Summary:

Join Dr. Jim and Superintendent Dan Scherry as they tackle the challenge of building a unified school district amid disparities in resources and educational outcomes. Explore Dr. Scherry's leadership journey in transforming North Spencer County School Corporation through strategic planning, community engagement, and fostering relationships. Discover how operational consistency and visible leadership led to balanced educational opportunities across schools, driving a high-performing district. Gain insights into the four-step framework used to address inequalities and promote sustainable change in education.

Key Takeaways:

• Balanced Resource Allocation: Scherry emphasizes the necessity of addressing disparities in resources to ensure an equal educational experience for all students, regardless of their school's economic status.
• Leadership in Transition: The episode highlights how leadership turnover can be an opportunity to bring in new perspectives aligned with strategic goals.
• Community Engagement: Scherry shares how active community engagement and visible leadership can drive change and foster a unified district culture.
• Curriculum Consistency: Establishing standardized curriculum pacing across the district aids in maintaining educational consistency and quality.
• Strategic Planning: The importance of strategic planning and measured progress is underscored as vital for long-term district improvements and financial responsibility.

Chapters:

00:00

Building Collaborative Teams in Resource-Limited School Districts

02:40

Building Balanced School Teams Through Coaching Insights

08:58

Addressing Educational Disparities in North Spencer School District

11:21

Organizational Change and Community Reactions

11:56

Building Community Engagement and Unity in School Districts

17:02

Collaborative Leadership and Curriculum Consistency Across Schools

19:57

Transforming Schools Through Equalization and Community Engagement

23:53

Enhancing School Safety Through Structural Improvements

24:57

Building Trust and Overcoming Challenges in Education Management

28:30

Framework for Addressing Inequality in School Districts

Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung

Connect with Dan Scherry: https://www.nspencer.k12.in.us/

Music Credit: Shake it Up - Fesliyanstudios.com - David Renda



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So how do you navigate that environment and solve the root issues while at the same time creating a cohesive and high performing district? How do you build a highly collaborative team in that setting? Those are some of the questions that we're going to tackle in today's conversation So who's going to play the role of storyteller in this discussion?

Dan taught science for 11 years. He then garnered valuable experience as a athletic director, assistant principal, high school assistant principal, high school principal, assistant superintendent, and eventually superintendent. Dan has been the superintendent of the North Spencer County School Corporation for 15 years.

So the first question of the show, Dan, welcome. What are you going to do after you retire?

So hopefully that comes true. And I can actually make ends meet doing that.

And when, and this gives a great opportunity to look back and reflect on some of the things that you've done, but before we dive into the main Topic of the discussion, which is building a high performance to school district and eliminating competition amongst schools within the district. I think it's important for you to set the stage a little bit and share with the audience a little bit more about some of those impactful experiences that shaped your overall leadership philosophy [00:03:00] as you are navigating your career.

So that was challenging to move my mindset from managing people to. Really learning about instruction and how that plays together. So I think that background of coaching really helped to, to understand how those pieces have got to work together in a human kind of way.

Or instructional excellence [00:04:00] as an area of focus in the K through 12 space. I didn't think that was really the direction that you were going to go, because one of the things that I know of coaches at least in the sports arena, is that they're able to motivate people in unique ways that are specific to that each individual.

So I was thinking you were going down the road of talking about that. piece of coaching that lends itself to really well to K through 12 leadership. So walk us through some of the things that you noticed as being a former coach that really served you well, when you transitioned into your leadership roles as a principal and eventually as a superintendent.

Pieces fit on a big on a, in a bigger team. And that personality needing someone who has a very concrete way of thinking versus someone who has really abstract way of thinking, we have jokingly on our team. We have our flower child and our extreme conservative thinker and the.

The dynamics of a group like that are so important to keep a balance. I think a tendency when you get to hire it on your own, you have a tendency to want to hire people like yourself and knowing, that coaching background gives you that perspective. If I can't have. 5 shooting guards on my team, even though they might be the best shooting guards.

I need a center. I need a point guard to distribute. So I need all those different pieces. And I really think that has helped me in establishing my bigger team as a superintendent in school.

What were the steps that you took to build out that balance team?

Again, it's, it comes back to relationship building and trust building trust with my school corporation school board of trustees. Trust with current administrative leadership team members to, to really talk through those things. And the only way you can build that trust is spending time together.

[00:07:03] Dan Scherry: I came here as a high school principal and when you begin, I was, I think, 3839. Your first job as a high school principal is stay between the, as I think you said, guard with stay and stay in bound, stay in your lane, whatever those words are. At the high school, I really was just trying to manage my own building, try to understand what we were doing at that level because that was my comfort zone.

Middle school, high school. And then as I got more comfortable at Heritage Hills High School, some of the interactions I was having currently with the current other elementary principals, the middle school principal, that 4 years of learning helped me to develop a little bit of a picture of what North Spencer was about versus what Heritage Hills High School was about.

What I'm curious about is when you first got in the big chair as the superintendent of the district. How did that shift your [00:08:00] view? And what did you notice that you weren't aware of now that you have a broader span of control?

