As I noted in my professional practice reflection, I thrive when I am challenged, and my first 16 months of Superintendency have offered plenty of opportunities for growth, learning, and plenty of joy! In reflecting on my first 16 months, I have learned a lot about myself as a leader, about the Arlington Public Schools, and about areas where I can continue to grow and learn. The first year included many smaller “firsts;” to name a few:

1. My first time bargaining new contracts – with not one, but seven units!

2. My first time building and executing a school district budget;

3. My first time reporting to a board of seven officials;

4. My first time experiencing a town meeting approach to governance;

5. My first time evaluating and leading principals directly;

6. My first time evaluating and leading all functions of the school system;

7. and several others!

Through these experiences, I have learned the importance of regular connection with those I lead and members of the committee. I have learned to be careful about when I weigh in and share my thoughts, and when I need to continue to challenge my ideas, because they are still in flux. I have been challenged by the productive tension between guiding leaders towards an approach that I believe will work for the community, and allowing leaders to try new strategies, gather feedback, assess impact, and reflect on the experience with me afterwards. I have discovered the challenges that come with building a data-informed and values-driven learning community across the district and within our schools.

While I had some experience with inclusive strategic planning when I took on this role, I have reinforced what I already believed about how simultaneously challenging and important it is to involve community members in the creation of strategic visions, priorities, and plans. I have also reinforced my conviction that it is important to communicate early, often, and as concisely as possible. I have come to understand that when stakeholders talk about “communication” being a problem, they are often voicing frustration with unmet expectations about when, how, and to what extent stakeholders should to be included in a process or decision.

In preparation for my evaluation in fall 2021, I selected indicators from the MA DESE Superintendent Rubric that would guide my reflection and the committee's feedback. Here, I will discuss my progress towards goals and performance against these indicators, along with what I believe to be areas for continued growth on my part as the leader of the Arlington Public Schools.

Instructional Leadership: Data-Informed Decision-Making and Planning

I shared in my formative assessment that "APS leaders did not always have a shared language about what data are most important, what kinds of data exist to inform our planning, why we use particular data to inform our decision-making, or how to go about using data to make decisions and plan for future actions." This remains true and has been a challenge as we have engaged in strategic planning, so I would now expand this statement to include the wider community of APS stakeholders. My reflections early in my tenure led me to focus our collective attention on school-based improvement planning, and it is my hope that the committee and community will notice more coherence, cohesion, and use of similar - if not identical - data to frame school-based conversations around improvement. The reality is, we must all work from the same expansive (and at times massive) sets of data to hone in on areas of challenge and focus for specific school communities, and so the focal areas of concern may differ across schools or departments. At the same time, we must get better at presenting why particular data points, focal groups of students, or other factors "stand out" to us amongst the rest, and be sure to have a common language system-wide about what we're looking for and how we report on it. This will be our focus over the next couple of years.

Following my formative assessment, it became clear how important it would be for educators at all levels of our system to take part in these important conversations, and so we rolled out the important work of developing and implementing school-based ILTs with support from the Arlington Education Foundation. The implementation of these school-based leadership teams transformed our August Leadership Workshop, welcoming 120 educators to the August launch of the school year. Our initial couple of months with ILTs at all of our schools have highlighted at once how important and how challenging data-informed leadership can be. ILTs are focused on understanding and defining their roles, and on trying out protocols and practices that will allow them to lead their colleagues in inquiry and trying new practices in their classrooms. I look forward to reporting on the progress and impact of this work more in the years ahead.

Management and Operations: Student Safety, Fiscal Systems, and Supportive Structures

I have spent considerable time in my first six months working to deeply understand how the Arlington Public Schools operates; from day-to-day business workflows to student and teacher schedules to attendance and coverage, to identifying technical systems that are misunderstood or even not understood, operational challenges have surfaced throughout my first 16 months in the role.

We transformed the budget process last school year and are looking forward to tweaking that process to be more inclusive and to include more iterations of decision-making with the Budget Subcommitee and with educators. Last year, I very much valued the opportunity to hear directly from the leaders of each individual cost center about what is important for their school or department in the coming year. The opportunity for conversation with the Cabinet team, and the subsequent conversations that help me to make final decisions about what is included in the proposed budget, were invaluable to my planning process, and I am hopeful that those discussions can undergo at least two additional iterative cycles this year.

