Scott was one of my non-traditional students in a Traverse City cohort. One of my clear memories when I first met him was when he asked me to listen to his artificial heart valve. Looking at him, you would never know that he had a life-threatening medical condition that was thankfully resolved with surgery. Scott was 35 years old when he started his teaching career.

When I first visited Scott, he was teaching in the high school in Oscoda, Michigan.  The school was on a trimester schedule, with each class lasting 70 minutes. This was the high school’s first year in a trimester schedule. They were following a block schedule in previous years. There was very little ethnic diversity in the district or the high school. Oscoda’s economy was adversely affected by the closure of the Air Force base there. There were attempts at bringing in new business, but there was an increase in poverty due to the loss of hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs. In 2008 the graduating class was around 110 students and it would rise to 140 the next year, but then drop to 100. Before the air base closed the high school had 700 students.  There was some hope with a new business at the airfield, a 747 airline freight and engine renovation company might bring in 200 new, well-paying jobs.

Scott was teaching two elective courses at the time, a Freshmen level leadership class and a Psychology class. The Leadership class used a district curriculum, but Scott had some leeway in how to teach the course.  Even though the Leadership class was focused on freshmen, one of his two classes had mainly seniors and Scott told me that the dynamic changed entirely for the seniors and almost required a whole separate and different lesson plan.

Scott was hired to teach and coach and he coached football, basketball and JV baseball.  He also worked with students in the weight room.  His day started at 5 AM, getting to school by 6, with football practice after school, then home, helping out with his two younger children, getting them and himself in bed by 8 PM.  Of course, that schedule did not include game days and depending where the game was and the length of bus ride, 5 AM probably came quickly the next morning.  All of these assignments are not uncommon for male Social Studies teachers around the United States. It was never apparent in New York that my teaching position was dependent on my coaching record, but the same cannot be said in other districts in New York State or other states, for that matter.  I was careful and insistent when I moved to Kansas reinforcing I was a teacher first and a coach second.

There was a writing prompt on the board. “If the minute you stepped into 7th grade you made a decision that you were going to seek your full potential, instead of giving into negative influences, being lazy or afraid, what would be different about your life today?” (Lueck, f.n., 2008, p.1).  Pretty heady question for a group of Freshmen. Discussion followed. Scott asked, “If you were to maximize your potential, where would you be and what would you be doing in five years? (Lueck, f.n., 2008, p.1).  The students shared the potential negative influences on their lives: peer pressure, the media, themselves, being afraid to try. He asked them about the factors that impacted the students’ standardized test scores: “teachers, students, funding”.  Scott called on five different students for responses to his first questions and all five said they were college-bound. Scott next asked for raised hands for an informal poll on how of them had a father who lived at home.  Only 50% of the class indicated that they did.  Scott shared some statistics on fatherhood and its meaning for young adults. He asked about responsibility on how his students were taught to be responsible.  He shared a quote from John Steinbeck: “People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.” Even though the discussion was serious and thought-provoking, Scott managed to work in some humor in order to keep the atmosphere a little light. The class joined in as a whole, offering various relevant life examples of responsibility and Scott shared at least one example from his own life. Scott posed another question: “Why were fathers leaving their families?” (Lueck, f.n., 2008, p.3). The students offered the following answers: no responsibility, too young, not ready to be fathers, accidental situations, divorce proceedings where the mother usually got custody, non-payment of child support. It was a very frank discussion with these young students.  Scott next asked what happened to a family when a father left? The students answered with “psychological problems for the children, the girls looked for sex in replacing the father’s love, young children were forced to work to replace the father’s income”.  I had little doubt that these answers came from these students’ own life experiences. All this discussion happened within a 70-minute period. It was open, honest truth and I was amazed at how Scott conducted a positive and at the same time, gut-wrenching conversation with these young adults.

Scott’s second period class was Psychology and today’s agenda was research on psychological disorders. The students retrieved laptops from a cart as Scott explained to me that scheduling the carts was difficult. There weren’t enough laptops for all the teachers who wanted to use them.  The students were creating 5 to 7 slide presentations that discussed causes, symptoms and behavior related to various disorders. They could use video clips no longer than 3 to 5 minutes and those clips could be sourced from almost anywhere. The students were given a case study handout as background for their research.

