Hopkins School Superintendent Discusses The Year Ahead

The start of the school year is always a time of excitement and change. School Superintendent John Schultz sat down with Hopkins Patch last week to discuss some of the changes and issues Hopkins Public Schools will see this year.

On new features for the 2011-2012 school year

• “From the junior high perspective, there’s going to be , some for junior high students. You’re going to see a different schedule that allows, I think, for better relationships for teachers and students at the junior high schools.”
• “I always say you get a better teaching staff every summer because teachers renew themselves (through) professional development and start thinking about things differently from the experiences from one year to the next. … I always say you get a renewed teaching staff. That’s a big thing.”
• "And I think we’re going to capitalize on that, from a teacher’s perspective, coming into it (with) ‘professional learning communities.’ Teachers are going to be looking at student data, doing some planning from the perspective of student data, and working on teaching teams.”
• “We always improve our technology—or technologies. … Kids are going to start seeing more devices in the classroom in the form of iPads and other types of devices. I don’t remember the names of all of them because there’s too many of them, but devices nonetheless. … I think every year the educational system continues to use different tools in the form of technology to teach a curriculum for students to be prepared.”

On “professional learning communities”

For 2011-2012, Hopkins Public Schools is launching this teaching structure, which brings groups of teachers together to collaboratively help students achieve.

• “I think it actually provides the structure, provides professional development. Yes, we’ve had data, but now it’s really using that data and training the teachers on how to use that data. ‘What is that data telling you? What is the data not telling you?’ It’s really codifying the whole perspective of the use of data and using it to impact learning.”
• “Standardized testing is just one data point that’s used in professional learning communities. There’s a lot of data a teacher collects. That’s one piece of it. MCA [Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments] is a piece of it. Our are a piece of it. Now what are the quizzes, the assignments, the student work, the interaction the teacher’s having in the classroom? That’s all data. Put them into professional learning community, and they’re able to talk about it with another colleague—about how do I resolve this issue with this student, how do I resolve getting this student to learn more efficiently. It really improves teacher efficacy.”

On communication

• “There’s always so much content that you can communicate, as you well know. But I think we need to continue to figure out how people are communicating. Social media is becoming really ubiquitous. Some groups of parents communicate using one tool. You have another group of parents that communicate (with) another tool. Another group of citizens communicate using the newspaper. So the school system has to be really responsive to communication tools, the media, that people are using to get information. We are on Twitter. We have a Facebook page. We have the website [www.hopkinsschools.org].”
• “Our website is still what I would say is our main tool for communicating. If you want to know what’s going on in your building, what’s going on in your school district, it’s at that Web page. That’s the piece.”
• “But it’s not static. If we think communication is static today, we’re in trouble. Web pages seem to be the place that people go, but Web pages, in a sense, are not as ‘just-in-time,’ as quick, as maybe Twitter or a text message.”

On controversy and capacity

Hopkins Patch: I think one of your school board members told me last year that there’s always one issue a school year that really gets people, I guess, riled up or mobilized.

Schultz: Yep. Yep.

Hopkins Patch: Any predictions on what that issue’s gonna be this year?

Schultz: I really don’t. There’s no planned ones. Let’s put it that way. In the next month or so, James, we’ll have some direction on what we’re going to do as a School Board-superintendent team—as far as those things that we need to work on as we look out into the future. So it’s a little premature to say what that is yet.

Hopkins Patch: Is there any plan for what parents are going to start seeing at or or some of the schools that are seeing capacity issues?

Schultz: That’s a discussion we will have. We’re right now at the point now where we’re gathering data for that. That’s a good question. That would be a piece that will play into our discussion. The hard part of making predictions with this is we don’t know what our enrollment for this year yet. We have a really good idea, but things change. They could change in the next month. You could have 25-30 kids be added to a school or you could have 25-30 kids leave a school. So the flexibility—or the flux, the movement—it’s hard to, you know, and depending on what happens within that enrollment is going to drive whether we have to do something at Eisenhower. We’ll just have to wait until we start seeing the children’s faces in the building and make decisions around those numbers.  

On new leadership

The 2011-2012 school year will bring significant turnover for Hopkins Public Schools leadership—including two principals, a director and at least two new .

• “I don’t get to select the board members, but that’s OK. This is a great community. … The community always brings forth great leaders, and the leadership is collaborative. They want to work together. They want to work with all of us. They work well. They have a great vision for what their schools should be. So I don’t have one anxiety over what the board’s going to be. It’s going to be fun to have a new group—you get new vision, you get new ideas, you get a different way of approaching issues, a different way of approaching leadership and bringing vision to the schools. It’s really exciting for me to have that—kind of that refreshment that goes along with a board election.”
• “I get to choose the principals with the help of the staff. It’s a real collaborative effort in choosing [ Principal] Patty Johnson and [Associate Principal] Adam McDonald at the high school—great, great leaders committed to the diverse nature of our high school. They know the art of teaching. They know the art of learning. They know what it means to provide care to a high school student. They know how high school students think. They’re able to get teachers to work together collaboratively around one vision for student learning. They’re high energy, so it’s going to be fun to watch them unfold.”
• “[ Principal] Becky Melville—another principal with a great teaching background, with a great understanding of what it means to teach to junior high students, with great experience both here in the district as well as the district she’s from. And she is coming in as a thoughtful administrator with high energy and new ideas.”
• “I also wouldn’t want to forget Linda Gardner, our new director of special services, who comes with a real perspective of what it means to provide an educational program for special needs kids in special education and how do you deliver that assistance in an effective but efficient way.
• “All of us have hit the ground running at leadership workshops this week. It was fun to have everyone together. We all decided as a team to focus on collaboration, the collaborative nature of our work, and encouraging collaboration—especially teachers as you get into professional learning communities, the PLCs. But also helping that sense of community engagement and how we get our community (involved). … How do you bring those people from all those different backgrounds—different races, different perspectives, different economic backgrounds, different ideas—bring them all together in one community?”

On preparation for the 2012 Legislative session

• “We just got the summaries of those bills—so until we get our head wrapped around that, we’ll have to figure out what we do with what they gave us for 2011. … What’s going to work out of this session?  What isn’t going to work? And what else do we need? And then bring that back to them for 2012.”
• “As I look at the first run of the bill, I’m really concerned about the [school funding] shift—that $2.8 billion shift that they have. There has to be a plan to pay that back, and I think we need to know what that plan looks like.”
• “The policy stuff still remains unclear because the MDE [Minnesota Department of Education] hasn’t even had a chance to figure (it) out. There’s some policy around teacher evaluation. There’s some policy around principal evaluation. There’s some policy around integration. There’s policy around literacy, and that also is in the funding bill. So until we can tease all that out—we’re learning right now.”