Business Acumen in Education: The Convergence of Two Worlds

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They really were coming together. They wanted the school district to be the best. And I'd say the community as well. So that's something you look for in a lot of districts you want to go to because I'm a change agent. And if I'm going to come and make change for the betterment of the kids and the community.

I got to make sure the school board and the community are behind me through every step as I go through. I believe Sandler is a very unique place here in the Bay. It's got a lot to offer young families. You're close to the city. Even though I lived only about 18 miles away. I didn't spend much time here but i've grown to love it and that's why i've been here 12 years.

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And what we noticed right from the bat was we had to kind of rebuild everything from the bottom up, which I mean, the infrastructure, like building the house, I needed the forms, all these things first before we could jump all the way here. So we needed to look at what did our leaders look like? What do policies look like here? What's happening in the classrooms? What's happening here? And start slow. So we had a solid infrastructure and so that first strategic plan if you looked at it was the first three years was It's just building blocks. We couldn't put in the hot tub. We can't put all this crazy stuff in until we had some infrastructure in place.

s a new superintendent, they [: 00:03:00

You're putting people in the right place. And some people have been here a very long time. Some people short time. Bringing in new people that can bring a new lens into the school district. Cause they're coming from other school districts and they're going, Hey, I see that, that needs to be fixed, right?

This is working. The big thing is getting people to follow the process, especially my school board, and, thank God they got on board real quick. I said, I know you want me to do this. I know you want to do this, but until we figure out these other things, there's no way we can move forward.

So again, I use that analogy of just basically, let's start slow. Some districts I've been in, they do have some infrastructure in place so you can leap, but San Leon was one of those that we really needed to break it down. So we could rebuild it up.

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Let's just keep doing it. And you heard it everywhere around here. That was part of the interview question I had for a lot of the higher level employees. What do you believe we need to change? And if the answer was, Oh, we just need to keep doing what we're doing. Then they got in this pile and the ones that said, Hey, I think we need to be doing this or we need to get creative or we need to do this.

And you put them in this pile and said, those are the ones we're going to need to work with, as we move forward.

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So you start building some things. And then once that's built, you go around to different service groups in the city, you go around to the each school and you talk to them. What do you think about these priorities? If I come in and I just say, I think this is what needs to happen.

I'm not going to be successful. There's got to be buy in from everybody in the community. Cause I work for them. That was part of my original research before I applied for the job is does my personality and does my skill set fit with what San Leonard Unified is looking for?

Because what I do may not fit in another school district, right? I knew it was good marriage, I knew I had the skill set to help them out, and to get moving. The priorities came from, as we narrowed it down, it was like, this is what I can do for you now. This is what I think we should do.

You guys believe in the [: 00:06:00

And if you don't teach the kids that tool in the classroom, we are doing them a disservice. I've been in this 25 years. My kids had one to one computers 25 years ago. So seeing a school district here close to the bay that didn't have any, it was something we could attack. And so that was one of our first things we really prioritize facilities really trying to get the right leader.

ady knows what your skillset [: 00:07:00

And then you get in the mix of it and they're like wait a minute. How's this going to look? If we had to move a lot of people around, I said, it's going to get tough here because we're dealing with people's lives. We're moving people around. You're going to have to go through this wave.

You have to go through the bad before you see the good. And they're going to have to stand up strong. And they did. I was very amazed. So those first three years after that, I said, okay, I could do a lot of good work here because the board stood strong when it got really tough, which means they want change.

They actually wanted to move forward. It's that dance. And that's why you sometimes hear superintendents last only three years. Because if you do it right and you go through the dance, maybe it's not working. And you go, wait a minute, maybe this isn't the right marriage and I need to go someplace else and do it.

s really go out to my school [: 00:08:00

We do three year strategic plans and we really try to stay focused on that. And that keeps the community and everybody, the teachers saying, oh, that's a great idea, maybe the next strategic plan, but let's stay focused on this one. Cause you know, if people don't focus, you start getting all over the place, so I give all the kudos to the school board, the community all along the way. I felt like I've been supported.

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They're literally living with you. Your customers are their kids . So it's a lot tighter and maybe politics as well that's involved because funding formulas and so on could be decided either at the state of federal level.

How do you feel like that's the same in your experience driving change at San Leandro over the past 12 years? And how is it different in your experience?