Scott had classroom management well in hand. He had to step out of the room a few times while I was there during the day to get tech help and have a conversation with another teacher. His students stayed engaged and did not use the opportunity to let loose. During one of the conversations Scott learned that he was being shifted to the middle school next year and would be teaching 8th grade U.S. History, a subject he last taught during student teaching. He did not seem too concerned regarding the grade level change.

He told me later that the district’s teachers were working without a contract and lay-offs were looming for next year, no doubt caused by the weak financial situation due to the base closure. An Art teacher with 39 years in the classroom was laid off the previous year when the district’s art program was cut. Apparently, tenure was meaningless when it came to budget cuts. Also apparent was the trust placed in Scott by his colleagues because they asked him to get involved in contract negotiations. With all these problems going on Scott predicted that 10% of the student population would leave after this school year, due to the bad economy and the district’s low standardized test scores.  Poverty, unemployment, and broken homes are not limited to urban areas.

As the day progressed it was evident that Scott was respected by his students and he respected them. He had virtually no discipline problems with his classes, and his students willingly shared some intimate details about their lives and struggles, a sign of trust in their teacher. Few of his students in his second Leadership class admitted that they were headed to college.  Twenty-three out of the twenty-nine students admitted that they did not live with both of their parents. Scott was adept at finding ways of engaging students in discussion who initially were reticent to join, while also holding them to classroom standards. At one point he told a student who had his head down on his desk that if he would not raise his head he would have to stand by his desk. He took his head off his desk. Scott described his role in his classes as being a facilitator for learning.

Interview, 2008

Defining Success, 2008

Scott said that his success was totally derived from the success of his students. An example he provided was when his students successfully prepared for a test. If they took test preparation seriously, then he knew they wanted to do well and he thought he was getting through to them. This test success was not based on his students’ results on standardized tests because the two classes he taught were not part of the state’s testing regimen. He extended that answer to include results on ACT tests and in-class writing assessments. Scott said that many students were signing up for his Psychology class and students told him that he was their favorite teacher. He learned at GVSU that teachers should be every students’ favorite teacher and his students’ reactions in signing up for his elective classes and their effort in his classes certainly made him feel that he was successful.

Scott taught Psychology and Economics his first year and when the district lost a Wood Shop teacher, Scott agreed to take on that class for a semester, given his previous experience in building houses. His Psych class had expanded to two trimesters and now including a Psych 2 class, with content he had not taught in the past.  Next year, in 2009, he would teach five sections of U.S. History in the middle school and drop all the other classes he taught in the high school.  A brand-new prep did not seem to bother him, nor did the shift in grade levels.

Content, 2008

When I had Scott in the classes at Traverse City it was second go-around with GVSU. He began his first go-around at college in 1987, stacked up quite a few credits, but did not graduate.  He said what he learned in those courses would no longer be applicable to classrooms now. One of the positives he gained from his most recent coursework was the fact that GVSU used the Charlotte Danielson model for teacher evaluation. When presented with the system at Oscoda, Scott told the administration that he knew the workings of the system and would have no problem with its requirements.

Even though he did not use the ITIP lesson planning method in detail, which he learned at GVSU, he did plan using that method as a background. He knew how to plan, even if he did not write out three to five-page lesson plans every day. I related to my students at GVSU that few teachers have the time to write out extensive written plans for every day, but they did have to plan. Teaching extemporaneously never worked.

Most of Scott’s content background came from the content courses he took at Northwestern Michigan College, but the strategies and methods for teaching that content came from the courses he took at the GVSU Traverse City campus. He learned how to use varied approaches to student learning, keeping an agenda and keeping on schedule.  He developed good classroom management plans due to a course in Classroom Management through the College of Education. Overall, Scott found his coursework at GVSU and assignments at GVSU practical and useful.

While Scott did receive most of his content courses from Northern Michigan College, the ability to apply that knowledge came from coursework at GVSU.  He said his best class was a diversity course. His professor for that course, Marty Litherland, told the future teachers that they had to teach every kid and there were multitudes of different types of students. That fact was reinforced when Scott started having his own children and realized that no two children are exactly alike, even in the same family. I know, at times, teachers have made the mistake of comparing children from the same family, as in the line, “Why are not you more like your older sister or brother?”  That indictment does no one any good.  Not the student. Not the teacher. I relied on a quote from James Fenimore Cooper in “The Last of the Mohicans” in which Deerslayer said, “Everyone has their own gifts” or words to that effect. Only by realizing that different student have different gifts and different perspectives they bring to the learning table, will teachers have any chance of reaching and educating all the students under their care and guidance.

