Under the Umbrella, Volume 1, Issue 7

Under the Umbrella
Volume 1, Issue 7
February 2019
ALSO FEATURED:
SCHOOL REDESIGN
SCHOOL SAFETY
SCHOOL
Women in Leadership
ASSESSMENTS
SELF CARE
CAREER & TECH
UPCOMING EVENTS

CONTENTS Volume 1, Issue 7
2 Keeping in Touch During the Legislative Session, G.A. Buie
WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP
3 Women Make Great Leaders, Donna Zerr
5 Does Gender Impact Leadership?, Suzan Patton
SCHOOL REDESIGN
6-7 Our Vision, Mission, & Goals? Where is the Fit in 2019?, Dr.
John Vandewalle
7 Redesign From Canton-Galva Schools, John Denk
SCHOOL SAFETY
10 Train According to the Possibilities, Not the Protocols, Doug
Parisi
11 Online Activity, Offline Trouble, Jeff Bean
SCHOOL ASSESSMENTS
12-13 We Can Do Better: 5 Guiding Principals for Improving Fluency
Assessment, Cindy Jiban
13 Teacher Evaluations Have Dramatically Changed the
Principal’s Job, Denisa R. Superville
PRACTICING SELF CARE
14-16 Live Well, Lead Well, Mark Wilson
18-20 Improve Attendance, Behavior, and Academics! It Begins
With This, Mark Wilson
CAREER TECHNICAL EDUCATION
22 Amazon Launches ‘Future Engineer’ Program to Aid Pursuit of
Computer Science Careers, Lauraine Genota
22 CTE Training Not New to High Schools, Jerry Henn
24-25 Upcoming Events
NETWORK & STAY CONECTED
@USAKansas
Facebook.com/USAKansas
2018-2019 USA-Kansas
Board of Directors
Sean Cochran—President, KASEA
Ryan Jilka—President Elect, KAMSA
Pete Bastian—Past-President, KAESP
Mike Berblinger—Director, KSSA
Cory Gibson—Director, KSSA
Eric Hensen—Director, KASBO
Volora Hanzlicek—Director, KASCD
Ron Barry—Director, KASSP
Justin Henry—Director, KSSA
Christie Meyer—Director, KASCD
Bert Moore—Director, KASEA
Suzan Patton—Director, KSSA
Dennis Peerenboom—Director, KASPA
Jake Potter—Director, KanSPRA
P.J. Reilly—Director, KCCTEA
Donna Schmidt—Director, KASSP
Glen Suppes—Director, KSSA
Patrick Schroeder—Director, KAESP
Donna Zerr—Director, KASSP
G.A. Buie—Executive Director
Jerry Henn—Assistant Executive Director

KEEPING IN TOUCH DURING THE LEGISLATIVE
SESSION
G.A. Buie, Executive Director, USA-Kansas
It has been eight long years
since the democrats felt like
they had a say in Kansas
Government. The election in
November of 2010, put a wave
of conservative republicans in
control of the house, senate,
and governor’s office. I am sure I do not have to
tell you what happened next, even with a stronger
moderate republican presence during the last four
years, democrats often felt like outsiders looking
in.
Stay tuned with USA-Kansas as we keep you
informed on the activities in the Capitol; we have
already started with our weekly Capitol Connection
released on Friday’s. The Connection is a one to
two-page weekly update including bills, testimony,
and activities in the Capitol. The Capitol Chatter is
posted on Mondays and the Chatter includes a
behind closed door look at what is happening
around the Capitol hallways. Each of these updates
and more will be shared through our USA-Kansas
App and will be stored on the USA-Kansas
members only portion of our website.
Following Governor Kelly’s State of the State
speech, KASB and USA-Kansas hosted a reception
for all legislators, but it was the democrats who
had the extra pep in their step. Granted, the
republicans still maintain advantage in both the
House and Senate but having a democrat in the
Governor’s office helps set the tone. Kelly clearly
put education and educators at the top of her
agenda.
Download the
USA-Kansas App!
Search for USAK in the
app store or use this
QR code for fast
access!
2

WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP
WOMEN MAKE GREAT LEADERS
Donna Zerr, Principal of Augusta High School, USA-Kansas Board of Directors
Growing up, my teachers, friends,
and even my mother told me I was
too bossy. What if they would have
told me I had excellent leadership
skills instead? J Women make great
leaders! The odds are against us to
lead – it takes the added push to
get to the top. Most women who
emerge on top are extraordinarily sharp and vibrant.
I’ve learned so much throughout my career from other
women who have excellent leadership skills based on
their individual strengths and their personality traits.
Maybe “bossy” wasn’t the best description; however,
it’s imperative that we continue to encourage women
to capitalize on their skills to take on those leadership
positions.
Just a few weeks ago, Laura Kelly was inaugurated as
the governor of Kansas. What an inspiration she is as a
female in the top position of our state government!
We need to continue to follow women such as her to
learn, grow, and develop women in leadership
positions. I’ve had many women as role models for
me, and I enjoy discussing, questioning and emulating
them, to establish the quality traits that make them so
successful. Women can learn from other women, and
that’s how we will keep them in prominent and
influential roles. Another method I like to employ is to
read books and watch movies about inspiring women
who have leadership influences. Below I’ve listed and
briefly described a few books that anyone (female or
male) might enjoy and increase their knowledge and
appreciation of women leaders.
Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead by Sheryl
Sandberg
Sandberg examines why women’s progress in achieving
leadership roles has stalled, explains the root causes,
and offers compelling, commonsense solutions that can
empower women to reach their full potential.
Leading Women: 20 Influential Women Share Their
Secrets to Leadership, Business, and Life by Nancy D
O’Reilly
A good read for women looking to go beyond obstacles
and skillfully overcome stereotypes. This book offers
insights of multiple women and will leave you inspired.
Leading Gracefully: A Woman’s Guide to Confident,
Authentic & Effective Leadership by Monique Svazlian
Tallon
This book covers leadership styles, collaboration, and
finding the balance of women’s inner qualities and
established rules of business.
New Rules of the Game: 10 Strategies for Women in the
Workplace by Susan Packard
Packard shares her career story with humor, including
the successes and the mistakes. She provides you with
insight and inspiration to play the business game
smarter, stronger, and more successfully.
Thrive by Arianna Huffington
This book is about taking care of yourself as much as
your work. Arianna tells a personal story of her health,
her life, and her job and how she juggles it all.
"No country can ever truly flourish if it stifles the
potential of its women and deprives itself of the
contributions of half of its citizens." -- Michelle
Obama, First Lady of the United States
Women in Leadership
• Defy the odds
• Are flexible
• Lead by example
• Wear many hats
• Handle crisis situations well
• Communicate effectively
• Can multitask successfully
• Motivated by challenges
• Are great listeners
• Focus on teamwork
• Empathetic and nurturing
• Value work-life balance
3

DOES GENDER IMPACT LEADERSHIP?
Suzan Patton, Superintendent of Pratt Public Schools, USA-Kansas Board of Directors
Are there leadership differences
between men and women
superintendents because of their
gender? Are there differences
between Laura Kelly and Kathleen
Sebelius? Both elected governor
of Kansas. How about Donald
Trump and Barack Obama? Both elected president of
the United States? See any similarities or differences?
Fundamentally, are leadership styles about gender or
simply the amalgamation of one’s own values,
background, personality?
My experiences
and observations
as a female district
leader suggest that
gender differences
do not play a role
in the strengths or weaknesses of a superintendent. I
am the sum total of my inherited and learned
leadership skills and individual personality, not my
gender.
I am the sum total of my
inherited and learned
leadership skills and
individual personality,
not my gender.
The significance of culture could not have been
demonstrated any clearer than watching the
Alabama-Clemson National Football Championship
and listening to post-game comments from team
leaders, coaches and players. Clemson’s Dabo
Swinney used words like “love, family, our players
and staff.” Guess which words came out of his
quarterback’s mouth, “love, family, the seniors, and
coaching staff.” Notice a similarity? One of the
Tigers’ senior linemen talked about loving his
coaches. No doubt they were overly joyed in the
moment of victory, but to repeatedly hear the same
phrases suggests those words are part of the
culture. Coach Swinney, as their leader, has
established common themes. Ask any K-Stater
about Bill Snyder and family is a recurring theme.
There’s a reason family is part of the K-State’s
stadium. I don’t think it’s any accident; both Snyder
and Swinney know the importance of establishing
the right culture for success.
For instance, as a district leader, my fundamental
core focus is district culture. By surrounding myself
with the people who share my core values,
compensate for my weaknesses and accentuate my
strengths, and share my vision through teamwork,
we create a culture where people want to come to
work every day and do their best. If bus drivers,
paras, custodians and teachers are doing their best,
they create a culture where our students will be
successful. Culture is not a male/female leadership
focus; culture is a value held by many
superintendents, male AND female.
How superintendents lead their districts is not a
matter of gender. Superintendents are humans who
are called to lead and bring many skills, not just pink
or blue ones, to the job. What’s more, as Coach
Dabo says, leaders, “B.Y.O.G. (Bring Your Own
Guts.)”
5

