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A Model Leader: Q&A With Krista Parent

Q: What is your vision of a districtwide learning community?

First of all, I think that learning has to be modeled from the top. As a superintendent, I feel like I need to constantly model and share what I’m learning, what I’m reading., what I’m thinking about. I need to set the tone districtwide. How that played out in this district in the past, before I became superintendent, we had twice monthly administrative meetings with 25 administrators from throughout the district. It was the typical business meeting with 15 items on the agenda, a lot of them could have been shared very easily through technology with a quick e-mail. You’d see a lot of the principals walk out of those meetings with glazed eyes, like this is a waste of my time.

So, when I became superintendent, I thought this is the first thing I’m going to change: We’re the leadership team of this district and we ought to be learning together. That’s how we should spend our time.

The first year we took just one of those two meetings and said this is sacred learning time; we’re not going to have any business items. The other meeting was the business one. After one year, we completely shot the business meeting; now, a business meeting now might occur twice a year max.

The first year we read Transforming Schools and Whatever It Takes, and I would say that the DuFour work around how PLTs [professional learning teams] play out in their school districts has been really influential in what we try to do. The way those administrative meetings would look was that we’d read a couple of chapters ahead of time on our own. We’d come together for a 2-hour meeting and one of the four district administrators would facilitate that meeting.

What we tried to do was model instructional strategies that [administrators] could put in their toolbox so when they evaluate and coach and support teachers, they have a wide repertoire of instructional strategies to help teachers become better teachers. We used literacy as the content when we talked about these strategies. Somewhere in the midst of this, we took Reading First and Reading Next and pulled those documents apart. We let the elementary folks do Reading First and the secondary do Reading Next, and they had to teach one another what those documents were about.

In the second year, we read about 40 different books around literacy in a jigsaw format. Everybody picked a book they wanted to read and the central office team probably read 25 books among the four of us. The administrative council meetings that year were focused around what we were reading about literacy and how that played out in terms of the strategies for our schools. A lot of what we did in the administrative meetings, they [principals] paralleled in their staff meetings. They modified slightly what we did so they could use that in their staff development meetings.

We have early release every Wednesday in this district and that’s sacred staff development time. We’ve had that since 1994. That’s a huge plus, because it’s just part of who we are. This year, we’re reading together Change Leadership by Tony Wagner. We’ll read two chapters, come together, and one of us will facilitate the discussion. On the chapter we just finished, we looked at two lessons (a middle school and a high school lesson): We spent about 15 minutes on each lesson and then evaluated them individually and as a group.

One advantage we have [in operating this way] is we’re small enough. I was trying to think how this would work in a school district that’s quite a bit bigger. We have 11 schools, 3,000 kids, and 350 employees and pretty much everyone knows one another so it makes it a little easier to do this work. But we’re also not so small that we can’t do some innovative things. Our size really is an advantage for us.

Q: What are some of the other ways you’re trying to promote the idea of all staff learning together?

We’ve really tried to bring the school board into this learning community as well. We read Seven Habits of Highly Effective School Boards with them and did a similar design with them over the last two years.

We’ve changed some other long-standing traditions here. When all the teachers come back at the beginning of the school year, there’s always been that traditional welcome back meeting where 300 people gather in the cafeteria and the superintendent does a speech and the association presidents do a speech and you can just see the teachers out there thinking “I’ve got to get into my classroom and get ready.” So, why are we doing this? Two years ago, we brought everyone together but we spent the entire four hours learning literacy strategies together. We divided the cafeteria in the high school into quadrants and every quadrant had five big round tables: a K–2, 3–5, middle school, and high school area. At each one we had someone from our district to facilitate each of the five groups around the bigger concepts of fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, motivation, and parent involvement related to literacy. So, you’d go to the table and the facilitator would lead you through learning a couple of new instructional strategies about that topic. After 30 minutes, you rotated to another table—so you went through 5 rotations that were cross-school groupings.

They got a big notebook so, even if I was in the K–2 group I got all the strategies for all the levels because a lot of strategies apply across grade levels ... The response was overwhelming. They use these: they have them out in their classrooms; you see them thumbing through them; and they’ve added to them.

As a follow-up, we went around to all the schools in June and we shared a little piece on 20 of the best books we read together around literacy. All 250 teachers, administrators, educational assistants, and all school board members picked a book and when they returned for the welcome back meeting in August, we were in book clubs for the book we read that summer. One school all read the same book: Marzano’s Building Background Knowledge. In January, we’ll have a follow-up for the whole district and talk about our next work. Those are big examples of what we’ve done as a district.

Q. You’ve been quite successful at winning large grants. How do you target which grants to go after and how do you sustain the work once the money is gone?

