Leadership Lens: Is now your favorite time of year?

“Leadership Lens” is a monthly column featuring the insights of K12 leaders who are navigating common opportunities and challenges. Many of the leaders have participated in the DA Leadership Institute.  

This is many leaders’ favorite time of year: Welcoming students and staff back and rekindling enthusiasm for teaching and learning.

From the classroom to the playing fields to the board room, superintendents and their teams are launching new projects and eagerly tracking the progress of ongoing initiatives designed to move their districts forward.

The leaders that District Administration has spoken to in recent weeks are laser-focused on visibility, relationship building and continuous improvement. Superintendents are emphasizing a service-oriented mindset, with spending time in schools a top priority for informing leadership decisions.

For Superintendent Jeanne Siegenthaler, that means she’s likely to be seen serving lunch, helping the custodial staff clean or repaint or shoveling snow outside the Richmond School District’s single building this winter.

“You want to be around staff who feel valued, heard and can come to work every day, not liking what they do, but loving what they do,” says Siegenthaler, who calls leading Richmond her “dream job.”

“I have tried to create a culture where people feel comfortable coming to me, that their concerns are heard, and I’ll do what I can to help support them,” she adds.

This visibility also extends to social media and storytelling. Siegenthaler has made herself the district’s No. 1 influencer, using social media to share authentic, emotional moments from school life to engage families.

“Celebrate as much as you can,” she advises. “Make sure your pictures tell the story because people aren’t going to read everything you write. Make sure that the pictures that you share show the emotion on people’s faces and show action.”

How visibility empowers your teams

Superintendent Rony Ortega is among the leaders who are continuing the transition from top-down management to servant leadership. Ortega, superintendent of South Sioux City Community Schools in Nebraska, is transforming his central office into a support hub for principals and teachers, emphasizing empowerment over compliance.

He and his leadership team conduct twice-monthly school walkthroughs to determine how they can better support building leaders and educators in achieving the district’s improvement plan goals. Ortega and other South Sioux City administrators begin each day at a school building, welcoming students and parents and connecting with staff.

“That increased visibility has led to trust,” he observes. “We’re no longer the compliance machine. We are now making decisions based on a connection to that school, to that building leader.”

Superintendent Kristine Martin spends some of her time as a “student-intendent.” The leader of Ohio’s Washington Local Schools occasionally joins a class or rides a bus as a student, or helps out staff in the cafeteria.

Recently, she sat in on a kindergarten and rode the bus home with another group of students. She also got help with some pesky math problems from some middle schoolers. Her team has shared photos of her visits on social media to connect with Washington Local’s community,

“What I learned is, kids are just amazing. They are so kind and helpful,” she points out. “There have been a couple of situations where I was in a classroom, and students were trying to help me. They felt bad for this lady who couldn’t figure out the answer.”

‘Part of the economic engine’

District leaders across the nation are relying more on community relationships to support students and staff in their schools.

Superintendent Dustin E. Nail says of Harmony-Emge School District #175 in Belleville, Illinois, is launching the “Community Coalition,” which will bring together civic and religious leaders to collaborate and communicate to ensure services aren’t overlapping. As an offshoot, Nail intends to expand the district’s mentoring programs to help students envision the pathways they will take in high school.

mentoring programs, it will start with adults mentoring his junior high students, with those students in turn mentoring young intermediate students.

The intermediate students will work with the youngest elementary children. “We’re creating these small families with the mentors embedded in them,” Nail explains. “It’s another way to connect our students to school, because we find a lot of times that when those connections are broken, that’s when we start to see students and families pull away and not be fully vested in the education process.”

Allen County Schools is part of a cohort of Kentucky districts experimenting with greater local accountability. The concept would see districts continue to align with federal education requirements, but would remove the state from much of the process.

Superintendent Travis Hamby will design this new model in collaboration with Allen County’s educators, families and the wider community.

“The school district is part of the economic engine and the students we graduate truly matter,” he explains. “We want to produce graduates that business and industry want to employ so the community thrives and excels.”