SCHOOL REDESIGN
OUR VISION, MISSION, & GOALS? WHERE IS THE FIT IN 2019?
Dr. John Vandewalle, CEO Lumen Touch, johnv@lumentouch.com
It’s a New Year and we have just rung it
in 2019.
New Year resolutions are said
to have evolved from the
days of the Babylonians when
in spring as the lands were
readied to seed, the new king was elected or
allegiance to the reigning king was reaffirmed. At
this time the populace would make promises to the
gods to pay their debts and return borrowed items
to their owners. If they obeyed, they were given
favor by the gods otherwise they were condemned.
This was away of creating
accountability and striving
for good.
Our accountabilities in our
organizations are embedded
in our vision, mission, values
and goals. Since we are all in the mood for
resolutions at this time of the year, let’s cash in
while the emotions are blowing in our favor. Let’s
reinforce the change we are bringing about for the
sake of our students. Let’s give them the best start
in their lives so that they too will be making high
aspiration resolutions and hold themselves
accountable.
“What leadership skills are you going to exercise to
exemplify your conviction to a new world of
education?” “What will you do in 2019 to
dramatically improve the well being of all our
students?” “Can you visualize 2019 and be sure it
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is dramatically different to
2017 and unrecognizable
from 2016?” “Can you
support the dream that Dr.
Randy Watson has visualized
for us?”
As we ventured into the universe of Gemini and
Mercury schools in the universe of Kansas, we came
across two episodes that are worthy of mention.
Teen is getting his high school and
Harvard diplomas in the same month
Braxton Moral from Ulysses,
Kansas has achieved what many
16-year old’s would love to
achieve when he graduates a
high school diploma and
bachelor’s degree at the same
time. Carlos Moral, his father said they began to
realize their son was special when he was in the
third grade.
This is an example of where leadership and
resolutions came into play years ago that bore the
fruit of vision, mission and goals. This is where an
independent plan of study worked; this is where the
system was challenged; this is where the leadership
showed that there is a better but different way.
School District in Kansas
is showing the way
Dighton Unified School District
482 is a Gemini District and is
venturing its course!
“By being a Gemini district, we
drive the changes in our

approach and how those approaches will best benefit
our kids. We are moving toward a more modernized
educational system based on student choice, real-life
skills and improved concept mastery.” said
Superintendent Dr. Kelly Arnberger.
They want to be sure they don’t miss the
opportunities for all students. How do they know
they are different? Well, others are wanting to see
what they are doing so now they have a new
responsibility. They have to manage all the visitors
and the way they tell their story while continuing to
focus on their space and their journey to excellence.
Next month’s edition will bring some challenges of
Dighton’s journey as they strive to become the
picture of a Gemini District in an interview with some
of their leadership team. See you in this SPACE.
REDESIGN FROM
CANTON-GALVA SCHOOLS
John Denk, Superintendent of Canton-Galva
Schools
As I look back to the beginning of our journey into the
redesign process, I am amazed by the power of our
educational community. Canton-Galva USD 419
teachers, CGKNEA and USD 419 School Board were
willing to take a leap of faith to choose this journey.
To comprehend the strength of this initiative, you
first have to understand that I was a first-year
superintendent. When the call went out for districts
to volunteer to redesign their schools, we had just
ended our school year; our teachers were gone for
the summer. Needless to say, it took a great deal of
courage, professionalism, and faith for our teachers
to accept this challenge under those circumstances.
Personalized learning is a principle of redesign that
we, as a district staff, believed could have the
greatest impact on the learning of our students.
Through our discussions, we determined that
blended learning and project-based learning (PBL)
were the best practice tools to initiate personalized
learning for our students. Blended learning would be
the foundation for instruction with PBL woven into
the foundation to strengthen learning and provide
greater application of knowledge. We hired trainers
who could come to our district and empower our
staff using methods on how to create a Blended
Learning Environment. We targeted leveled
instruction with one elementary trainer and one
secondary trainer who are spending two days per
month during the 2018-19 school year with our staff.
This approach has had a tremendous impact on our
teachers; we are already seeing a transformation
within in our classrooms. The focus is evolving our
classrooms from a teacher-centered model to a
student-centered environment. While we still have
much to learn before we reach the level of
personalization that we wish to attain, we feel we
are on the right path. The Canton-Galva staff is
gaining knowledge, experience, and confidence
through what they have learned, and they are now
implementing these skills in their classrooms. As our
teachers grow, so to do our students. Our goal is to
challenge our students to think, to be creative, and
to solve problems on their own or through
collaboration with others. We want our students to
be self-regulated and to take the initiative to find
their own solutions.
In addition, we are adapting the physical learning
environment in our schools. Our libraries are being
transformed into collaboration spaces and individual
study spots. We are creating tinker spaces and
maker spaces in which students may be creative
learners. We are also providing alternate seating in
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our classrooms.
All of these
changes are
designed to make
our schools an
inviting,
comfortable and
exciting place for
students to learn.
Furthermore, it is
exciting to see
the opportunities that are opening for our students
with college and career readiness initiatives including
job shadowing and internships. In addition, social/
emotional initiatives like our elementary school
“families” address SE topics in multi-age groups. I
cannot share everything we have on our agenda in
our redesign, but I can tell you that the process of
examining our district and determining how we
design it around our students’ needs has been
exciting, challenging, and rewarding.
What we have found is that the redesign process has
been a positive experience for our district. I won’t tell
you that everything has been easy or that it has all
gone smoothly; however, I can say that we have
grown as a staff and as a district, that positive
changes are taking place, and that we are continuing
to learn through this process. There is a lot of hard
work, fear and doubt that has to be addressed as we
work through the redesign process, but our
experience so far is that by accepting the challenge of
redesign, we will grow as a staff in ways we never
would have otherwise. Take the leap. We did and it is
worth it.
Retirement Plan Contribution Limit Changes
for 2019
403(b)/ Roth 403(b) / 457 Elective Deferral
Limit
Pre-tax 403(b)/ after-tax Roth 403(b) /
457 contribution limit will go up by $500
from $18,500 in 2018 to $19,000 in 2019.
If you are age 50 or over, the catch-up
contribution limit will stay the same at
$6,000 in both 2018 and 2019. The 457-
plan limit is separate. You can contribute
to both a 403(b) plan and a 457 plan.
Traditional and Roth IRA Contribution Limit
The pre-tax Traditional and after-tax Roth
IRA contribution limit will go up by $500
from $5,500 in 2018 to $6,000 in 2019.
The age 50 catch up limit is fixed by law at
$1,000 in all years. The IRA contribution
limits and the 403(b) limits are separate.
You can contribute to both a 403(b) plan
and a traditional or Roth IRA.
http://www.ameritimeks.com/
Securities offered through Securities America, Inc., member FINRA/SIPC.
Advisory services offered through Securities America Advisors, Inc.
Ameritime, LLC and Securities America are separate entities.
8