We're composed of mainly students that were coming out of those 2 affluent schools. We also notice the same thing in the classroom in the middle school. If you talk to the principal, you talk to classroom teachers. They could tell you which school was coming, which kids were coming from which school.

At that point, we, that helped me to realize, we had some balancing to do. We had some work to do instruction and curriculum wise and facilities wise to try to give all 4 schools and equal opportunity to get them on the same page.

[00:09:35] Dan Scherry: When, as you referred to, when you finally get. To sit in a superintendent seat or a seat of leadership, I think, in any realm you all then you get to pull back the curtain, right? You get to see finances. You get to see memos. You get to see history and 1 of the things that we that I noticed was just a discrepancy between the amount of dollars that were being allocated.

To have those conversations with all 4 of us. We did. I never at any point sat down with everybody and said, hey, guys, we got a problem. We're spending X amount of dollars here and X amount of dollars here. It turned into more of a curricular conversation where our director of learning was able to say, there's a difference when kids come from this school or that school.

What they would have what they would have done, how they would have reacted. And I honestly, I think they moved on because 2 reasons they were ready in their careers age wise to move on. And I don't think they wanted to get involved in some of that conversation. It's just not comfortable. To build relationships if you're not in a relationship building mindset.

So that transitions in process, but eventually the community is going to hear about that. Some of this stuff, and they might have some opinions. So what were the things that you did in terms of community engagement to communicate the need for this sort of transformation that you noticed was going to be necessary?

And 1 of the things we did is we came in and gave them some new furnishings. We, we hired a extremely dynamic principal at 1 of our title 1 schools who literally led by example, got in with her husband pulled out all the old mulch out of a playground. Put new molds, new liner new boundaries on a playground where, you know when you do that in a small town people take note, all of a sudden there's work getting done.

We were able to just spread it out better. And really we began to take maintenance guys from one school and sharing them at the other school where there'd be two guys working together instead of working in isolation, we had that same mentality with our.

administrative staff, they would be seen together a lot. And that really, again, whether it was by conscious design or just happened as these relationships organically developed, I think there's probably a little bit of both, but most of it was just a an organic human relations. Let's make sure that we're doing what's best for our kids. All of them,

[00:14:03] Dan Scherry: so we had a, an activity in the summer called kids 1st festival, where we had all the as many people from the community organizations as we could find, from mental health to urgent care to law enforcement to firemen to Kwan is optimist. All those community organizations. And we used to do it just for 2 of our schools are our 2 title schools and we open it up to all of our schools and we moved it to our high school, which is really centrally located in our community.

Kind of like a hub and spokes are our high school and middle school campus or is a hub for elementaries would be spokes surrounding that hub. And so that was a real, I think, yeah. Noticeable thing that we did was opening up the kids 1st festival where they get free school supplies.

[00:15:17] Dr. Jim: So that makes sense. And I think that probably smoothed away for progress in those initiatives. We got a little bit of a view into how some of these disparities showed up from an operations perspective, and you also touched on how some of these resource misallocations across the district showed up in educational outcomes.

So when you look at both of those issues, how did you come up with a plan to build a more unified district and build more consistency across the district, both from an operations perspective and an education perspective?

By just by nature of personality, I was involved in a lot of community activities. Feeder programs in sports. My kids were at that age, so I was constantly in the public eye was at every ball game, high school, middle school, just visibility. And I think that developed some buy in.

But then, we developed some strategic planning regarding instruction curriculum. We began to meet with Grade level teachers from all buildings instead of meeting with the staff of Christie and the staff of David turn on the staff of Nancy Hanks, et cetera, we began to meet with the 1st grade teachers from all schools.

There was a lot of, one of the things that in schools, teachers, parents, at times, I think, pressure principles to always be in the building, worrying about your building and what you have to do. And we meet 3 Wednesdays. Out of the month, and we have really deep learning conversations. We have deep personal conversations as a 10 member team.

[00:18:04] Dr. Jim: How much of your meetings with your executive team and your leadership team were focused on doing some of the blocking and tackling at their level down into the building and what they should be doing in terms of bringing their teachers or their educate, Their entire building teams into the fold as you move forward on this transformation initiative.

So we wanted to make sure that was occurring 4 ways through all of our elementary schools. And that's an easy conversation to have with people who genuinely are bought into the, through the improvement of students. So [00:19:00] that was easy. And then the idea of, okay, here's the state standards we don't want.

Cookie cutter teachers. We want creative teachers, but we want creative teachers. That are our teaching standards, we, a lot of the conversation was guys, this isn't going to work if that 1 of our teachers are doing it. But the 8th 1 is not, we did a lot of enter, they call them groups.

Now. We just call them study groups where the building people would have. Study groups, the admin team would have study groups and we would do anything from a book study. We're doing a book study right now for this year to revisit where we've been in the last 20 years to make sure that our new staff, our new principles are.

Walking in lockstep, I, we, I think that history of where you've been is important so that people understand. Yeah, that's why we do it. And then it's pretty easy to say, hey, this has been working and we're growing. Here's the hard data that says we're growing. Let's keep going.

