Domain I—Leadership of the Educational Community – Competencies 1 - 4
Competency 1 Area:
The superintendent knows how to act with integrity, fairness, and in an ethical manner in order to promote the success of all students.
Transparency has been a recurring theme in all of the discussions I have had with district personnel and educators. In order for a superintendent to meet the definition of transparency, he or she must act with integrity, fairness, and in an ethical manner at all times. In my internship plan, four of the activities I selected fell under the Competency 1 area; however, in part, all of my activities could be connected to this area because it deals with how a superintendent interacts and conducts himself/herself on a daily basis.
The superintendent is the “face” of a school district. Perception is a key word that has been discussed in many of my meetings with current and past personnel along with stakeholders in the district. A superintendent can be doing everything according to the book, but if the perception of the community or the staff is that something is amiss, that is the “aura” that will penetrate and potentially damage the culture and effectiveness of an administrative team and a district as a whole. In discussing issues that deal with the development and passing of bond initiatives, Mary Springs, superintendent of Santa Gertrudis ISD, stated, “All the work put into a bond package can quickly go up in smoke if the stakeholders in your district do not have faith in the administrative team leading the district.” It is important that as a superintendent, you not only hold yourself to the highest standard of conduct but that you model this through the process used to make decisions, your daily actions and behaviors, and conducting yourself in a professional manner at all times when dealing with district staff, students, and stakeholders.
In working on my internship plan, the term of “situational ethics” came up a couple of times. The community business person believed that in business the ethics needed to fit the situation that was at hand. In talking with district leaders and the retired teachers, they held the common belief that “situational ethics” was more of an oxymoron unless you were talking about extreme circumstances, like a life or death situation. The teacher that had been in the district the longest, described previous and current superintendents in terms of their being trustworthy. She believed that some of the superintendents used the district only to better themselves, “a stepping stone on their road to bigger and better things.” In general, superintendents do not stay in a district forever for various reasons. I believe that how a superintendent leaves a district is just as important as how they begin with one. By placing the children first and conducting yourself in the most ethical and transparent way possible, the majority of stakeholders will see what you are trying to accomplish and support you and your staff in their efforts. It is important to improve the culture and climate of the district that you work in a manner that does not destroy the systematic beliefs that are in place, but enhances them into a system that benefits all.
Competency 2 Area:
The superintendent knows how to shape district culture by facilitating the development, articulation, implementation, and stewardship of a vision of learning that is shared and supported by the educational community.
Teamwork is necessary for many things to be accomplished. In a school district, teamwork is crucial for the advancement of education for the population that it serves as well as the staff and faculty involved. Consensus on what the vision of a district should be can sometimes be hard to reach.
All stakeholders want their children educated, but in the manner of how it is done and the more defined goals can differ greatly from person to person. In the ever-changing technological world in which we live, many parents are left behind and fear that their children may be exposed to topics and situations that they have no control over through the use of technology. With the changes in requirements for graduation, parents often struggle with the courses their students are required to take that are outside of what they consider “needed”. Educating the parents in what is needed for their child to be successful and have the capabilities to meet their full potential is a crucial part of developing a shared vision supported by all.
A superintendent must be aware of the trends in education, so they can make sure that not only the shared vision is in line with expectations, but that it is also being implemented in a manner that encompasses all. Communicating the significance of the vision and how it relates to the local outcomes, as well as a global outcome, effectively is a key factor in a district’s success. The vision statement for a district can look phenomenal on paper but if it doesn’t have the systems in place to support it through implementation, articulation, and review, it is just a group of words on paper. Vision statements are just lofty dreams if they don’t have concrete tenets to help connect them to everyday practice. This is done through the policies and practices put into place by the administrative team lead by the superintendent and approved by the school board.
The district goals are tools to measure the progress the district is making towards fulfilling the district’s vision statement. These goals are also used as part of the criteria to measure the job performance of the superintendent. With the goals being part of the evaluation document for the superintendent, it’s imperative to effectively communicate the goals to all campuses and throughout the district. Board members use the superintendent’s job description with the district goals as the total evaluation tool. When talking to different board members, they have varying opinions on what is the most important goal for the district. This makes the process much more subjective according to the participants. Knowing the pulse of the board and keeping them informed of the ongoing processes in the district is important to make sure that the district is heading in the direction the board feels it should be going.
The superintendent is the steward of the ideals and educational beliefs of a community. Their attitude and manner of looking at the many different strengths and weaknesses of the district will shape and set the tone of the district’s culture.