SCHOOL SAFETY
TRAIN ACCORDING TO THE POSSIBILITIES, NOT
THE PROTOCOLS
Doug Parisi, SafeDefend
With the changes to the crisis drill
requirements in Kansas, the
addition of intruder response drills
and lockdown drills have been an
overall positive thing. Most school
administrators had already added
these types of drills to the
preparedness training by staff. At
SafeDefend we encourage schools to regularly discuss
response options and consider scenarios for notification
in the event of hostile intruders. The manner in which
these drills are conducted, however, can greatly impact
the way the information is conveyed and maintained.
The idea should always be to prepare not to scare.
Fire drills and tornado drills have consistent response
protocols. Regardless of where the fire starts the goal
is to exit the building. A tornado warning clearly
indicates the need to take shelter in designated areas.
Very little deviation from these protocols is required.
Practicing these responses and having students be
familiar with expectations is necessary to achieve the
goal of keeping everyone safe.
Hostile intruder drills cannot be so easily handled.
There is no one response option that keeps everyone
safe. Real attacks have demonstrated that the events
10
are fluid and require various responses. Simply
instructing staff to lockdown and wait is an option but it
shouldn’t be the only option. Teachers and staff need
to understand that until help arrives their actions can
have important consequences. If you can get out safely
then that should be an option as well. If the intruder is
trying to get into the classroom be prepared to drive
them back out. In order to accomplish this the drills
should revolve around mental exercises and discussions
about options. Having kids hide in a corner while the
teacher locks the door and turns out the lights does not
prepare them to adapt when the situation changes.
Staff should spend
more time learning how
to communicate a
threat over the
intercom with simple
commands like
‘Lockdown, Lockdown,
Cafeteria Intruder!’
Staff that are informed
can make immediate
critical decisions that
will reduce casualties
and save lives. Simply hoping that police will arrive in
time and locate the intruder has shown to fail time and
again. Empowering staff and faculty can have
measurable results.

COMMUNICATION
CORNER
ONLINE ACTIVITY,
OFFLINE TROUBLE
Jeff Bean, NAESP Principal
School Safety & Security – Three Steps for
Safer Schools
Submitted by Michele Jones, Director of Communications and
School Safety, USD 383 Manhattan-Ogden
Three school safety related tasks that school districts
should accomplish this semester:
1. Contact your local first responders and ask for
their help in developing (or reviewing) a safety
plan. It is in everyone’s best interest for schools
and first responders to work together to build
the safety plan. Those first responders will be on
scene first, so it is important that they know the
plan, as well as the school. Work together and
seek assistance from the Kansas Safe and Secure
Schools Unit through KSDE.
2. Number exterior doors. Number doors starting
at the front door and go clockwise around the
building - the front door will be 1. Use vinyl-type
number labels that are large enough to be seen
from a distance. Label both the exterior and
interior of the door. Place the number in the
same location on each door (ex. top right
corner). This is a straight forward way to assist
first responders with navigating your building
campus, even if they have never been on site
before.
3. Update your building maps. When was the last
time the school map was updated? Do your first
responders have current maps of all school
buildings? Items to include on the map: exterior
door numbers, severe weather shelter area(s),
elevator location, water, gas, and electrical shutoff
valves, fire alarm control panel, annunciator
panel, interior classroom numbers.
Any time is a good time to build positive relationships
with your community's emergency management
professionals, and engage them in ensuring the
safety and security of your staff and students. Don't
make the mistake of waiting until there is a crisis to
begin having these important conversations.
Bullying and violence often begin in the virtual world
and on social media before entering schools.
Cyberbullying and school violence have reached
epidemic proportions in our country. People can
engage in intellectual debates on the causes of these
problems and their solutions, but there can be no
doubt that the digital world in which our kids now
live has produced harmful effects.
Having been a School Resource Officer (SRO) in a
junior high school, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. It is
not the same school setting we had a generation ago.
Today’s youth are more likely to communicate using
electronics than they are to talk face-to-face. And
they are having a harder time maintaining
communication through conflict, because they either
don’t need to or don’t know how.
Click Here to view full story.
11