[00:20:07] Dan Scherry: We had the opportunity to do smaller projects for the last 12 years. So we sat down with a clerk of the works. We mapped out what needed to be done. I was very cognizant that if we did something to one of our affluent schools it would just make that gap bigger.

So we, those schools, they are too affluent, our two newer schools had built in cafeterias. Our 2 title, 1 schools we're eating lunch in their gymnasiums, then having to clean up the tables, having mopped the floor. So they lost use of their gym at least 2 hours every day for the last 30 years.

Once what? Our vision was, we're going to touch every building in an improvement mode. But we're going to start out with our title one schools. And that, that has really made those communities feel like, we are now part of North Spencer. We have in Christie, we had probably, I think there were no zero new construction things for 20 years.

In the last five or six years there's new restaurant, there's new homes. There's a new dollar general, believe it or not. So I, that, that school being the focus point of a small community is just still true.

What was your process there?

But really, the pacing of that. Came from when was funding available? We were a very financially conservative area. We didn't want to raise any of our taxes by doing projects. So each time we saw a bond coming off of our debt service. We looked at trying to maintain that tax level.

[00:23:10] Dr. Jim: When you look at that entire equalization effort or standardization effort across the district and you hit fast forward on all the stuff that you've done walk us through what the landscape looked like when you started and what it looks like now.

We, we put drywall in. We built Concrete block walls in some areas and really that again, that was a an easy sell because school safety is such an [00:24:00] issue. And we, those rooms needed to be have thicker walls. They needed to have more solid lockable doors. And so we went through. Those two schools and did that.

We moved the office. So again, back in, in those days, people came into the schools. They were, the doors were unlocked. Community members, parents would just walk in and find the office and ask what they needed to ask. So those office spaces were actually in the center of those two schools, and we relocated those to the main entrance.

So that. All patrons parents, whomever that came to visit the school had to come to the office 1st. And that again, as odd as that sounds, it was a big deal because there was a feeling that, the school is thinking through these things being proactive, even though no 1 is clamoring that this is a problem once they see the work done.

Have the conversations with either the superintendent, the principals, school board members who are very well informed and on board. That word travels very well.

[00:25:29] Dan Scherry: I hate to, I'm very poor example, Jim. I don't really, I think I'm fortunate and blessed many times instead of strategic. But, there were so many things that happened along the way that just paved the way to where we're at. We went through a real budget crisis.

And that's just not true. So having that outside perspective helped ultimately. Relationship building this idea that We need to be on a niche or whatever all these different marketing sites are. That's good. And but the face to face relationship building trust building, doing your very best to honor your word to have integrity, especially in a small community where you plan to stay now, if you're a shaker and a mover and are looking to climb the ladder, maybe it won't work.

Being able to have meetings with those people that were concerned, being able to go to their meetings, being able to meet with them in the church basement, wherever and say, that's not our goal. We don't want to close your schools. The purpose of this study was to make you aware that there's a crunch coming and if something doesn't change.

We're going to have to make some really hard decisions and, the people, because of the previous 10 years, they were able to understand and not come out here to our office, come to our school board meetings with torches and pitchforks, they were willing to listen and get on board. Now, fortunately, we happen to have a year where the state of Indiana.

But through those conversations, even deeper relationships were built so that, there's a level of trust at North Spencer that. Even though last year, our tax rate went up. Because we had some reassessment go on in our community, there was a little bit of pushback, some not nice things said on Facebook, but that lasted about 2 weeks.

And now we're moving forward and getting ready for our next budget. And, people are just satisfied and happy with where we're at. And I think that's about relationships.

[00:28:35] Dan Scherry: Email is probably the best and then I can drop a phone call or email them back and getting contact be great. They can come to Santa Claus. Jim by gosh, it's a wonderful place to visit.

That popped into my head as you were talking. I think when I break down the story or the conversation that we had and break it into steps, there were four key things that you did that I think. led to the turnaround that you experienced. The first thing was when you got into the district, you took a view into the landscape of the overall district and particularly the operating rhythm that each building is going through.

And you identified key differences in terms of how one building operates versus another. And the thing that stood out was the conversation about how lunch is done at those various buildings where You know, one building had a dedicated lunchroom. The other building was multi purposing their gym for it.

That's an important thing that all leaders need to be aware of. If you want to impact change, you need to be visible and you need to be constantly You Temp checking on how the activity that you're doing is being received and if you I'm a believer that you need to lead from the front. Others might disagree, but that's generally a better way than being an armchair quarterback and taking a backseat.

So you have line of sight into what's going on and you can triage problems. So when you're looking at building a framework, those four elements. Viewing the landscape, understanding the operating rhythm, making your leaders visible, and then measuring over time provides a key framework that anybody can apply in any transformation initiative that can put you in a position to be successful.

So I appreciate you sharing that with us. For those of you who have been listening to the conversation, We appreciate you hanging out. Make sure you leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. If you haven't already done so make sure you join our community. And then tune in next time where we'll have another leader hanging out with us and sharing with us the game changing insights that help them build a high performing team.