We’ve gotten some grants that weren’t aligned with what we were trying to do. Over the years, we’ve scrutinized those grants more and said unless this really furthers the work we’re doing, it’s not worth the money. So, we’re much more intentional about what we apply for.

The part about sustaining it, that’s the tough one. We have a 21st Century grant right now that’s allowed us to have after-school programs at the middle school and high school. With that grant application, we had to write a sustainability strategy; one of the pieces of that is we have to set aside a certain amount of dollars out of our own money each year during the five years of the grant so that we have a fund to keep us going when we get to the end [of the grant period].

Q. What other ways do you try to stretch your money?

We’re pretty creative here in terms of how we assign staff time. One of the very simple things is shifting staff time, instead of everyone working an 8 to 4 day. We have a couple of people now who are working 10:30 a.m.–6:30 p.m. and it’s not costing us any more for those staff members. In addition, they like working those hours.

Q. You’ve mentioned that a high priority is getting technology in the hands of your students. How are you going about that?

We’ve had five years of the ed tech grant. The first three years we focused on handheld computers and we’ve been a leader in the Northwest in this. Our kids use their Palm Pilots all the time, and teachers use them in the classroom. I walked into a second grade classroom the other day and every kid had a Palm—they had their keyboards out and they were doing a writing lesson.

Building on that with the 21st Century grant, one of the carrots for kids to participate is that every student who’s in the after-school program gets a computer to take home. The Rotary Club was a partner in this effort: they’re refurbished computers that were donated by different people and one of our high school classes cleaned them up.

You should have seen the faces when the kids and parents walked in [to get the computers, which were programmed with open source systems and linked to the Internet, via the local educational service district’s network]. It was incredible. We didn’t ask any questions. If you’re in the after-school program, you can have a computer.

Q: Is the after-school program a contributor to your low dropout rate?

There are a lot of factors but it’s a contributor. We also have had an alternative high school for a number of years. The one thing I don’t want you to leave here without knowing is the huge transformation our high school has undergone. We used to be a single high school district; now have an alternative. We were not known for our academic prowess. This used to be a timber town and a lot of kids quit when they were 16 and went to work in a mill. Graduating from high school was not a priority.

I’ve been in the district 22 years. Even in the early 1990s, you look at our kids’ test scores and they were pretty pitiful in many cases. Our economically disadvantaged rate is near 60%, that’s what we’re drawing from. But if you look at our high school in the last two to three years, and you look at how kids are achieving, it’s pretty phenomenal. We went from being at the bottom of the 22 high schools in Lane County and this year we were second in the county in reading and tied for second in math. It’s a huge turnaround. Part of it is the learning community work. Our high school principal has been immersed in this with us and has done a great job of modeling what we’ve done with his staff. But, I think the literacy work they’ve done has been the biggest factor. They have a really sophisticated pyramid of interventions for kids.

Q: A lot of your staff has been here a long time. Has it been difficult to get everyone on board with new programs and new approaches?

I tend to look at the glass as half full. I cannot really say we’ve had any resistance and I think it was because it wasn’t a top down thing. It was about us all learning together. It wasn’t us coming in and saying we have the answers and do it all this way. It was let’s learn about this together and figure out what the strategies are together.

When we went into our new high school four years ago, we had a site council with eight members that wasn’t that functional. We said let’s scrap that concept and have a culture of achievement team and that whole team is going to be focused on how to change the culture of Cottage Grove High School so it’s cool to achieve, it’s cool to learn. That team has 32 people on it—parents, teachers, kids, administrators—who meet twice a month. That team has systematically worked on the issues we’ve been talking about: one subcommittee worked on developing the pyramid of interventions; one that I was on looked at how do we get parents involved.

Q: Can other districts do the things you’ve accomplished here?

I was trying to think about how you can do this in a bigger district and I think it can be done ... maybe not as quickly. I think you’ve got to get centered on what your work is going to be about. There’s nothing fancy about what we’ve done. It’s not like we’ve had to spend a bunch of money to bring in a model. We have the collective intelligence right here to draw on.

I think it comes down to prioritizing: you do what matters. I think sometimes school districts get mucked up in stuff that isn’t really important and isn’t about how kids are doing in school and what they’re learning. You have to get rid of that stuff the best you can. It’s really a question of focus and where you put your energy. We spent a year and a half with our leadership team developing shared beliefs. We did a ton of activities and came up with a list of shared beliefs. It’s nothing we published or printed on fancy paper and shared with anybody. It’s what we check in about as a leadership team—is this still where we’re at? We continue to check in and we modify it.

Q: How do you feel about being named Oregon Superintendent of the year?

That award is about everybody here and I think they feel that way—that this award is about all of us. The community and the staff think that award is recognition of the work that we’ve all done. This is an incredibly talented staff: people really care about what happens to kids.