Competency 3 Area:
The superintendent knows how to communicate and collaborate with families and community members, respond to diverse community interests and needs, and mobilize community resources to ensure educational success for all students.
Communication, it can either make a district soar or crash in a burning heap at the bottom of a ravine. The ability to communicate effectively, which means that you listen as well as you speak, is the most important skill a superintendent can possess. The school board members, many without any educational background, are the elected stewards of the educational health of a community’s children. The superintendent is hired by the board to ensure that the well-being of the community is cared for by providing guidance to all that work and attend school in the district.
To insure that the students’ needs are being met, the superintendent must make sure that there are programs in place, not only educational, and funding is adequate to run the programs effectively. In Lockhart, one program that tries to address the needs of the students outside of the classroom is Community in Schools (CIS). Each campus has a social worker that counsels students in small groups and individually. Students are recommended to the program by their teachers, counselors, administrators, or family members. It is hard for a student to be successful in school if outside forces and circumstances are working against them. CIS has access to many different resources not available to the district. In addition, since the CIS representative is a social worker and not a school employee, they have a wider scope available for which they can work.
The superintendent, or his representative, must work within the community to get the needs and goals of the district out to all of those outside of the district. Becoming a member of local business groups, such as the Chamber of Commerce, the superintendent can build relationships outside of the district that can enhance the community’s view of the district and may provide additional funding resources for certain projects. These groups also give another venue where a person can get the opinions and feel of leaders in the community outside of the office. In addition, being visible at school functions makes the public feel that a superintendent is connected with the daily activities in the district and strongly connected to the students.
Site-based committees on each campus have representation from both the school and the community. The superintendent can use the reports from these committee meetings as another resource to evaluate the concerns of the community and individual campuses. By utilizing effective communication and building community relationships, a superintendent can ensure that he or she is getting the most out of the available resources to ensure the educational success of all students.
Competency 4 Area:
The superintendent knows how to respond to and influence the larger political, social, economic, legal, and cultural context, including working with the board of trustees, to achieve the district's educational vision.
Although the superintendent is the highest level lead employee of a school district, it is the school board that has the final say in district matters. This authority is given to them through the policies and laws put in place through the Texas Education Code and further expanded through local policy. The board sets the tax-rate, approves the budget, and gives final approval for most hiring of district employees, with advice and recommendations coming from the superintendent and his educational team. The superintendent is responsible for the day-to-day running of the district with the policies and staff in place. In order for the district to run effectively, the superintendent and the school board must be aware of their roles and duties and what areas they are responsible for and the areas they are not. Teamwork is essential and each group must respect the responsibilities and duties of the other without over-stepping their boundaries and attempting to micro-manage or leave completely out of the “loop”.
Trust plays a large part in effective superintendent/board relationships. The board must trust that the superintendent is serving the districts best interests on a daily basis. In turn, the superintendent must respect the input from the board and communicate with them honestly and effectively to keep the channels of communication open. At times, this might include unsatisfactory reviews of performances or questioning of why actions were taken. A superintendent needs to not take these negatives personally. He or she must be able to explain their actions in a reasonable manner in some instances. Board members generally do not have an educational background and may not understand why things are being done in a particular way, or why they can’t be done in a certain way. Strong communication skills and a healthy working relationship between the superintendent and the board will make for a stronger district not only in good times but also during stressful ones.
Keeping abreast of the political and economic climate is another area that the superintendent should do on a daily basis. By being able to see the trends and understand current issues, will help a superintendent better guide the processes that are currently in place to grow and change to continue supporting the district’s goals and vision. Funding can be found through alternative sources for certain projects when one knows what trends and political influences are occurring in certain areas. The superintendent can guide his staff to pursue the areas where additional funding might be available to better enhance programs on campuses or create new ones.
Staying abreast of these influences, a superintendent must be well-read and stay informed of the educational trends not only in his local area but also in state and federal trends. He or she must also be able to communicate the trends and how they can affect the district to personnel and the community at large.
DOMAIN II—INSTRUCTIONAL LEADERSHIP – COMPETENCIES 5 - 7
Competency 5 Area:
The superintendent knows how to facilitate the planning and implementation of strategic plans that enhance teaching and learning; ensure alignment among curriculum, curriculum resources, and assessment; use the current accountability system; and promote the use of varied assessments to measure student performance.
As an instructional leader, a superintendent needs to be able to take all avenues and assessment tools available to accurately measure his/her district’s performance and its road to meeting the district goals. Communicating the district’s vision to the district’s campuses and making sure that the individual campuses goals promote the district’s vision.