I next asked Scott what content he did not have, based on his college preparation, and needed to teach himself, due to his class assignments. Even though he taught Psychology for 15 weeks during his student-teaching semester, he finished his minor in 1992 so there was a gap in his information. He said he was all right for the first 6 weeks of his first semester but then he had to reacquaint himself with information he had not be in contact with for sixteen years. He also contended with putting that content into workable lesson plans.  Unfortunately, like more than a few of my college students, Scott’s 6 credit hours of Economics, Macro and Micro, were not easily applied to his teaching and he was tasked with teaching Economics when he started his career. That task was further complicated by the fact that the district did not provide a textbook, just a curriculum guide and good wishes. Scott said it was a good thing that he liked doing research because he had to do a lot of it. It was good that he had a solid background for teaching Psychology. He was fortunate that he was familiar with a good Psych text during student teaching and after a little wheedling with the publisher, Scott was able to get a classroom set of books at no cost to the district. Quite a coup for a district in a high poverty area!

Methods and Strategies, 2008

Scott tried to vary the activities in his classes every day and with a 70-minute class period, he included at least 4 or 5 different modes of learning and teaching. Every day he started the period off with a short warm up activity, which also allowed him the time for attendance-taking. He used slide presentations, but he also had students create their own slides in the process of teaching the class. He used short video clips, followed by discussion and he also believed in modeling his students’ assignments so they had an idea of Scott’s expectations.

For the first time in 2008, Scott had a dedicated computer cart with a projector, stereo speakers and a DVD player for his classroom. He used that technology every day, plus a roaming computer cart for student use.  At one time the school district had a course in middle school that taught various software applications, but it had since ended that class and now the teachers included that information and those skills in their classes.  Scott said the students easily picked up on what they did not know.

I asked Scott if there were gaps in college preparation in terms of methods and strategies and he said that the economic and mental diversity of his students was a challenge.  He had college-bound, non-college bound, and special needs students, all in the same classes. He found he was teaching to the least common denominator and probably losing the high achieving students’ attention, especially when the block schedule featured 84-minute periods, instead of the present 70-minute classes. He had to find other activities for the students who were able to finish a class-long assignment for some students, in 15 or 20 minutes, without making the high achievers feel like they were being burdened because of their ability. He did some group work, but he kept the groups small and most of the time he created the groups himself, rather than having the students choose their own groups, especially in his Freshmen Leadership class.  The freshmen were too immature in managing their time and their relationships with their groupmates.

Pearls of Wisdom, 2008

Scott’s first pearl was the need for beginning teachers to know their content… “or the kids will figure it out quick” (Lueck, v.t., 2008, p.9). He related an experience during his student teaching semester when his students knew he was not well grounded in the Psychology content he was presenting, but he said the next class period things went much better, once he was more familiar with the material and how he wanted the class to proceed.  His next “pearl” was “don’t be afraid to be wrong” (Lueck, v.t., 2008, p.9).  He said that teachers should not worry about their students taking a discussion in a different direction which might challenge a teacher’s content base.  Better to admit you do not know and promise to do further research, rather than trying to gloss over the question or comment or try to bluff your way through it.

Scott’s next pearl was the basis of a message I repeated to my student teachers and future teachers every semester and every year.

If you’re not overwhelmed your first year, you’re not doing it right.  You know I remember my first year, one of the first or second new teacher orientation meetings that we had, and people were talking about, “I’m just so busy.  I’m overwhelmed.” And the principal that was running the workshop says, “good.  You’re supposed to be overwhelmed.”  So, if you think it’s really easy your first year, you might not be doing it right.  Do the time doing your research.  Write out your lesson plans.  Save everything. Save your lesson plan book.  Be sharp with attendance.  It’s one of the legal things you have to do.  Be prepared for the paper work.  Be prepared for department meetings and professional development (Lueck, v.t., 2008, p.9).

There is a lot to remember and a lot to do, but just knowing that every new teacher struggles with the planning, grading and other paperwork provides some sense of relief. It is good for veteran teachers to admit to rookie teachers that teaching is never easy and the first few years are definitely a challenge.

Scott warned about staying away from negative people and the cliques that sometime form amongst teachers at school. This comment aligned with other people’s comments about school politics.  One of my professors warned me about staying out of the teachers’ lounge when I first started teaching. That was easy because the lounge was distant from my classroom. The same could be said for lunchtime gatherings. New teachers should know the backstory in how a school operates, but with all the challenges they face it would be more helpful for them and their mental health to limit the amount of negative information and gossip they might hear.