SCHOOL ASSESSMENTS
WE CAN DO BETTER: 5 GUIDING PRINCIPALS FOR IMPROVING
FLUENCY ASSESSMENT
Cindy Jiban, PhD
Oral reading fluency
assessment is now
commonplace in
American primary
grades classrooms.
Getting to this point
has been an
incredible victory for data-based problem solving in
education. However, given some of the side-effects that
have emerged, it is clear that oral reading fluency
assessment is due for significant structural improvement.
Educators and early learning experts at NWEA® recently
tackled the problem of next generation fluency
assessment. In the process, we talked about the role of
comprehension, rate, and accuracy. Here, we offer the
five guiding principles that could improve fluency
assessment.
Let’s keep comprehension central
In many systems, oral reading fluency is assessed in
isolation—without comprehension checks on what the
student reads aloud. So instead of adjusting their rate to
best support their own understanding, most kids aim to
read as quickly as possible. If we want to keep reading
comprehension as the central goal in literacy instruction,
then we need to attend to the message we are sending
kids. It’s not that better reading is faster reading; instead,
better reading means getting more from the text.
When oral reading fluency is positioned as a gauge of
word automaticity, the downward extensions follow suit:
they focus only on skills that support word decoding. We
do not, however, see much downward extension for
comprehension. This is tragic given what we know from
research: early oral language comprehension is a crucial
predictor of later success in reading comprehension.
12
01 Principle for improvement: Emphasize comprehension
across the board. We need to ask kids to show
comprehension of what they read aloud. In assessing kids
who can’t yet read passages, we need to incorporate oral
language comprehension, not just early decoding skills.
Let’s adapt to assess where growth is meaningful
Increases in words correct per minute (WCPM) are
most meaningful as kids are developing some
automaticity with words. The sweet spot is from
about 10 WCPM to about 90 WCPM; this growth is
important in freeing up some mental space, so that a
student’s attention is no longer fully spent on
sounding out, re-trying, and self-correcting at the
single word level.
But for kids who are reading smoothly from gradelevel
text—and understanding it—we don’t care if
they can read faster. For these kids, meaningful
growth is about handling harder and harder texts with
good comprehension.
02 Principle for improvement: Adapt text level for
passage readers. If we don’t want to send the message
that faster is better, then we need to get beyond the onesize-fits-all
approach of assessing all kids only on grade
level text.
Oral reading fluency assessment can fail kids on the
lower end of reading development, too. Some not-yet
-reading kids are at zero words per minute in the fall,
and still at zero in the winter. So—no growth in
literacy? That’s typically not the case. We know that
for these kids, meaningful growth is happening in
foundational decoding skills and in oral language
comprehension.

03 Principle for improvement: Adapt to measure
emergent readers where they are growing. When a reader
can’t yet identify enough words to handle connected text,
time is better spent assessing what’s useful now in
instruction: foundational decoding and oral language
skills.
Let’s minimize the time spent on testing
In many schools, all students in first and second
grades are given oral reading fluency assessments
one on one. An efficient teacher might collect
WCPM data on her whole class in three days of
reading block time – and then do that again in
winter and in spring. And in other classrooms,
teachers prefer one-on-one assessments that can
take upwards of half an hour per child. The time
taken from instruction to do assessment adds up
quickly.
04 Principle for improvement: Assess efficiently. We need
to support high-quality teacher student interactions in
literacy instruction.
Let’s use tools to advance rather than duplicate
Today, more than half of American teachers report
using 1:1 computing, where each student has a
laptop or tablet. We all have a phone that processes
speech input masterfully. It’s clearly time to use
technology to redesign fluency assessment for the
better.
05 Principle for improvement: Use technology to raise the
bar. Instead of just replicating what we’ve done for
decades onto an electronic screen, let’s use technology to
do things smarter and more efficiently. Computer
adaptive testing and speech recognition offer two obvious
places to start.
We honor the research and the leadership that got
us to where we are today in oral reading fluency
assessment. It’s possible to make it even better.
Learn more about our approach to early reading
assessments at nwea.org.
TEACHER EVALUATIONS
HAVE DRAMATICALLY
CHANGED THE
PRINCIPAL’S JOB
Denisa R. Superville, Education Week
The pitched battles that once waged over morerigorous
teacher evaluations have long since
quieted, but there's a lasting legacy of those
systems: They have fundamentally changed the
principal's job.
They have increased principals' attention to
instruction and what's happening in classrooms. But
at the same time, they have created monumental
time-management challenges for principals that
could lead to turnover and burnout.
That's according to a new paper published online
last month in the Elementary School Journal, in
which researchers from North Carolina State
University, the University of Michigan, and
Vanderbilt University examined how multiplemeasure
teacher evaluations adopted as a result of
the Obama administration's Race To The Top
competitive grant program—and still largely in
place in many states—have redefined the
principal's role.
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Click Here to view full story.

