Leadership Matters August 2013 issue.pub

New school year brings challenges IASA superintendents offer their views For this “Back to School” issue of Leadership Matters, we posed a two-part question to superintendents who are serving on the IASA Board of Directors. The questions were:  What do you see as the biggest challenge heading into the new school year? And  How do you plan to address that challenge? The responses we received covered a variety of topics and are listed below and on the following pages.

Tim Buss Wabash District 348 Wabash Valley Region

Dr. John Correll Salt Creek 48 Du Page Region

“Implementation of the Common Core Standards and the PARCC Assessment are the biggest challenges. We have been planning for this for over a year and hope it goes smoothly.”

“The biggest challenge I see

for this coming year is not one of the specific legal or technical issues we face with increasing regularity, but the challenge of keeping our school community focused on the positive attributes of our educational system. While we always take a hard look at areas we need to improve on, and develop plans for those improvements, I believe the glass is half full and we need to be proud of our students, staff and families. We are a popular, and too often easy, target for those that want to blame schools for anything they are concerned about, and we need to remind them that we know what we are doing and that good things are going on in our schools. “I plan to address this with consistent regular communication to our community in a variety of ways about the good things happening in our schools.”

Paula Hawley Pikeland Community Unit District 10 Two Rivers Region

“Our biggest challenge for this year is keeping up on all of the new requirements — Common

Core, new teacher evaluation systems, new reporting systems from the state, etc. I truly feel like there is not enough time in the day to do everything that is being asked of our teachers, schools, and districts. “How to address it? I can’t create time. I can only work with the time I have, keep my staff calm, and hope that my administrators and teachers don’t go crazy in the process of addressing everything that is being asked of them. I am starting to see burnout in even my very youngest teachers, and it is very concerning.”

“My challenge is to maintain focus on our local goals and real reform in a time of many distractions.

Dr. Jonathan Heerboth West Prairie CU 103 Western Region

I remind myself that I was hired to lead. Each day I give the distractions their due, set them aside, and then bring myself back to the real work of concentrating on teaching and learning in our district. It would be possible to fill my days doing what others say is important. My job is to concentrate on the work that will best serve our students' needs as we move forward toward our district's goals.”

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