Schools Superintendent: District Needs 'Radical Changes'

Pasco County is currently ranked 34th out of 67 school districts — and new Schools Superintendent Kurt Browning said he is not content with being average.

“You’re looking at the face of a very unhappy superintendent,” he said during a speech before the Central Pasco Chamber of Commerce Wednesday. “I’ve never been happy with mediocre.”

The only way to move the district forward, Browning said, is to make “radical changes.” Browning said his staff knows never to tell him that something is done a certain way in the district because that’s the way it’s always been.

Since  Browning’s swearing in in November, the district has reduced the number of assistant superintendents from four to two and has done away with the structure of segregating the elementary-level learning environment from the middle and high school ones.  

“How do we know if what we’re doing in elementary schools is preparing them for middle school and then high school?” Browning said. “We don’t, other than test scores, and at that point it’s too late.”

Browning said the district is now broken up into four zoned regions: east, central, northwest and southwest. Each so-called “learning community” has an executive director who examines the district’s student feeding patterns from the lower grades to the higher grades.

“We’re better able to watch as our students come into the system and see what they’re doing in the third grade and see how they perform in the sixth grade, Browning said. “Novel idea, but we weren’t doing that.” 

Propelling Pasco County ahead will also require a change in perspective for not only the district, but the community too, Browning said. No longer is the region quite as small and rural as it once was.

“We are an urban district,” he said, referencing the traffic and development along roads such as State Route 54.  

Frankly, Browning said, students also need to be pushed harder, too, in light of lagging test scores and a changing world.

“Our students are educationally lazy,” Browning said. “We are letting our kids be kids, and that’s the problem. Our kids are not being prepared to survive a global economy.”