PRACTICING SELF CARE
LIVE WELL, LEAD WELL
Mark Wilson, The Principal Matters
What is the framework we use to guide us in our
work as school leaders? In other words, why do you
lead your school the way you do?
Most of us lead based on the experiences we've
had. Sometimes we lead as we've been led, and
other times our prior experiences teach us what
NOT to do.
We can have more effective schools if we have
more effective leaders, but you won't DO well
unless you LIVE well. What does that entail? Let's
look at five areas.
1. Bring awareness to Stress and Wellness;
What gets talked about gets done. If you want to
have a culture of wellness at your school, talk about
it. Talk ABOUT stress; not around it. Everyone has
stress and teachers/administrators are no
exception. The first step, as they always say, is
acknowledging the problem, and we know that
stress is a problem for teachers and administrators.
There's a part of the "how to be a school leader"
narrative that we continue to perpetuate that you
might want to reconsider. It's the framework that's
based on: 1) working all of the time; 2) not
recognizing or addressing the stress of the job; and,
3) falling out of balance with the other facets of your
life.
We have seen this as the norm for principals and
assistant principals for a number of years now, and
it's time to consider another approach on HOW to
be an effective principal.
That approach? Live well, lead well.
You can rightly assume that the reverse of this
approach is also true: If you don't live well, you
won't lead well. At least not for very long.
14
But, we also know that wellness is a solution to that
problem. What would it be like if staff wellness was
a cornerstone belief for your school or your
system? How might that positively impact
relationships between teachers and
students? Teachers and other colleagues?
What good might the example of wellness bring to
your students and your community? How might it
directly impact the performance of teachers and of
students?
So, here's the truth: you either have an intentional
effort to focus on wellness, or you are just hoping
for the best. The challenge behind that "strategy"
lies within the increasing levels of stress reported
by teachers and administrators. We need a better
plan than to hope everyone makes it.
2. Establish Live Well/Lead Well as a norm, and not
exception of afterthought.
The answer for staff well being is NOT a once-a-year
promotion for losing weight. It also is not

sponsoring a 5K in the fall. Those activities can serve
to be a part of an emphasis on wellness, but we are
fooling ourselves if we stop at the awareness
level. As a school leader, your well-being and that of
your faculty and staff are essential for the work that
you are doing. Random acts of wellness won't be
enough; what we need is a sea change to help our
people live well to lead well, on a daily basis. How
can we partner with health professionals to teach
our faculty and staff techniques to curb stress as it
arises during the day? How can we support each
other to have healthy habits both at and away from
school? Should we really consider it a badge of
honor to say that, as an administrator we can't
remember whether we ate lunch? If living well is
just "what we do" at our school, imagine how that
can positively impact morale, performance, and
health?
3. Lead by example from the system level.
The best way for a school to have an emphasis on
wellness? Be a part of a school system that makes a
priority of the well-being of its people.
Information on stress reduction can be shared with
all of the employees across the system. Healthy
habits throughout the day can be encouraged from
that same level.
For the most impact, the effort to manage stress and
promote wellness is collaborative, being fueled from
the system level with engagement among those at
the school.
4. Establish a framework of health habits;
(expectations, timeline, reflections, and review); 15

All right, you've established a need for stress
management and well-living; you've built a
framework to make it work. Now what? What do
you exactly do?
You may want to consider a two-part
approach: living well at work, and living well away
from work.
The idea of "living well away from work" holds even
more possibilities. What might you and your team do
to promote healthy lifestyles away from work? This
effort might include awareness efforts (about
exercise, hobbies, nutrition, and sleep) as well as
group activities (teacher bowling night; running club)
or encouraging your people to enjoy things with
family, friends, or on their own.
Some of your recommendations for living well at
work might include: an educational effort on
breathing techniques to reduce stress; an
encouragement for movement; strategies to catch
one's self when stress is building up. Your team
might also encourage some exercises in gratitude, in
recognizing other's support, and in activities to
provide a respite from what might otherwise be a
grind. Wellness at work is about what you do
individually, but also what you do as a group.
If you're thinking, "that sounds great but things are
too busy here for that to work," you probably are a
great candidate to build a healthier
workplace! Remember, like everything you do in
bringing about change, small steps lead to the
biggest goals. Don't roll it all out at once, but bring
about your change in stages, beginning with the
most willing participants.
Part of making this work is establishing that
boundaries are normal and that technology shouldn't
make any of us on call at all moments of the day and
night. There should be provisions for real
emergencies, but the fastest path to burnout for your
teachers (and leaders) is constant mental
engagement with work.
5. Establish accountability partners.
Want to do better? Make needed
changes? Accomplish your goals?
You might want to consider the power of
the accountability partner. As you begin an emphasis
on stress management and living well, very few
people will be against those ideas. However, very
few people will be able to reach those goals without
help. You'll provide lots of help: awareness/
education about healthy habits; encouragement of
making wellness a priority. The most significant help
for any individual is in having someone to hold them
accountable. A partner in wellness.
16
Having someone who has an interest in your wellness
and stress management provides you consistency
and support in your efforts. As you build your
wellness efforts, imagine the ways that an
accountability partner can be the key to
success. Think of how you can acknowledge and
recognize the efforts of the accountability
partner. Develop a plan to connect people together
in this way.