Scott said that teachers should be enthusiastic about teaching and what they teach. Students should want to be in your classes, not ‘have to take it’.  I told my college students that, even if they were not particularly excited about a topic in history or any other subject they teach, their students should have the impression that a teacher can’t wait for them to learn about it. Not only that, but a good teacher would rather be in her/his classroom than have a sub teaching their students. This is not to disparage substitute teachers, but rather that a teacher should think that no one relates to their students better than they do and no one loves what they are teaching better than they do.

The next pearl was succinct and said a little humorously, even though I know Scott was being dead serious.  “Don’t hit them and don’t kiss them” (Lueck, v.t, 2008, p.10).  I will leave that comment at that. Some people say teaching went downhill when students could no longer be swatted with a paddle. The few times I was paddled or shaken as a student back in the 50s and early 60s might have modified my behavior in the short run, but did little to make me a better student. As for the second part of Scott’s comment, there are more than enough stories in the news about improper relationships between teachers and students. Students, for whatever reason, may be attracted to teachers, but that attraction should never be returned in kind.

I told Scott that one of the other teachers in this study chided me about the fact that I did not warn my college students about the minutiae of teaching. I was worried that if I was too honest about the reams of paperwork teachers face it would form a negative impression for their future profession. Scott’s “pearl” for piles of paperwork was organization. Teachers should not let piles grow and must make time for prioritizing and completing all the things that are thrown at them.

Scott’s last pearl had to do with classroom management and good classroom discipline. He did not consider himself a disciplinarian. He said teachers need to be respected by their students and inferred that respect should be earned, not imposed. Teachers should be able to take care of discipline problems on their own, unless the offense meets an automatic office visit based on school policy.  Principals’ jobs are difficult as it is, without teachers relying on the office to take care of what they needed to do on their own. Students take advantage of teachers who do not like to set and keep their own standards for behavior in their room. After a teacher earns his/her students’ respect, then it is fine if they grow to like you for who you are, what and how you teach.

2015

In May of 2015, Scott was no longer a high school or middle school teacher.  He was the Assistant Principal and would soon be Athletic Director at Oscoda High School. He taught Psychology, Economics and Freshmen Leadership for 3 years in the High School and United States History for 3 years in the Middle School.

Defining Success, 2015

Scott’s answer on whether his college experience prepared him for success was a definitive “yes”. He thought most of college coursework described the different ways in teaching various subjects and then provided real-life examples of how to make those ideas work in the classroom. As far as defining success, Scott thought the definition came from the students.

The students like coming to your classroom.  The students like or respect you, one of the two.  Hopefully both, but you don’t get kids who are not wanting to come to class. They want to come to class. They want to come to school.  It’s successful because they are showing that they are learning.  They’re demonstrating that and then they’re demonstrating the fact that they want to be in school. So, we can only teach them so much if they’re not here (Lueck, v.t., 2015, p.1).

One of Scott’s jobs as assistant principal was being the attendance officer. Some of the answers for why students did not show up for school or a particular class was a poor relationship with the teacher.  I do not think he laid all the blame on the teacher. Obviously, the student contributed to a bad situation, but teachers did shoulder some of the responsibility for not setting some of the conditions for successful learning and teaching conditions. Another factor that contributed to problems at school for students was poverty.  Scott’s county was #2 in the state in terms of poverty at the time of this interview in 2015.  He did say that the number of students on free/reduced lunch dropped recently to about 60% of the student population. The economic situation was not entirely bad due to summer tourism and a thriving aircraft repair business located at the closed airbase.

Returning to the definition of success, Scott said that the pedagogy classes he took in college gave him the tools to translate content into workable lesson plans.  He again gave credit to the diversity class he took because it helped open his eyes to all the different kinds of students and their needs when it came to teaching and learning. He took the class when he started having children of his own and that experience helped him realize that he was being trusted with the care and learning of other people’s children.

Challenges, 2015

I started this question off, like I did with so many of the teachers I interviewed, with the sad statistic of the number of teachers who leave the profession within the first four or five years of their career. Scott jokingly said he was still in teaching because of the paycheck and he had to pay the bills. Most good teachers I know are eminently capable of being successful in many different lines of work and therefore could earn much more than most public educators. Scott’s first answer to challenges was time. Teachers’ and administrators’ workloads were increasing, with more regulations and the attached paperwork.

