Building Bridges: How to Unite a Divided School District

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So how do you pull this off while focusing on the right things at the right time? Answering that question requires you to think big while acting deliberately. This is where aligning around a unifying vision and purpose becomes critical. Why are we here? And what are we trying to accomplish? Are two of the most powerful questions in your arsenal and when you're brought into a struggling school district, you need to lean on those questions to help you set the right priorities. Today's story is about how building a beloved community was a key rallying point that served a district turnaround. We have Dr. Rainey Briggs joining us live. today to share with us his turnaround story.

He's listed [: 00:01:00

As an African American boy growing up in poverty, Dr. Briggs quickly learned how to advocate for himself and others and has carried that passion over to his daily work. He's obtained his degree from Edgewood College, wrote and wrote a dissertation on the factors that promote or impede success of African American males in a predominantly white high school.

Dr. Briggs strives to bring a voice to marginalized students and families as a principal. He's collaborated with staff and families to bring the motto every kid every day, whatever it takes to the forefront of their school and a mission to live by daily. Dr. Briggs, welcome to the show.

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[00:02:00] Dr. Jim: We're going to be in for a pretty interesting and different perspective than we've had on the show previously.

So I'm really excited to have you on the show. I think the first order of business before we dive into the turnaround story is for you to give us a little bit more background on your career trajectory and also the district landscape. And that's going to set the stage for the conversation.

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Number one, labeled as a student with a disability being placed in a classroom, when I was in middle school and never, ever coming out of that classroom other than going to PE or band. And that, that experience for me really allowed me to say, nope. I don't want anything to ever do with education.

I don't ever want to go into [: 00:03:00

And it's a school that's predominantly. African American. So you're 99 percent African American, 99 percent free and reduced. And she asked me to volunteer and Oh, I want you to come into the class, and I'm like, no, I'm not doing it. I'm not coming in. But she stayed on me.

She kept asking me. And then finally I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to get her off my back. I'm going to go in. and volunteer. And so I volunteered that first time and I'm then about a month later, she was like, Hey, the kids want you to come back in, and I'm like, all right.

s I'm telling you this right [: 00:04:00

Because it was really a key turning point for me in education, because I asked myself that critical question. Why aren't I working with kids? And that was that turning point for me, which kind of led me to apply for a position in the Verona area school district, which is in the Madison area.

And I applied for a position called the cultural liaison. That's where they wanted me to work primarily with the student with students of color and their families bridging home life in school life. And I remember when the superintendent called me to offer me the job, he said the thing is.

I want you to work with the families, the black families, Hispanic families and bridging their home and school life. And I looked at him right in the eye and I said, here's the thing, the white families need just as much bridging to school and home life. And also more importantly, the bridge to their peers.

In school. [: 00:05:00

So I reached out to the department of public instruction. And asked them, what can I do to get a teaching license? I majored in health science, corporate community fitness. And they indicated to me that, we want to set you up with this alternative licensing program and this alternative licensing program.

They told me that I could go into health. PE or biology. So I elected health and PE because I majored in health science, corporate community fitness. I had a couple of classes to take, so I only needed to take two or three classes because all of my credits transferred and worked great for me.

Prairie Area School District [: 00:06:00

And then from there, I went on to the Madison Metropolitan School District as a elementary principal. And then came back to actually Sun Prairie as a head principal where my kids, actually attended school. And I was actually the principal of my kid's school which was pretty cool in itself.

And then from there after a few years, I ended up becoming the director of elementary education in the Middleton Cross Plains school district, and then from there, after being there for about five years, I moved on to be the superintendent of the Bearbow school district.

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[00:06:57] Rainey Briggs: Yeah. The reasoning behind that is, when we look [00:07:00] at our society right now, there's been so many divides. You go back in time, when there was, segregation that kind of painted a picture for me that in order to get over that hump, we need to continue to build bridges and close those gaps, not only of instruction and achievement, but also those gaps of hate and that gap of not quite understanding who people are how we can be connected to them and what we can learn from each other.

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Paint us a picture of what the district looked like and what stood out to you as potential areas that you wanted to pursue in terms of turning around the district or what you wanted to impact within the district.