IMPROVE ATTENDANCE, BEHAVIOR, AND
ACADEMICS! IT BEGINS WITH THIS
Mark Wilson, The Principal Matters
Let's take a quick look at what you spend a lot of your
time doing--- working to improve student
attendance, behavior, and academic achievement.
You want your students, each and every one of your
students, to come to school regularly. While there,
you want them to behave in accordance to school
expectations and to achieve academically.
You and your team are in a continuous process of
modifying your approaches to get your students to
maximize their effort in those three areas
(attendance, behavior, academics). You offer
18
incentives; you create disincentives for the undesired
behaviors. Your work yields some progress some
times, but it never seems to last and you always
seem to be working to make adjustments. Some
(and often many) of your students do what you want
them to do, and most likely do so with or without the
rewards and punishments you build into the system.
What if there were another approach you might take
that could yield better results with more lasting
effects?
What if you made a priority out of the
student experience? We talked about that in last
week's Principal Matters! and shared the three
questions that students ask themselves as they

come to school. (how will I be treated? will the
learning be interesting? what do others think?)
This week, let's focus on the first of those
questions: how will I be treated? Students of all
ages, in their own ways, want to how others are
going to treat them at school. They are particularly
interested in these four areas:
what the rules are in my class. I said, it tells them
everything that they need to know about your class
and respect. It's a good thing to share. The teacher
walked away without really getting what I was
hoping to share (and ended up leaving the whole
line out of the syllabus!)
1. Will I be treated with respect? Students often act
like... well, they act like kids a lot of the time. Will
the adults at your school always act like adults? Can
the adults at your school unconditionally treat their
students with respect? As an administrator, what do
you do to build a culture of respect for all in your
building? Have you discussed what it means to treat
students with respect?
Students aren't only interested in how the adults
treat them. They also care how their peers treat
them. It's interesting how much one follows the
others. In schools where respect is modeled by the
adults, the students begin to learn what respect is
like. The opposite is also true: in schools where
respect from the adults is conditional, the students
learn to do the same (and the adults don't like it!)
In my first year as an administrator, I asked my
teachers to share their syllabus with me before they
distributed it to their students and their
parents. One of my teachers had a line that read "if
you respect me, I will respect you." I handed it back
and asked that the teacher look at that item before
sending it out. The teacher came back and wanted
clarification. "I don't know what you're talking
about," the teacher replied about that item. I told
the teacher there were too many words on that
line. Still, the teacher didn't know what I was talking
about. Finally, I said take out the first part. ("If you
respect me...") and just leave the last part. The
teacher looked at me and said then it will only say "I
will respect you" and that doesn't tell the students
2. Will I be treated with warmth? Students want to
be treated with warmth and kindness. The most
effective administrators and teachers combine
expertise with warmth to build a relationship with
their students that develops the conditions where
learning is most likely to happen. As the late Rita
Pierson said in her popular TED talk, "kids don't learn
from people they don't like." One of the greatest
things we have going for us in school is willingness of
most of our students to like us, to respond to our
warmth, and to follow our lead in the classroom.
It can be as simple as this for a student: do the
adults at the school seem glad to see me? Harry
Wong said it long ago: greet your students at the
door. Help them feel welcome. Modern adaptations
of that are seen often on YouTube with teachers
greeting students with their own special handshakes
as they enter the room.
The power of feeling welcomed is stronger than all
of the rewards and punishments you could ever
stack up. If a student doesn't feel welcomed into
your room, it's all hard from that point. But if they
do, and you consistently keep that positive
classroom environment, you are halfway there from
the start. 19