Even 10 years ago I felt I could just shut my door and teach, but then every year it seemed just more and more would get poured on.  And then I think money doesn’t solve all your problems but some of the funding issues have caused drops in employment so people take on more work.  Like I said, I’m taking on athletic director next year for budgetary reasons and so when people get more put on them it causes stress.  If you’re 24 years old and you’re making $32,000 a year and you’re stressed to the max, you’re looking for something in the newspaper that pays $32,000 a year that’s 8 to 5 because there is jobs out there like that.  Now some teachers, part of that number is they don’t get tenure.  We knew that.  We had teachers who we didn’t think were outstanding and we didn’t keep them so it’s by choice or by force and sometimes it’s by force.  You can, you can make $40,000 a year working in a bank, 9 to 5 and you don’t have to call parents or meet with parents or do conferences and so (shrugs his shoulders) there are other options out there and we see it all the time. We don’t see our top 10% going into education.  They are looking at nursing fields or anything medical or engineering. Sadly, we don’t see a lot of them, “Yeah, I want to be a teacher.”  Teachers get beat up in social media and newspapers.  Teachers get beat up.  Schools get beat up.  It’s the popular thing to do so it’s hard to convince somebody you can go change the world with 30 kids.  And you’ve got to have that belief. You’ve to got to be born to do it now.  You’ve got to see the importance of kids and education. Otherwise if you don’t see the value in that then you’re not going to see the value in the money or the time or anything like that (Lueck, v.t., 2015, p.4).

Dealing with Stress, 2015

Like other people in this study, Scott said that coaching was a stress relief for him. At the same time coaching did cause a little more stress because of the time it took out of his day. He had fun working with young athletes in the local youth football program and was looking forward to continuing that stress relief. He also liked to play cards, especially with people who were not involved with education. There was no shop talk, just card talk. The other card players did not care what Scott did for a living and he was having a good time doing anything but “school” for a few hours a week.

Motivation, 2015

Scott quickly named off two of his motivations; service to his students and service to the community. At this point in time Scott’s youngest child was a 6th grader and Scott had no thoughts about leaving education or the community in which he lived. He had thought about his future after his children were out of high school, including finding employment at Grand Valley State, in some capacity. He liked school, he liked the 90% of teachers which he considered competent and successful at what they did, he liked seeing the students every day and he liked seeing them succeed. He did not know if he was born to be a teacher, but he felt like something clicked when he started teaching.

Strategies and Methods, 2015

Scott said there were two big changes between 2008 and 2015 in teaching; integration of technology and differentiating instruction. He viewed differentiation on two levels; providing different ways of teaching and matching those different techniques to the different kinds of students. He referred to a class in which he had the school’s valedictorian and a special needs students. In terms of technology, the high school in 2008 had a roaming computer cart, which teachers had to reserve and now, in 2015, the district was preparing to go 1:1, one computer for every student. The students now were used to having tech in their hands all the time and now the challenge was finding ways to best match all the different programs and applications to students’ abilities and learning needs.

I asked Scott if he still thought of himself as a teacher, despite his job as an administrator and he said, “no”.  The reason for his answer was that his administrative duties were preventing him from classroom duties. He still liked visiting classrooms and offering help and suggestions to teachers, especially classroom management ideas. I think part of it was he wanted to be with all the students, not just the ones who required disciplinary action. One of my last assistant principals when I was teaching in Kansas was a great person and I was sad on the day he retired. Don was a great supporter of the school’s Quiz Bowl team and would travel to away meets on the weekend in order to watch our scholar-athletes compete. Knowing the amount of time his other duties took from his week, I asked him once why he set aside the time to make those meets.  He was perfectly honest in admitting that he needed to see the good kids doing their best in competition, not just dealing with discipline cases all day long as vice principal.

Evaluation, 2015

In 2008 Scott said he got a leg up in his job interview when he told Oscoda that he was very familiar with the Danielson model for teacher evaluation. The College of Education at GVSU did a good job of integrating that model into the classroom and into the evaluation of teacher-assistants and student teachers. Now, as an administrator, Scott saw that model, with some variations added by using part of the Marzano model, as a tool of improvement. He did have some pushback from some of the teachers when he cited certain areas of their teaching as being ineffective, but his line of reasoning was that they needed to improve and the comments were not made to disparage them.

