Summary:

In this episode of the HR Impact show, Dr. Jim interviews Jim Boebel, superintendent of the Platteville School District, about attracting and retaining top talent in rural school districts. They discuss the importance of building strong relationships within the community, aligning hiring practices with the district's mission, and fostering a collaborative environment for educators. Jim shares insights on how their district focuses on student learning, uses data to drive improvement, and supports the well-being of their staff. This episode offers valuable lessons for leaders in any industry looking to build high-performing teams.

Key Takeaways:

• Effective talent strategy in rural education requires a strong alignment with the district's mission and vision.
• Collaborative efforts and community relationships are key strengths that can be leveraged to enhance education in rural districts.
• A well-structured hiring process and ongoing professional development are critical in retaining and developing educators.
• Observational learning and data-driven approaches are used in conjunction to dynamically improve teaching practices.
• Despite the challenges of the profession, creating a supportive, collaborative environment can mitigate educator burnout and stress.

Chapters:

0:00:00 Introduction to the challenges of attracting and retaining talent in rural school districts

0:03:22 The complexities of serving multiple constituencies in a school district

0:05:17 Innovative approaches to serving students and the community with limited resources

0:08:10 The role of mission and vision alignment in the hiring process

0:12:41 Ensuring success and setting up new hires for success through collaboration

0:15:34 Collaboration and continuous improvement contribute to educator well-being

0:21:52 Building strong relationships and community support is crucial for rural school districts

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

Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung

Connect with Jim Boebel: boebel@platteville.k12.wi.us

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



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It's the thing that should be keeping people leaders up at night while challenging. I would make the argument that no industry has it tougher than the K through 12 education space when it comes to finding and retaining top talent. It's hard enough to do this in a typical district. How do you execute this in a rural school district? We just turned the degree of difficulty to a hundred with that question. Rural school districts face an even more unique challenge and we're going to tackle some of the best practices that the Platteville K 12 district is doing to attract and retain their talent. This is part of a special series that we're doing on the K through 12 education space and focusing in On the best talent strategy practices of some of the best districts in the country Joining us today.

He's been in the educational leadership position for the past 18 years. He has served the Platteville school district as their superintendent for the past five years, which includes the entire COVID 19 pandemic and recovery. As a rural education leader, he is responsible for the human resources of a district that employs over 200 staff that serve over 1500 students.

With that experience has come opportunities to learn and succeed each day. So Jim. Welcome to the show.

The classic, we know everybody when we go shopping, for example, and we share those stories who really have a strong relationship built with our students as they go through our system. And one of the challenges that we face and that we love to face is how can a rural school district. Offer the same opportunities, the breadth of curriculum, the depth of curriculum.

So when our students probably graduate as seniors, that they can go out and compete in this world. And a lot of that comes back to how are we going to recruit, retain, and then actually at the same time, allow our staff to grow?

You need to serve the rest of your administrative staff that report into you. You need to serve the educators that are in your district. You need to serve the students that are in your district. You need to serve their families and you need to serve the school board. And the reason why I'm framing it that particular way is that I'd like you to share a little bit about the complexities involved with satisfying all five of those constituencies as customers.

And how you've actually approached that in your time in this district and overall throughout your career

To our community. Thirdly, we have that responsibility to our staff and the first element, the responsibility to the students. That is how we drive all of student learning in our district and we can do it. Tap into that a little bit later when I talk about how we allow our staff to grow while on the job.

The second element that adds the complexity to it is that in a public school system, we're different than a private business in that we have a predetermined. And in Wisconsin, we have a biannual budget. So every two years they'll determine here's the amount of funds that you'll receive in order to have success in your schools.

Dr. Jim: That's that's really great perspective and I appreciate you sharing that. When you're looking at those two priorities and you're looking at the constraint of a fixed budget for a two year period, what are some of the things that you have done that are particularly innovative or scrappy? That's helped you serve the students and the communities really well, especially in that rural school district context.

Learning how to school. We switch that to a five day a week, full day. For all our kids, for all of those four year olds. Now that increased in our, in that building at that level, that increased our staff from three to six. That was educationally an easy decision to make, but when we go back to the state revenue, we now had to think about we're employing three more employees plus salary and benefits and the odd thing about Wisconsin to really get to enter into that complexity, the state.

Funding formula for Wisconsin. A big element is that is how many full time students do you have? The more students you have, the more funding you're allowed. At the 4k level, those, each student, even though they're a full time person, they count 0. 6 of. Point one, because in history, a lot of those programs were only half days.

With the lack of daycare to serve all our students we have the school district taking on that responsibility and employing it. Now we're going five days a week full time, but yet the state funding formula has that restriction on it. We looked at that and said, we don't care. Our mission is that every student learns every day in a safe, inclusive learning environment.