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So it's a rural community with a little bit of a city life to it. It is the heart of the county and it's the county seat to be honest with you. So when you have that, you have some things that kind of work in your favor. And that's a part of people looking at you to know, man this school district must be good, or this school district could take this area to a different place.

I'll tell you, there was things coming into the district. That I looked at as challenges, but challenges that I'm willing to overcome. And at the time, of me coming into the district, they were looking to get, a new superintendent, there was behavior.

Challenges at the middle [: 00:09:00

This particular place and job and think about how can I bring people together more than cause people to be, going their separate ways from this community not quite there yet, but we're still working. On that but those were the things that really drew me into this position and wanting to take it on.

And there was a couple of other things there's been some racial issues that this district has faced that I think really warranted and needed, some particular skills and desire behind moving it to a different place.

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What was your process for deciding? What to tackle first and how to actually put things in motion so that you can triage these things in a reasonable amount of time.

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I created a entry plan, right? And this entry plan really had me. Meeting and getting to [00:11:00] know a lot of people and to hear from them. What from their perspective, what's really happening, what has happened, what do they see as solutions and things like that? So those were like some of my initial thoughts.

But in the midst of that, I really leaned on Dr. King's six steps to social change. And that six steps to social change after I. Met with all of these different groups, community members, students, staff, the leaders of the district, the school board. Like I had meetings with all of these people and I would say I probably met with.

I would say probably well over a thousand people just to understand their perspective on what was happening. And after I finished those meetings my admin assistant and I, who my admin assistant, she accompanied me in every one of the meetings. So she took notes while I really was, attentive to the individuals that I was.

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That's going to help me be the best person Leader that I can be, but also help me build others up around me to build the capacity. That second step was education. Now I may need to educate myself on some of the things that I'm learning because I don't know a whole lot about the community yet.

I don't know a whole lot of around the situations of things that's happening. And then there's the personal commitment that I really felt like I needed to make. The negotiation and discussions I needed to have with people to see how can we move from here to there? And then what are the actions that we needed to take?

eople were hurt, people were [: 00:13:00

[00:13:08] Dr. Jim: There's a couple of really interesting elements of what you did on the front end. There's a principle and I think it's a Covey principle seek to understand before trying to be understood. I might you're nodding, so I'll rely on, on, on you validating that.

And oftentimes people say it, but when they try to execute anything it's just run fast and break things without actually taking time to to listen. So I really liked the emphasis that you put on Your entry plan and specifically meeting a wide range of people. So you can actually understand the landscape when you're thinking about other elements of that entry plan, which which I find pretty interesting.

Are there any other elements of that entry plan that you put together that you feel would be relevant for other new superintendents into a district that they should adopt, regardless of what the situation on the ground looks like,

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But then also see them right so that you can understand the perspective or even give a different perspective to those things as you're seeing them happen continue to be out in the community like it was really big for me to visit. The Kiwanis Club, the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, these different, or, civic organizations was really important for me to get in tune with because it allowed me to, once again, now expand My connection with the community and the people in the community.

individuals. And I would say [: 00:15:00

If your team is not in a place to move, it's going to be really hard. And my first year and a half, I spent a lot of time building team. I've been, I spent a lot of time trying to help reconcile some challenges that was within that team. And a lot of things happened before I got there, but at the same time.

It's now my responsibility to take that on, which leads me to my last piece, own things, own them as they happen. As that there's a challenge then you take that challenge on, you face it. There's a saying when you know better, you do better. That's that was my model.

ck in my pocket of tools and [: 00:16:00

And you gotta figure out how to help them see things through a different lens sometimes.

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So when you look at those three things, how did you build, what was your process for building alignment across all of those things? And really you had to do it more or less in the same [00:17:00] time because you can't start on one until your leadership is capable. And you need leadership that's capable to help you prioritize all of the stuff that you heard into what is the most important things that we need to move forward on.

So tell us about how you actually all of that .

