How do you plan to get to know the Blue Valley Community and cultivate connections?
Yes, so I attend all the student activities that I can, and sometimes that means two or three nights [a week], and that includes elementary and middle school. This is a much larger school district, but every time I go to an event, or even interacting [with the community]. If I have a server and I try to patronize businesses within the Blue Valley community. When I'm sitting down and having, in fact, I've met a graduate of a Blue Valley student and who had siblings at, I think Blue Valley West and so, just engage them. You know, what do you love about school? What what do you wish we would have done differently? So I make the most of all those moments, which is a little bit annoying, if I'm with my friends or family, they're like, ‘Really, can we not talk about school?’ But I try to attend things and support community efforts, whether it's the Leawood chamber, the Overland Park chamber, the Rotary. If there's some sort of an event, I try to engage with families and but really the most important people in the groups that I want to get to know are you as students, because as a superintendent and as a school board too, we hear a lot from parents. We hear input, and we get input from community members, and, of course, staff members, we get a lot of input from them. Sometimes students are the groups that we don't interact with as much, and I think you all have the best information for us to share. And I think it's interesting that these well intentioned adults like me spend our career and our lives working on behalf of students and making decisions for you, and if we're not involving you, then am I really making a good decision if I don't know you and I don't know your hopes and dreams and I don't know what challenges that you're facing? So I think involving students is really important. So I think you'll see me out [and] about quite a bit in schools. One of the favorite things that I did in Jackson is I had a student senate, and it involved elementary students, middle school students and high school students, and I had the seniors that were also student school board members, and they helped me facilitate my student senate, and they basically worked on, what's an issue that they feel strongly about that needed to change in the district. And they basically had two things that were important to them that they tackled. And one was basically cell phone use social media and the you know, how do you how do you really balance the fact that, if you're born today, 97% of your life and your time is spent within three feet of [phones]. It's a fact. And so how do we adequately prepare our students and our parents? We learned parents are worse than kids about cell phone use, so they tackled that, and their work was tremendous, and because they tackled it, it was their problem of practice, implementation has been, I wouldn't say easy, but they are respecting the boundaries that they established on cell phone use and device use and appropriate use. And then the second thing was they tackled nutrition and physical well being and making healthy choices in the cafeteria at home, and knowing how nutrition impacts their body [and] their mind, and in order to be at their best, they wanted to know more about nutrition and what we were serving in the cafeteria and guidance for parents. And so it was really fascinating. So I hope I can start [a] Student Senate here in Blue Valley, it's a tremendous time commitment, so I'm kind of waiting to see what routine is established and how I could make that work on a much larger scale. But it personally gave me joy because of the connections that I was having with kids, and also guided a lot of the decisions that I made, not just around cell phones and nutrition, but everything that we did in the district, I was involving the students. Blue Valley has already a great start on that because of the strategic plan and the involvement that students had on the strategic plan, that was a year long process. So I feel like Blue Valley is already ahead of that curve. So now it's, it's kind of like, when you're working out [on] a treadmill, you start out as a walk, and then you gradually go faster and faster and faster. And I feel like I've kind of dropped in on that treadmill when we're at a little faster pace, because I wasn't involved in that. But the work is so good. It's, it's a little bit easier for me to just drop in, although I'm pedaling as fast as I can.
