Efforts are underway in the Shawano School District to improve its attention to shifts in the school landscape, including better ways to evaluate Superintendent Kurt Krizan’s leadership.
Part of the push, which Krizan said is greatly needed, comes from Tim Renard, the new Shawano School Board president. Krizan said that, when he was promoted to superintendent almost three years ago, there were no systems in place to indicate whether schools, classrooms and staff were improving.
Krizan attended the Wisconsin Association of School Boards convention earlier this year, and he said a lot of discussion surrounded quarterly cycles, with assessments every three months on how things are progressing. He said the system could also be used by the local school board to see how he is performing.
Three to five goals for the superintendent would be put in place, Krizan said, and then every three months, the board would review how he is progressing. The goals would need to be achieved by the time the annual evaluation would come around.
“I started working through this with my admin team a little bit, and we looked at, for 90 days, what are our vitals?” Krizan said. “What are the things we want to look at weekly to determine the health of our organization? Also, our rocks, those big projects we have to work on.”
Some of those vitals, according to Krizan, include weekly student attendance levels, readiness for iReady exams in the schools and open staff positions in the district at a given time.
Renard told the district’s executive committee June 9 that one of the difficulties he’s had in the past year after joining the school board is determining exactly where the district is at. A recent evaluation of Krizan’s performance was difficult for Renard, because most of his interaction with the superintendent was at board and committee meetings. That’s something he wants to change.
“I want to see a better tracking, if you will, over the course of the year on how we’re progressing,” Renard said. “Kurt has pointed out that, with the board members, some of us only see Kurt and others at board meetings. We don’t have that touchpoint with him throughout the course of the year. So finding a way to get snapshots at smaller portions of the year to track that progress will be more meaningful when we go to do his evaluation.”
Board member Jeana Winslow agreed there needed to be more to the annual evaluations than what board members could recall over the course of the year.
“We’ve done this before, but I don’t know why it felt so impersonal this year,” Winslow said. “I don’t feel like we, as a board, have goals for you or goals for us as a board. I feel like if we’re part of the team, then we want to see the district in a particular place.”
Among the things the district is looking to improve is having the best staff available to work with students. Krizan noted that it can be difficult, because sometimes Shawano will wrap up an interview just in time for another school district to make an offer for the position.
“We’re hearing some districts that are calling people who are still in the parking lot — they haven’t left yet — and they’re making them an offer,” Krizan said. “If we can get under 24 hours, that would help.”
Open enrollment is another issue. Krizan noted that the district has no plan in place to stop students living in the Shawano area from attending school in another school district; an estimated $8,000 to $9,000 in funding is lost for each student who enrolls in another district.
“The ones that are really concerning are the ones that are living two blocks from Hillcrest (Primary School) and going somewhere else,” Krizan said. “We’ve got to figure out why they’re leaving, but also, why aren’t they coming in?”
lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com
Superintendent to get goals to accomplish