3. Will I be treated with high expectations? One of
the most important questions to ask yourself as the
administrator is this one: What do the teachers at
my school REALLY think about our students? You
can have warmth and caring (and you REALLY need
to have warmth and caring) but it can't end
there. Students need warmth AND
expectations. Teachers who are confident in
knowing that the students in their classroom are
going to grow find the best results. When preceded
with warmth, students will give their best
effort. The greatest of teachers know how to
continue to get that effort to grow, a little bit each
day.
Master teachers are
experts in treating kids
with high
expectations. There
are thousands of
stories of people who
can trace their positive spike in performance to a
moment when a teacher told them that they were
smart. Told them they could do it. Encouraged
them with expectations.
a place where people expect to grow? How might
you make it so?
4. Will I be treated with value? Everyone wants to
be valued. It's easy to value students who do what
you ask them to do the first time, show up to school,
and do well in their work. The students who don't
do those things? They need to be valued as well.
It's not about lessening your expectations for
performance; it's valuing students for who they
are. It's getting to know your students and the
unique things about them that make them who they
are. When they sense that you appreciate them,
they most often will in turn begin to value you and
the things that are important to you.
Why do students do their best work? Sometimes,
they find value in the work. Other times, they like
what comes with doing well in school. Many
students do what they do because they have
developed a relationship with the teacher. In other
words, they may not always value the work, but they
value their relationship with the teacher and are
willing to do more than they normally might do
because of that relationship.
Many of those moments don't seem monumental at
that time, but later are revealed to have been
pivotal in a person's story.
This isn't a suggestion for false expectations. It's the
concept that your school, and ALL of your
classrooms are a place of high expectations for
students, for student work, for how students treat
each other, and for students' growth. Talk about
those things with your teachers. Teach your teachers
how to build a classroom of high
expectations. When students fail to meet those
expectations, the adult response shouldn't always be
a punishment, but instead reteaching. Is your school
20
Those relationships aren't accidents. They're built
by teachers who are confident, capable, and
courageous enough to respect and value their
students, to treat them warmth and to challenge
them with expectations of growth every day.
Those teachers are more plentiful in schools led by
administrators who first do those same things with
their teachers. Good goes around.

CAREER TECHNICAL EDUCATION
AMAZON LAUNCHES ‘FUTURE
ENGINEER’ PROGRAM TO AID
PURSUIT OF COMPUTER
SCIENCE CAREERS
Amazon is launching a "childhood-to-career"
program that aims to spur underprivileged children
and young adults to pursue careers in computer
science, according to a statement released Thursday.
With the Amazon Future Engineer program, the tech
giant aims to reach more than 10 million kids each
year through coding camps, online lessons,
introductory and Advanced Placement courses in
computer science. Through the program, Amazon
will also award computer-science related
scholarships and internships at Amazon.
"Computer science skills are some of the most indemand
in the modern economy," said Jeff Wilke,
CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer. "We have
created Amazon Future Engineer because we
believe young people from all backgrounds should
have help from childhood to career so they can have
a future in this highly paid, rapidly-growing field."
Click Here to view full story.
22
Lauraine Genota, Digital Education,
Education Week
CTE TRAINING NOT NEW TO
HIGH SCHOOLS
Jerry Henn, Assistant Executive Director,
USA-Kansas
CTE training is not something new
for high schools. Looking at what
is out there for training our
students is very large. There are
many different pathways our
students can choose, but for this
article I want to focus on only one,
Education and Training. This pathway focuses on our
profession and with the current state of students
choosing this profession at an early stage continues to
decline.
When should we start talking about our students
becoming educators? That is a great question. In
2010, the Department for Education published an
evaluation of career education in primary schools.
This article simply said the more you talk to your
students and expose them to careers, students
became more confident to achieve their goals. So, if
this is the case, we need to start talking to our
students about education as a career.
We used to believe that modeling was all that was
needed to show our students what teachers did in our
day. But that has changed. We need to talk about
what teaching is and how it influences our lives as
well. We all have inspiring stories to share with
students, why don’t we do that? All levels of students
should be exposed to education as a possible pathway
to success. We must grow our own!
At the secondary level we must provide situations for
them to shadow and explore this profession. Provide
observation time for these students at not only your
district, but neighboring districts. Educators do have
the opportunity to expose students to many different
job opportunities, why not look at the one we chose!

Professional development Schedule at a Glance
USA Drive-In Events
No Cost to districts who are PLN Members,
$100 for USA members, and $200 for non-
USA members. Events run 9:00-2:00.
KASCD Conference
2.4.2019
School Safety One Year Later-What’s
Changed? - G.A. Buie
4.1.2019—Topeka
4.2.2019—Lenexa
4.8.2019—Maize
USA Leadership Events
No Cost to districts who are PLN Members,
$100 for USA members, and $200 for non-
USA members. Events run 9:00-2:00. These
will be conducted by National Presenters.
Building School & Community Partners—Dr.
Sheila Harrity
2.20.2019—Lenexa, 2.21.2019—Goddard
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21

48th Annual Conference
May 29-31, 2019
Hyatt & Century II Convention Center
Wichita, KS
Opening Speaker
Alan November
CLICK HERE
for
Registration
Closing Speaker
Kent Rader
& Conference
Information!

KAESP—Kansas Association of Elementary School Principals
KAMSA—Kansas Association of Middle School Administrators
KASBO—Kansas Association of School Business Officials
KASPA—Kansas Association of School Personnel Administrators
KASCD—Kansas Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development
KASEA—Kansas Association of Special Education Administrators
KASSP—Kansas Association of Secondary School Principals
KCCTEA—Kansas Council of Career and Technical Education Administrators
KanSPRA—Kansas School Public Relations Association
KSSA—Kansas School Superintendents Association