Last year, we also introduced new expectations for hiring, the implementation of which successfully resulted in an increasingly diverse administrative and professional teaching team; despite this bright spot, we know we still have work to do to retain our educators of color, and that work will be embedded in our professional learning opportunities and other efforts this year. This year, the HR and DEI offices are also conducting "check-ins" with all new staff to see how their first few months on the job have gone and what additional support the district can provide. I am looking forward to building on our momentum from last year's hiring season this year, hopefully with more candidates than we experienced during the nation-wide hiring crisis.

I am also reflecting constantly on our facilities, and their capacity to hold some of the efforts I know are important to the Arlington community. As an example, expansion of instrumental music has exacerbated existing space constraints in our elementary schools, which have no swing space and were not built for the level of services APS now provides. Neither are our elementary school spaces working well for all of our after school and community education programming that we are seeking to expand. As part of strategic planning, I am thinking about how our schools might need to be enhanced and staffed in order to accommodate the schools as a community resource accessible to all - both within and beyond the school day.

Family and Community Engagement: Family Support and Culturally Responsive Communication

In my first 16 months, we have expanded our reach with new social media platforms, a new website, new formats for communications from the Superintendent's office, and inclusive mechanisms for community members to participate in district-level planning. While I am pleased with the progress we have made with communications processes since my tenure began, I see a lot of opportunity in this area of work as well, and am constantly re-evaluating my own approaches to communication and considering community feedback when it comes to both two-way and one-way communication with our schools and the district.

Now that we have migrated the website, attention is turning to reorganizing information on the website. Now that we have upgraded communications approaches, work must be done to ensure that families receive consistent communications from all of our schools, and to set communications expectations. Now that we have an additional registrar and have cleaned up registration processes to make them clearer, more fluid, and easier to navigate for families, we must turn our attention towards building a welcome center full of resources for families and ensuring processes are in place that prevent any family from having a challenging start to their time in APS.

I entered the Superintendency with communications as an area of relative strength, and have come to understand that community engagement is a skill that can (and should) be taught. I am considering how, in future years, we can work with our teams and administrators to build our collective skill in this area, so that all of our families feel welcome and supported by our schools. I think some of this starts with continuing our close-to-the-classroom, close-to-our-families work so that we can deeply understand the experiences of our students and families. For this year, my focus is on building the supportive systems that can model our expectations for communication and participation of families, so that we can realize the vision of Strategic Priority 4.

Professional Culture: Consensus Building and Policies and Practices

In my formative assessment reflection, I wrote about the importance of this standard area for me in my daily practice and reflections. I purposefully chose to focus my first year on building consensus and shared language amongst and across groups of APS stakeholders. I believe one of our major successes has been our in-depth development of and discussion about the APS vision statement. We are in constant conversation about what it looks like to create schools that provide opportunities for growth and joy. We are identifying moments of uncomfortable "growth," and leaning into them so that we can better understand the roots of our challenges. We are connecting with one another to provide more opportunities for belonging, growth, and joy.

At the same time, I find myself in conversations where stakeholders are confused by the concept of "equity," hold differing definitions of what it means to become an "equitable educational community," or suspect that pursuit of equity means the "taking away" of dearly-held ideas, activities, or structures, making some community members shy away from the mere mention of initiatives grounded in equity. I am challenged by this and I work with my Cabinet team daily, to consider the best ways to hold these conversations with community members, ensuring that we are always listening to understand the perspectives of others first, explaining our perspectives based on what we know as educators next, and identifying common ground, agreement, and a way forward that keeps students at the center of our actions always, while still marching towards our shared horizon. As we develop and share out the strategic plan, it will be important for me to listen carefully and closely to community members' reactions to initiatives, for our strategic planning team to revise, revise, revise those initiatives, and for us to use this as an opportunity to define what an "equitable educational community" will look like in Arlington in 5 years. I'm energized by this important work.

To conclude, I would like to emphasize what a rich and welcoming experience I have had in my first year of Superintendency, how grateful and proud I am each day to lead Arlington's public schools, and how routinely impressed I am by the dedication and talent of the leaders, teams, teachers, staff, students, and families in the Arlington community.