School communications cannot be a one-and-done exercise if administrators’ messages are going to resonate with the communities on and off campus, says Superintendent Sean Maika of the North East Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas.
“A long, long time ago I heard a superintendent talk and say, ‘The problem with communication is 90% of the time people think they communicated, they didn’t communicate or they miscommunicated,'” says Maika, who was recently named a Superintendent to Watch by the National School Public Relations Association. “That leads to 90% of your problems.”
Maika uses Facebook Live, weekly messages, videos, transcribed videos and other channels to continuously inform his constituents. He and his team also try to keep their “ears to the ground” for what communities are buzzing about. “In education, we think, ‘We said it once’ and people somehow got it,” he adds. “We’ve got to remember seven different times, in seven different ways.”
He is in the midst of producing a six-part series on Texas’ complicated school accountability system, which was recently redesigned along with the state assessment program. He hopes to explain the changes to community members who feel confused by the revisions.
He has also made videos on school safety, which in Texas includes a requirement that every K12 building have an armed guard on the premises. “How do we make the invisible visible to our community, is what I try to work on with my messaging,” he explains.
Why Sean Maika is excited
Maika and his team were able to build and open North East ISD’s one-of-a-kind “Institute of CyberSecurity & Innovation” during the pandemic, fulfilling a vision he shared with the school board when he was first hired. The center, which was built on the site of an old Walmart building, now thrives as a standalone program that was “co-produced” with regional industry, Maika explains.
Along with attracting visits from the White House and educators as far away as Colombia and Indonesia, the center gives students a chance to earn multiple industry certifications. That gives graduates a head start on higher education and makes them eligible for jobs with starting salaries as high as $75,000, Maika notes.
North East ISD is also the second in the nation to sign a “Space Act” agreement with NASA that allowed the district to revamp and expand some magnet programs into the Space and Engineering Technologies Academy for middle and high school students. The academy is staffed by NASA personnel who provide professional development in aerospace education.
“This NASA partnership will keep us very relevant,” he contends. “Without industry partners sitting with us and informing us, these programs can become stale and then they’re not teaching students the skills they need to enter the workforce tomorrow.”
Students, staff, stakeholders and stewardship
Maika and his school board set their overall vision—hold themselves accountable—with a “Balanced District Scorecard” they developed with community input and implemented last year. It covers four key concepts: Students, staff, stakeholders and stewardship. Drilling down, it defines three or four areas of focus for each of the large concepts.
When it comes to balancing staff and stewardship, for instance, the district is committing itself to offering competitive salary packages while remaining responsible stewards of taxpayer funds. North East ISD recently gave teachers the largest raise in 20 years. “No one of these outweighs the other,” he explains. “It allows us to say ‘yes’ to things, but it also allows us to say ‘no’ to things, because we can turn to that scorecard and ask ‘Where does it fit?’ and if it doesn’t, then that’s not the work we should be doing.”
When asked about his leadership style, Maika hesitates and he doesn’t want to boil something as complex and nuanced down to a checklist. “I look at traditional leadership models and I don’t feel like they capture what I truly believe,” he points out. “I have a great sense of urgency, which you don’t usually hear about leadership.”
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That sense of urgency covers making certain that employees have what they need to do a good job, communicating adequately with the community and parents, and making sure the district is doing a top-notch job at educating students. It comes down to “taking care of your people,” because education, he asserts, is all about people.
“I deal with people from the age of 2 all the way through 100,” he continues. “You have to realize that taking care of them doesn’t mean giving them what they want all the time, but allowing them a seat at the table and hearing their viewpoints.”
Safety is the big concern that keeps him up at night. He says he never could have imagined, when he began his career, that 30 years later he would feel pressed to comply with a law requiring armed security guards inside schools. Because he neither took nor was offered a class in school safety while he was earning his master’s and doctorate degrees, he recently hired a former Secret Service official to serve as his district’s senior director of safety to spearhead the district’s security strategy.
That administrator’s perspective on safety—such as determining what common practices are worthwhile and which aren’t—helps him sleep better at night as he tries to strike a balance between protecting kids and not making schools look like prisons. “What I say to my community is, ‘I’m not trying to be the district that’s best at a response to a shooting; I want to be the best at never letting it happen,'” he concludes.
