The School Superintendents Association’s newest president, Superintendent David Law, has big plans for K12, including building strong community partnerships for enhancing the student experience.
Law, the leader of Minnesota’s Minnetonka Public Schools, was named president of AASA last week. District Administration spoke with Law to learn more about his leadership philosophy and forecast what’s in store for AASA, K12 and his school district.
Note: The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
First, congratulations on this achievement. How does it reflect the work you’re doing in your district?
Thank you. I’m very honored. I think it’s as much a reflection of my desire to work collaboratively with superintendents both around my state and across the country to innovate and advocate.
It reflects the work I’m doing in my district because I’m really proud of the things happening in public education in Minnetonka. It’s also a reflection of my desire to improve public education across the country.
To expand on this, can you tell me about your leadership philosophy?
I’m a firm believer that people, properly inspired, work very hard to do the right thing and to do amazing things for kids. I hope my leadership reflects the fact that the people I work with—the teachers and leaders in my system—love what they do. They feel like their work matters.
During my last 12 years as a superintendent, we’ve done engagement surveys and we’ve heard from our employees that they feel that they get the support they need. So, I hope there’s alignment between my desire to inspire people to work collaboratively and have people love what they do.
What’s in store for AASA now that you’re president?
This last year, I had the chance to participate in The Public Education Promise, which asks, “What are the next 10 years of public education going to look like?”
It’s designed around five pillars of desired outcomes that should be as applicable in rural America as it is in urban America, including:
- Prioritizing student-centered learning
- Equipping students with real-life skills
- Attracting, hiring, retaining and rewarding the best people
- Building highly engaged family, community and business partnerships
- Measuring what matters most to provide a comprehensive picture of a student’s abilities and postsecondary readiness
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Tell me more about your school district. What are the initiatives you’ve pioneered as superintendent that you want to share?
Our district has a long history of providing exceptional opportunities for students. One thing that drew me to the district is its fantastic community support.
Sometimes in public education, people want us to get better as long as we don’t change. Minnetonka is a community that says, “We trust you. You’re doing amazing things for our kids. Continue to innovate.”
There are two areas that I’m looking forward to in the next few years. One is the core concept that literacy matters and students need to feel confident in their literacy skills, particularly before they can explore anything else.
The work that we’ve been doing as a state and in Minnetonka to lean forward with literacy and screening for dyslexia and intervention—we are coming out of several years of training and materials review with best practice and getting staff certified.
Forty percent of our students are immersed in Spanish or Chinese. We’re not just doing literacy in English. We’re doing it in Chinese and Spanish, too. We’ve had a chance to influence state law about what literacy should look like in immersion programming, so that’s been very exciting.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have a high percentage of our high school students participating in experiential learning, including one-on-one mentoring with someone who’s in a field of interest. Eighty-five percent of our high school students have an experiential learning opportunity in business, athletics, aviation, automation, construction, etc. Our board is interested in seeing if we could get that to 100%.
Looking ahead to the 2025-26 school year, what’s keeping you busy this summer? How are you gearing up for the upcoming school year?
Our community just helped us determine where we would spend the next $80 or $90 million to improve our facilities to be forward-thinking. We want our kindergarteners to have the same opportunities as our seniors, so we’ve put together a plan to make some significant improvements to our facilities with no tax increase to our community.
My long-term focus is on this concept of measuring what matters in our school system. How do we give our students the kind of credential that, when they take it out, whether it be the military or their future careers, includes their interests and their skills?