Scott had his own evaluation as principal with sixteen to twenty different indicators. Some of those indicators included how he was helping teachers improve, how he was improving school discipline and attendance, what he was doing in improving the school physical environment and what he was doing to improve communication with the staff and students. Scott’s basic point of view was everyone, himself included, could always improve what they were doing on some level.

Mentoring, 2015

Scott had a mentor-teacher assigned to him when he started teaching at Oscoda. They had meetings once a month which consisted of his mentor asking Scott if he had any questions.  Scott thought his assistant principal at the time did a better job at mentoring him, but he felt comfortable approaching both of these people when he had questions. For the most part, Scott felt comfortable with his teaching ability, and my experiences with Scott in my classes would support his assessment of his ability.  He was reflective concerning his ability and others. He told me at one time in 2008 that he actually tracked other people’s teaching abilities when he went to classes or participated in professional development. What Scott said he needed most from his formal and informal mentors were answers to the everyday minutiae of teaching, plus the ins and outs of contract language and fringe benefits. As an assistant principal Scott said both the high school principal and the district superintendent served as his mentors.  He had a good working relationship with both people when he was teaching and that situation had not changed, even though the superintendent could be quite forthright at times when situations arose where Scott needed correction with some of the decisions he made.

Even though Scott witnessed quite a bit of turnover with the principal’s position at his school, he still felt he received good feedback from the four principals he had.  There was some continuity with having the same superintendent and the fact that there was some internal hiring for the principal’s position. Scott knew the principal who was hired from an outside school district so there at least some shared understanding of that person’s background and the way he operated.

Scott said that the mentoring program in 2015 was a more formalized arrangement. There was a “new teacher development” plan, which consisted both of a teacher-mentor and a principal offering guidance and support. Monthly meetings were required, as well as written minutes which described what happened during the meeting.

Continuing Education, 2015

By 2015 Scott had his Master’s Degree in Educational Leadership from Grand Valley State University. Scott did not need more hours for his job, but he did need to keep up certification so some type of coursework was in his future. He was still considering moving to the college level, but he knew that would require a further advanced degree and he did not have the time to commit to that type of study in 2015. Scott reinforced his positive comments he made in 2008 for his college coursework. For his Master’s degree he had administrators and former administrators who offered practical advice on leading schools. Scott saw all his Master’s work as realistic and immediately applicable to his job as assistant principal. Scott’s one suggestion for change was for continuing communication with the professors and instructors he had for his coursework. There were times when he had questions or could use some advice and it would have been nice to be able to reach out to those individuals who did such a good job in preparing Scott for success.

Pearls of Wisdom, 2015

“Local politics” came up again as an area where prospective teachers need to develop an awareness, but Scott was not sure how someone would really know about the politics concerning any given district or building until they were employed there. He thought it would be indiscrete to ask about local politics during an interview, but a teacher needed an awareness that politics were involved in every district and building, whether it be community or staff-related. No teacher should expect to shut her/his door and not be impacted on what went on outside. Communication was a must, although, naturally, questions should be asked tactfully.

Beyond local politics, Scott said state-wide political influences on testing and standards was inevitable and the more quickly new teachers realized that fact the better.  He said that often policy decisions were made at the state level by people who have little background in education. Teachers should get used to the fact that changes will occur, whether good or bad, throughout their careers. Scott thought that there was no room for a negative attitude or people who resist change. Better to be accepting of change and willing to make the best of a situation. That situation was more complicated recently due to the impact of social media. The public was more than willing to repeat a second-hand story from school about their child or what they thought a teacher said or did.

Scott’s last bit of advice was for future teachers to be problem-solvers. That meant if a teacher sees a problem somewhere, she/he should address that problem with potential solutions and not just say, “This needs to be fixed!” Everyone, from the custodial staff to the para-professionals to the teachers to the administration, need to act like a team. Lines of communication must be kept open, especially in difficult times. Scott related that his district’s financial challenges meant that the district had to go to one-year contracts because it was almost impossible to predict how much state aid and local finances would be available from year to year. To better deal with that challenge, the administration and union leaders started to meet once a month, in order to keep informed about the financial factors impacting the next round of yearly negotiations. That kind of communication extended to the rest of the staff and the student body. Scott thought the more lines of communication that existed the better chance of real understanding and less chance of trouble.

Scott has since left his administrative classroom in 2020 and is back in the classroom. He has finished 15 years in education, bought five years of experience in the state retirement system and has 10 more years to go before retirement.