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And coming in and seeing a report card like that, man I'm like, Oh my gosh, what did I get into, but I knew that coming in, I knew our report card wasn't the greatest, which is a great, it's a good place to be because the only place to go is really right.

the very reason that we were [: 00:18:00

That they understand and will be a contributor to an ever changing world. And that's our vision for them. And if that's our vision, and we're not able to look across the table, we're not able to hear all this information that's coming to us and think about it differently and do something differently and create systems That can support this data changing.

It's going to be a larger issue. So for me, that data, I had to stand behind the data I had to bring cause us to be more data literate because we needed to understand number one, what is the data telling us? What is it telling us about our kids? What is it telling us about our staff? And what is it telling us about us as leaders?

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[00:19:01] Dr. Jim: So it's it's good that you had some data and insights that you could rely on. But I'm still wrapped up into the situation on the ground, because what you're describing. When you're looking at the community situation, when you're looking at the leadership situation and the educator landscape, so those are the key stakeholders that we've talked about so far.

Each of those in somewhere or another is basically operating in survival mode. So when you look at building unity across those landscapes, you have some data, that pointed to some things. How did you get these separate sort of entities to coalesce around a unifying message or vision?

What was the work that was involved in moving the needle across all three of them at the same time so you could actually make progress in the turnaround effort?

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Kids are number one. 100%. I'm in it. I believe it. I value it. But I also know when we talk about bringing people together, right? Those systems have to also provide a level of support for staff, a level of sense of belonging, a level of I hear you. And we have some things to do. So You know, at the building levels with staff, we created, as a part of the multi level systems of support, there's the continuous school improvement team.

So there's a group of leaders that at the building level, that consists of teachers from different grade levels, different departments that are stepping in to like really support. Each other in a different way, right when there is challenges, there's people stepping in when there are people who don't see eye to eye.

ifferently. But then there's [: 00:21:00

In better, right? So you have the teachers really coming together. And that's really led by our leaders. So like our leaders are really that's building principles with the professional learning communities. That's building principles with the continuous school improvement teams. But to get to that point.

Those district leaders we had to build on ourselves. So I brought in I don't know if you've ever watched the last dance with the Chicago bulls, Michael Jordan. So I utilize that series with my leadership team. And I asked my entire leadership team to watch that and to go through those things and.

Michael Jordan's leadership. [: 00:22:00

And that was really huge for us to really begin to think about it that way. I had watched that thing probably 20 times already. And when I say 20 times, each of those episodes, I've watched it like 20 times because each time I watched it. Differently to look at different ways that I could lead better, right?

e student study team. That's [: 00:23:00

That sit at the table and unpack their particular student to see what it is that this kid does really well. What are some things that this kid could do, that we could do to focus on helping the student, with some of the challenges that they have. And how much time are we going to, wait two weeks, three weeks, four weeks to see how this student grows or make adjustments with the support of the family, so those were some of the things that I really focused on for those three areas of groups that I mentioned that kind of, brought us to a place and we're still working on it, right?

It's not perfect. It's not great. We're still building on those areas to continue to be better.

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Cater community and even the leadership community there were trust issues. When you look at those various task forces that you set up, that are supposed to work at improving these problems, what was your process for repairing some of that lost trust that existed across all of those constituencies so that you can move forward more effectively?

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Like you, you think about those continuous school improvement teams that's their peers. We're relying on your peers to, to bring you along, support you and peers usually trust [00:25:00] their peers when it comes to education. If you got a peer voice, as in a teacher voice at the table, people are, can't say there was no teachers at the table.

Right now we have that at the table. And when you have that at the table you're bound to have people believe and trust in where we're headed more. When you think about, the leaders there's some ownership, some accountability that we have to own, and we have to face, with the challenges that we were facing with trust.

Clearly people didn't trust each other. But what is it? What is it? We had to unpack what is it that's causing us to not trust. And then let's work towards, that direct action that we talked about, in with Dr. King's, steps to social change, those direct action, and then also commitment.

we work together as a team. [: 00:26:00

Hearing from kids, which people rarely listen to kids. People rarely talk to kids. People rarely feel like, a kid has something good to say. Kids have way better things to say in many cases than the adults sometimes. To me, when you bring student voice into it. You then begin to also build the capacity of our kids and their confidence to respond to things that are happening.