In order for the campuses to be able to service the needs of the students, the curriculum and supports need to be in place for success. This includes the areas of curriculum, with a move to make sure that the subject areas are vertically aligned and instruction can be scaffolded to meet the students’ individual needs and assessments. Making sure the appropriate textbooks and instructional tools are available to the students and teachers, along with staff that is properly trained and have a positive educational environment in every classroom.
I met with the curriculum coordinator for the district to discuss the textbook adoption process. Changes have been put in place to ensure a more cohesive curriculum development from grade-level to grade-level. As superintendent, it is important that support staff for classroom teachers, which includes all at central office, is making choices and putting systems in place to improve the rigor and effective use of curriculum resources in the classrooms. Encouraging collaboration between teachers not only on the same campus, but across the district, will strengthen the delivery of information for all students.
Disaggregation of data is one of the more difficult areas for school personnel to incorporate at times. Bi-weekly principal meetings are in place for principals to collaborate on district issues and develop inter-campus programs and solutions. On individual campuses, department head meetings are held bi-weekly for principals to share information from the principal meetings and discuss student assessments and growth. Inova is a program used to organize data in a user friendly manner so that campuses, departments and individual teachers can incorporate assessment data information into the development of their lesson plans. As superintendent, it is important to have the appropriate tools in place for teachers, principals, and students to be successful.
Competency 6 Area:
The superintendent knows how to advocate, promote, and sustain an instructional program and a district culture that are conducive to student learning and staff professional growth.
Individualized instruction, Response to Intervention (RTI), ELL, ESL, IDEA, GT, AP, and inclusion, the list goes on and on of specialized instruction programs to meet students’ needs. As superintendent, part of your job responsibilities is to advocate for instructional programs that meet all students’ needs. It is impossible to know everything, so it is important to have people on staff that are knowledgeable and can assist you in the job. Communication and trust with high-level staff is a big part of a successful administrative team. The ability to soundly assess specialized programs and their effectiveness in the classroom is another area that is pertinent to the successful growth of students. With special needs programs, continuity and adequate funding is important to sustain the educational and social growth of the participants. Ongoing professional development and keeping up with the trends of special education and the varying needs of the students that fall under its umbrella should be the priority of the special education department on every campus and in the district. As superintendent, giving adequate attention to the special programs is important to model for all employees so they realize every student’s educational growth counts in your district.
As important as activities are in the classroom, the extracurricular opportunities available to students are necessary to prepare them for life after high school. Meeting with students to see what their interests are and how they feel about the opportunities they have access to on campus is imperative to providing a top-notch extracurricular program of enrichment for students. Making sure that the campuses strategic plans address not only classroom opportunities but also extracurricular ones is needed to educate and meet the needs of all students.
Discipline management programs in use along with studying the data of discipline trends on campus are another factor in supporting the culture of a school district. Schools should analyze the Disciplinary PEIMS data to see what the recurring issues on campus are which could include types of referrals, discipline consequences assigned, ethnicity of students receiving referrals, etc. Discipline data can help when monitoring programs to see their effectiveness on a campus. It can help in deciding if certain teachers need additional professional development in classroom management. This would be a topic discussed in the bi-weekly principals meeting with the information then dispersed to the administrative teams on each campus as it pertains to them.
Competency 7 Area:
The superintendent knows how to implement a staff evaluation and development system and select appropriate models for supervision and staff development to improve the performance of all staff members.
This domain has a strong impact on all areas of a school district. As important as it is to hire the right people for the positions available, it is equally important to have a system in place that evaluates the effectiveness of the district’s staff. In Lockhart, for all teaching faculty, there is a locally developed evaluation systems called the Lockhart Teacher Appraisal Performance (LTAP). This document is not a punitive document. It is strictly used to evaluate a teacher’s strengths and weaknesses and determine an appropriate plan for professional growth. For administrative team members, the evaluation process is a two-step program where the employee evaluates their performance on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the highest. After the employee rates themselves, they have a conference with their supervisor to discuss the evaluation and how the supervisor rates them. At the end of the summative conference, the administrative team member develops goals for the upcoming school year.
As steward of the district, it is the superintendent’s charge to make sure that the district staff is stays up to date with the trends and best practices in education. There can sometimes be a tendency to try to follow trends so closely, that a program never truly gets implemented or sustained properly. A superintendent should spend as much thought and care into the implementation and sustaining of a program as they do in choosing the appropriate programs for a district.
