinds of skills do they need in order to evaluate their own content that they produce and the impact of that content and are there long term implications for the decisions that they make but to what extent they get connect trust the content that they're consuming how do they evaluate the quality of content so online comprehension online literacy visual literacy and online content construction th the more of the alternative or kind of innovative approaches and we have done some with flipped classrooms the difficulty that we have is again for the particular population that is being served predominantly being served in the school there's you there are some some equity in access issues you have to address and even if you provide students with the technology you have to check a lot of things around equity in access before you can just move toward a flipped classroom it's not just technology it's also their obligations at home are they responsible for young children when they get home are they there are many things you have to look at it's so sometimes a simple depending and sometimes it's not you're welcome and so for the little bit of time we have and i'm grateful to have been to participate in the process to this extent and so thank you thank you for your time this evening i enjoyed this conversation i enjoyed the questions i've enjoyed my time here and regardless of how you decide i know you make an excellent decision i wish you the best of luck it wasn't too grueling with having to meet no i love to i love this thing right here that was fantastic i mean really i've never had that happen and that was