And if students are able to stand up and respond, we have way more kids in our district than we have adults. And if we can get our kids to build and we build their capacity of them being able to respond and stand up to things as it's happening, we can close gaps differently. With all that power that kids could take on by bringing their voice into the space.

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And then how did you leverage that to move the district forward?

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What I, what we've done over the last. year, two years, we've had people come in and meet with small groups of kids and ask kids what do you like most about your school district? What if you had no limitations, what would you change? And also, what are some of those things that cause harm?

. I like how our schools are [: 00:28:00

Sometimes kids come to us with those things and it's okay, yeah we'll look at the code of conduct. We'll see how we can unpack those things, maybe do some investigations, but it's very rare that kids have a space to process those things with I'm going to say we had an outsider come in and our kids felt really comfortable to share that information and this individual ended up, creating presentations that was done school wide at the middle school level and at the high school level.

d, harassment, bullying that [: 00:29:00

It warranted really people focusing and doing some debriefing around those things. And just recently we had those presentations and I'll say over the last month, we had those presentations that were done that really, I think had an impact Not only on the kids, but also on the staff of what to listen for, or even how to respond to those things when you hear those things, which was really cool.

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Done yet, but you've been been in the district for roughly three years and you look at all of the [00:30:00] different things that You've done in terms of repairing some of the issues that existed. What's the current state? What's the landscape of the district now compared to where it was when you got here?

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And she said, you told me to be patient. To give you three to five years to build this system of achievement, the way that we need to see achievement for kids. And she said to me, my son was accepted into many of the prestigious schools that we wanted him to go to. And he has ranked in the top 7%. Of students across the country to get into these schools, so she apologized because she didn't think we were heading in that direction because of where the district had been and that's a testament to the focus that we have here on academics focus that we have on [00:32:00] developing kids and in families into being connected to our district and having a sense of belonging to this district.

But also making sure that the, from a mental health standpoint, that needs are being met. We can chime, academics. But if kids aren't mentally well, to be in the space, To receive that achievement or that academic, instruction, it's going to be really hard.

And then they won't be successful. So we it's a happy balance that we have to strike and have for our kids being successful with the resources that we have to meet their needs to be productive instructionally.

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What would be the elements that you want to make sure they have on their radar so that they're in a position to turn around their districts based on the lessons that you've learned.

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Now it doesn't have to be six steps to social change. It's not like things need to change, right? But those six steps will support you. In listening, understanding, and even the things that you may need to do to be a better leader, to be inclusive, to be helpful to those that are sharing with you along the way.

the systems that you have to [: 00:34:00

And if there's somebody out there, the superintendent, you know it all. I love to sit down with you and learn from you myself. But there's a humbleness piece that you have to have also because there are so many people that we can learn from. There's so many people that bring different perspective, bring a different lens.

on their own experiences within that district that you haven't been in yet. And then lastly, it's really important for you to strike a balance, don't just get caught up in just work. You have to take care of yourself too. There's a happy balance between work and play.

leaders, families first and [: 00:35:00

[00:35:04] Dr. Jim: Great stuff, Rainey. If people want to continue the conversation, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

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[00:35:23] Dr. Jim: Thanks again for hanging out with us, Rainey. I think this conversation is going to be really valuable for a lot of folks. When I think about what impacted me during the course of the discussion, there are three elements to the turnaround story that I think is is really important to call out. One of the most impactful elements of the discussion that we had was your emphasis on listening.

that you took, but the other [: 00:36:00

And I think that piece of that exercise can often be forgotten if you listen to understand what's going on, but don't. Take inventory of the support structure that exists, any action that you take likely won't make as much progress as you'd like because the support structure isn't there. And then the last element that I thought was important about the, your success story and your turnaround story was the emphasis on communication at all levels and not only communicating what could be.

in, in service of a broader [: 00:37:00

For those of you who have been listening to the conversation, we appreciate you hanging out. If you liked the discussion, make sure you leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. If you haven't already done so make sure you join our community. You can find that at www. engagerocket. co slash HR impact. And then tune in next time where we'll have another leader hanging out with us and sharing with us the game changing insights that helped them build a high performing team.