When discussing programs with teachers, especially long-time teachers, one of the main complaints about school programs directed at discipline, tutoring, etc., was that time and money would be spent on them during the initial implementation, but that there was not much follow-up on the support as time would pass. Continuity goes well with the support of teacher programs as well as it does with programs directed solely at students.
DOMAIN III—ADMINISTRATIVE LEADERSHIP – COMPETENCIES 8 – 10
Competency 8 Area:
The superintendent knows how to apply principles of effective leadership and management in relation to district budgeting, personnel, resource utilization, financial management, and technology application.
When discussing superintendent performance, two areas are usually discussed finances and curriculum. School finance in Texas is one of the most difficult things to address. Yearly changes from the Texas legislature in mandated programs, without necessarily providing funds to implement them, along with the inequitable funding practices of the overall system makes budgeting nearly impossible. How do you plan for the upcoming school year, when you are not sure how many students you will have and how much money the state and federal government will be allocating to your district? The fiduciary responsibilities of a superintendent nearly require an MBA in finance to address effectively. The chief financial officer of a district is nearly as important to the health of a district as the instructional leader. If a district is not financially sound, all of its programs and buildings begin to suffer.
I know that coming into this program, that the financial and facility management portion for a superintendent was my weakest area. I’m not a financial wizard, so I know that it is very important to surround myself with top-notch financial people to insure that I get the best advice when it comes to making financial suggestions and decisions for the district. It will be my charge to further increase my knowledge of public school funding so that I will be able to take the information given to me from my staff and make the best decisions possible.
In order to help the district staff operate more efficiently, implementing the use of technology that can enhance their work performance would be a top priority; however, just purchasing technology and not providing adequate training on it would not be an effective use of district funds or employee time.
Competency 9 Area:
The superintendent knows how to apply principles of leadership and management to the district's physical plant and support systems to ensure a safe and effective learning environment.
In tougher economic times, it is hard to pass bond packages to improve facilities or build new facilities. Maintenance of existing facilities becomes a key factor in the upkeep and extending the life of existing buildings. Staying well-informed of maintenance costs and renovation needed to keep existing buildings in shape for educational purposes is necessary. When a district is in need of building new facilities, knowing the cost and upkeep to the current facilities is something that needs to be considered and communicated to the public. It is imperative to be able to communicate all aspects of a bond package to answer all questions that will be asked by the voting public.
I toured the district facilities with the head of maintenance. He pointed out many areas where we needed to expend some capital outlay to insure the safety of the staff, and people who visit our campuses. He also compared the current high school facility to the list of standards set in order for a campus to be considered a safe and secure school. The high school did not measure up to the standards set due to the age of the facility and the nature of the open campus. The key concern is the number of access points to campus. The other concern about the campus is the maxed out electric grid that services the campus. No additional phone lines, computer drops, or other electrical wiring can be installed on campus because the grid is maxed out. The only way to extend and upgrade current technology on campus is to add another transformer.
Support staff that are knowledgeable about their job responsibilities and the area that it covers are imperative to building a strong administrative leadership team. It requires everyone in a district to educate a child. The maintenance and cleaning staff are important to preparing a safe instructional environment to enable the teachers and students to meet their potential in the classrooms.
Competency 10 Area:
The superintendent knows how to apply organizational, decision-making, and problem-solving skills to comply with federal and state requirements and facilitate positive change in varied contexts.
When looking at the ten competencies for a superintendent, this last one is really a combination of previous competencies and how you work with people and programs to comply with all of the state and federally mandated programs. I believe that collaborative problem-solving is an excellent way to work with a team of highly-qualified professionals. With that said, it is also my name that will be signed at the bottom of programs, reports, presentations and suggestions to the school board. It is important to celebrate the successes of all and to model informed, out-of-the box thinking and problem-solving. Your team should feel confident in risk-taking problem-solving activities.
Having a professional library that is current and up to date with the innovations in education is a must for a successful superintendent. This library should be open to all of the members of the administrative team. Book studies with lead administrators from each campus should be conducted on a regular basis. Well-informed staff members are more likely to make well-informed decisions. Modeling life-long learning to your staff is as important as the faculty modeling the same behavior to their students.
Most districts have a department, or a dedicated person, working with special programs with federal mandates. Lockhart ISD has a staff member that works with all federally funded programs concentrating on ELL, TELPAS, and the curriculum practices they go along with the programs. It is important that they stay informed of the current practices and programs. Most of the programs have contacts through the educational service centers and area districts belong to the listserv that is dedicated to the programs. For smaller districts, this gives them a network of other professionals to bounce ideas off of and to help with any questions that may arise when dealing with the implementation and support of the programs.