And we're going to provide that for them. So that's a priority decision each year when we build our budget.

Dr. Jim: So I like how you tied. The decision to the mission of the district and it caught my attention because I'm sure that's going to play a role in the broader conversation that we're going to have. So let's start at the beginning when you look at the mission and sort of the number one priority that you've mapped out.

You have to attract them as well. What role that mission and vision alignment plays in your hiring process and what you've seen in terms of retention outcomes by by sticking to that.

Jim Boebel: A little context of Wisconsin history with hiring teachers. When I first began. As a building principal it was, I had a, it was a pre K 12 district in Northwestern Wisconsin. And you would, you could be able to broadcast for a position. You would post a teaching position and easily.

So it really forced us to reflect on what are we doing? Before we post for that position. And our school is similar to many others that we communicate with here in Southwest Wisconsin. In that we have to first build that profile. And with our district, we've been fortunate enough to identify the mission statement that had stated earlier.

We also have a couple of big rocks that don't move. And when we're building our profile, we collaborate. Let's say, for example, it is a third grade classroom teaching position. Building principal, third grade teachers, we'll get some representative from all the other services. They'll sit down and build a profile for what we want this position to do for us.

And then we use that same profile when we go through the first round of interviews, and that's normally a team approach and led by the building principal, and let's say they have 10 applicants, they interview for, if it's narrowed down to two, then comes our second round and each step along the way, what we're trying to do is.

Are you aligned with that? Okay, now prove that to me in a conversation and draw on some examples how you've done that the second one I usually bring out is it's called are you belong and a couple of years ago our staff again an intense Multi layered collaborative approach. We built this belief, a culture piece in which you belong.

And that's our, that's how we title it. And there are 10 elements in this, you belong poster. And I do the same thing. I take the poster in front of the potential teacher or other employee and say, let's look at this. This is who we are. If you identify with this, and this is a passion of yours. Now we're getting closer to that alignment and all of this is also board approved by our nine member school board, nine elected people from our community that help represent it.

Dr. Jim: There's some pretty strong value in what you just talked about where we often talk about it in other conversations that we've had where one of the first things that you need to do to drive high performance within an organization is have deep alignment to vision and mission.

Within the organization, that's the only way that you're going to actually connect the dots from what the strategy is and help with the execution. So I think that's a good point when you're talking about that strong values and cultural alignment on the front end of the hiring process. Now there's something that you mentioned in the answer that struck me and that was the collaborative effort in the hiring process.

Jim Boebel: Six years ago, our district, and this was the year prior to me, this is my fifth year in district. Six years ago, our district determined that we have to, in order to be successful, we have to collaborate on all of our learning efforts. And so we work with a vendor solution tree. And those three things that I mentioned, as far as the focus on learning, focus on collaboration, the focus on results.

Those are from studying, learning from, going to different workshops, going to different sessions, and bringing that back into our building. And collaboration is the key. Too many times in education, because the metaphor is, once the students show up, it's like drinking from a fire hose until 3. 30. We have to dedicate time in which a teacher can collaborate with other teachers about best practice.

Maybe it's 5 through 12 math, but they continue to go through student data, for example, should be at the forefront of every meeting. And We need to have that guaranteed and viable curriculum in order to have those discussions, to collaborate so we continue to improve. We need to have what we refer to as essential learning outcomes.

And as we've progressed, as we've improved, as we continue to learn about instruction, we get to other elements of it. We figured out what we want them to know. The second element that we collaborate is on how do we know that they know it. So that's through our assessment. Then we tackle what do we do with those students who learned it?

What do we do with those students who haven't? So all of those big rocks are in place for a staff member to join our team and continually analyze, continually Listen, and listen to one another, so they grow, the longer they're with us, they continually grow through that collaborative effort. And that's really what is taking us to the levels that we have now.

We like the challenge. We like the competition of that. And tying it all back to that collaborative piece.

Dr. Jim: You've emphasized collaboration through big chunks of this conversation, and we all know that being an educator and even being an administrator within a school district is extremely stressful. There's a high risk of burnout in those roles.

So what have you observed about the impact of building these strong collaborative environments on educator well being, administrator well being, burnout?

Jim Boebel: We have not solved the stress of being a teacher. We have not solved the burnout that comes with being a teacher because you lead with your heart. It's the combination of where the art and science of teaching collide. And it's a passion to want to do what's best for our students. So we haven't solved that, but by having identified what we hold to be extremely value, we are what we honor.

