What’s on this superintendent of the year’s bucket list?

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“How can I free up teachers’ time during the workday while providing five full days of instruction time for students?” asks Arizona’s 2024-25 Superintendent of the Year Scott Menzel. It’s one of the big-ticket items left on his bucket list for easing the daily pressures teachers experience in the Scottsdale Unified School District.

District Administration sat down with Menzel to learn more about his leadership style and the initiatives that earned him statewide recognition.

Note: The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Tell me about your school district. What makes it special?

Scottsdale Unified School District, serves just over 20,000 students with 29 school buildings and one online school, so 30 total options. One of the things we talk about here is “Scottsdale Unified” but not “uniform.”

We have so many different educational opportunities for families. If you’re interested in doing language immersion, we have a program in Spanish and a program in Mandarin. If math and science are your jam, we have opportunities at the elementary, middle and high school levels. If you’re interested in high-quality athletics or performing arts, those are across our schools.

Take me back to the start of this current school year. 
What were some of your priorities coming into it?

Our theme this year is elevating excellence and reaching new heights together. SUSD is a relatively high-performing school district when you compare our achievement scores with the state of Arizona and we’re competitive nationally. But we aren’t satisfied with our scores. We absolutely want to elevate excellence, and that’s been our focus.


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We’ve been building on our strategic plan and this year are focusing on our wildly important goals. We’ve identified three for the district that are really important.

One, like other school districts across the nation, we have a focus on attendance. Post-COVID that was a challenge for us. And we know looking at our data that students who come to school regularly perform better on assessment results.

So achievement is one of our wildly important goals. Growing our enrollment is another wildly important goal. Our economic engine is driven by the number of students that we have, and so that’s an area focus.

From an achievement perspective, we have a specific focus on mathematics. It’s been an area where we’ve not performed as well as we would like, and so those are the three wildly important goals. I think they’re interrelated. 


When kids come to school regularly, they perform better. When we have better test scores parents look at sending their kids here because they have more confidence, which grows enrollment. At the end of the day, we are, as an educational enterprise, focused on the students and their success academically.

You’re often celebrated as a leader who creates equal access to education. Tell me about the initiatives you’ve spearheaded to make those opportunities possible.

We prioritize providing support for all of our learners, wherever they live in Scottsdale. From a demographic perspective, a lot of people think about Scottsdale, and we are a destination for a number of high-profile events and vacations, and it’s a great place to be. But we also have almost 30% of our students who qualify for free and reduced lunch.

We are a diverse district. We try to make sure that regardless of where a student attends school, they are provided equitable opportunities to be successful.

We’re working to make sure that we allocate resources to ensure that whether you’re in a more affluent part of our school district, or one that’s not as fluent, those opportunities are available where you go to school.

What’s left on your leadership bucket list? Are there any big ideas you have in store for your district?

One of the significant challenges we have is attracting and retaining talent in this environment. In Arizona, for example, we are one of the lowest-funded states for public education. Being able to pay our staff what they need to be paid to live in Scottsdale is a challenge. And so, we’re thinking about what we can do innovatively to create an environment where we can attract and retain talent.

I would love to find a way to free up more teacher time during the workday while providing five full days of instruction for students. It could be modifying our schedule so that our teachers are providing direct instruction 80% of the time.

We can free up the equivalent of a full day for them to do their student-centered planning, their teamwork with colleagues, professional development and professional learningthe kinds of things that they do when we might have an early release day or things that they do on evenings and weekends.

I will find time within the workweek so that teachers can have more balance because our teachers work so hard in Scottsdale. You see it in the results, but it’s not sustainable over time if we don’t find other strategies to create balance.

What does an award like Superintendent of the Year mean to you as a leader in education?

It’s a reflection of the staff that work with me here in the Scottsdale Unified School District. The way that we have worked together during the pandemic when I arrived and then post-pandemic when we look at our achievement data, we’ve rebounded pretty quickly and more quickly than most. I think a recognition like this is something that’s reflective of the people that I work with.

Micah Ward
Micah Wardhttps://districtadministration.com
Micah Ward is a District Administration staff writer. He recently earned his master’s degree in Journalism at the University of Alabama. He spent his time during graduate school working on his master’s thesis. He’s also a self-taught guitarist who loves playing folk-style music.

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