When you are in a tough spot, your teammates will pick you up. This

Dr. Jim: Now, that's a great perspective. In a lot of ways, what you're describing is building a community within your organization and a cohort model that you have a support structure that's already built in the other thing that I'm curious about when we're talking about collaboration and the coaching that comes along with it.

What's the impact that you've seen of having that culture and its impact on developing the next generation of leaders within the district? Any observations there that you can point to that's helped you build? This top 100 district.

We are actually next week will be another episode of a coaching training that is provided by one of the state education services that inside of that coaching, we are, we're coaching each other. Because we're still in that collaborative mode, but then it gives the skill set for our building principals to get into a classroom, observe, and then use a conversation.

We collaborate, and we have that time in which we can share.

Dr. Jim: I think your emphasis on continuing continuous improvement and professional development and then taking the learnings from those efforts and putting into action. I think that's that provides a good template. One of the things that you mentioned in your answer was the value. Of learning through observation.

So you're getting a lot of coaching from peer to peer observation and maybe vertical observation as well. All of that sound it's, it can be to some degree subjective. The learnings that you get from it because one person is going to have a different set of operations observations and some somebody else.

When you look at the. Learnings that you're gathering from the observational exercise, how are you strengthening those observations using a data driven or predictive approach, applying analytics or any other data sources into it?

Jim Boebel: It's a, it's even more than a triangulation of data, that's just the catchphrase that we use. But, inside of the classroom, our teachers, when, for example, let's go back to third grade. When they're teaching math, they have a common assessment that all for us, there's six third grade teachers, they all worked on that same math assessment.

So there's that common assessment in which when we collaborate, they'll say, sit around the table. How did your kids do on questions three and four? Here's how my did. How did you teach it differently? So that's one data point. We also use as every other school uses, we have certain screeners in which our students will sit down and just take what level are you at?

So if I'm a building principal and I go into a classroom. And I see that this teacher's students have such an incredible growth arc in math. I can also sit down and say here's what the data says as those students have matriculated through our system. So we rely on both. It's a very good point in that person to person, that's human.

And there is subjectivity no matter what you do. So we try and blend both of those together with the data points and the ability to spot good teaching.

Dr. Jim: Jim, really great conversation. And I want to tie this all together. When we're looking at best practices that rural school districts. Can deploy in their districts. What are the key things that come to mind from your perspective that every rural school district can adopt and get them well on their way to becoming a top district?

So we have a nine person school board. They all live within the school district boundaries, and they're all very recognizable faces and figures in our community. So now let's tie back to that alignment question that we had earlier. The reason why we can be rock solid on the you belong on our focus on collaboration is because our board members have those relationships with the teachers, with the families, with the students, and they know the success that we're having in a rural school.

A really good example, right now, we have our school musical, high school musical. It started last night, it'll be tonight, it'll be tomorrow. In that school musical, we have 80 students out of a high school of 480. We have 80 students involved with either performing or the technical side or the backstage.

Our auditorium was full last night. It'll be full tonight. It will be full Saturday. So that's a gift that those relationships bring to a rural community. And when you have success learning. Everybody has a piece in that, and they're proud of that. So that's a piece of rural education that is a complete strength for ours, and it's our duty to use that to our advantage to improve student learning.

Dr. Jim: really great stuff, Jim, and I appreciate you sharing that. And it's it's really solid perspective that I think a lot of other.

Jim Boebel: The best way would be via email. And the email address is my last name, Babel, B O E. B E L at Platteville dot K 1 2 dot W I dot U S, and I would be more than happy to start a conversation. And just for example, what we've accomplished here in the last hour, I'm spinning. I just, there are so many things that, that I want to do, that I want to think about, and I am very grateful for this opportunity.

When I reflect on this conversation and I think about what impacted me the most, I think the biggest thing, especially from the lens of a rural school district leader that stands out is the emphasis that you put on collaboration. And the reason why it stands out is, I've always been a startup guy and being a startup guy, you're always looking at how can you be scrappy?

How can you leverage the talents and the skills that you have and maximize those results? And oftentimes that involves a lot of collaboration across different functional groups so you could leverage all of your strengths together for the greater good. And I think that's one of the key lessons that I drew from this conversation that we just had is The emphasis on collaboration at all levels of your organization and the district really acts as an amplifier for a lot of the capabilities that you've been able to bring to bear.

Your teachers, your communities, and so on. So I appreciate you sharing that with us. For those of you who have listened to this episode, we appreciate you hanging out with us. Make sure you leave us a review. If you want to hear more conversations like this, make sure you join the HR impact community.

You can find that at www. engagerocket. co slash HR impact, and then tune in next time where we'll have another leader joining us and sharing with us their game changing realizations that help them. Build high performing teams,