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district office. But if you [: 00:10:00

Unless something comes out, that's bad or whatever, they figure it out. Oh, they all come out. But as far as business sense it's really similar, in the fact that, everybody has to be invested in what's going on. Now, one difference between, I guess a lot of private sectors have this, but one thing that's different in a public school, especially here in California is unions.

Certain places where the unions are off over here. They put their input here and there, and then there's places where the unions are highly involved in their everyday activities for their employees and everything we do. And that's what we got here.

How do we move forward? How [: 00:11:00

So how do we do employee engagement? That's beyond compensation. So we try to do functions or surprise things that say, Hey, we love you. We want you here. So when you get a job here, the first thing you get is you're on boarded with swag, a shirt, a brand new laptop. It's really what can we do to make your experience better?

Another great example we saw from the beginning is we did our first professional development day. And we had food for them. We had breakfast. We were going to have lunch. We had a little jazz band playing in the lobby and people were looking at us like we were aliens. We've never had food.

We had to come to professional development and bring our own sack lunch. And I remember the conversation before when we were trying to plan for it, some of the old guard was like, they didn't want to spend any money on food. And we had to change that real quickly. I said, these are professionals.

g or a workshop or anything, [: 00:12:00

If you talk to places like the Ritz, the Ritz can't get worse. They're always looking at how they can get better and same with other businesses because once you ramp it up and you got it up to a level where you believe in, you can't go backward. And so I got a great team where we sit down and go, what can we do this year?

What can be the theme? How do we up the ante on what we're doing? Again, there's that theory you could always get better. And that's one thing I'm proud of. We're not sitting on our laurels and saying, okay, we were here 12 years ago. We've done a lot of great things. Let's just rest this year. No, it's always, what more can we do?

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And that's what you want. Money's money. Yeah, it's important, but people want to wake up every morning and go, I'm going to go to a school that I want to be in. I want to go there. There's a good culture. People are happy. People are smiling. People are just shutting their doors and doing everything they want.

I don't think we do a lot of that in public schools. When the first books I give out the first year I come, it's called "Raving Fans" and really it's teaching customer service and people go, what are we doing customer service?

enrollment when I got here. [: 00:14:00

But because we used the business model of customer service, advertising, sharing with parents all through the Bay, this is what we got here in San Leandro. People will come and so I wish I saw more of that because it's competition out there now. You got charter schools, private schools, they do it, so if you were ever in San Leandro, You would see our advertisements on buses, on BART, on billboards. We do commercials in between movies at the movie theaters, not just in San Leandro, all up and down the bay.

And I've done that my whole career is how do we get kids in? Cause kids, we don't function without kids. We don't get any money, we can't do this, can't do that, and so we press that really hard, so it's everywhere.

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And it's the same thing in education. You have that higher purpose of this, the kids and the students and their achievement and their outcomes. But to get to those outcomes, you need revenue. And how do you get that revenue? You need to think very strategically, pulling it all together, and we were chatting a little bit about like investment even in buildings and facilities and how that has a direct impact on how much a student wants to go to school.

Maybe if you can share a little bit more about that.

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And when people forget that piece of facilities, it's tragic, because, for example, at the high school, forever they had in their quad, it was just like a dirt patch. Kids weren't sitting there. Kids weren't doing anything. So something as simple as changing the whole quad for with concrete and benches, nice stuff, we really took the model from like a college.

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We only have one high school in San Leandro so we're trying to build it in a fashion where they do get that sense of what college life is like. What it looks like, where you go, we're building a student union in a couple of years that, what high school has a student union. We want a student union slash captor and we're building a giant, we're almost finished, I think a couple of weeks with a state of the art gymnasium.

So the high school had one of the worst gyms in the Bay and they will probably have one of the top gyms in the Bay coming here. Some places you'd say, this is how much that's going to cost. And you get a pushback. Not here. Here's go for it. Mike. Let's do it Let's put San Leandro on the map because that is also a driver for people wanting to come here. If i'm going to go buy a house, i'm going to drive around not just look at the houses, i'm going to look at the schools And if I look at the schools, they look clean from the curb.

reat art programs. You still [: 00:18:00

It's increasing. So our enrollment will go up just because we changed the facilities. Especially for athletes. I remember the old day I'm a USC Trojan, and it was one of the number one football programs around. All these kids from LA are going to Oregon because Oregon put in a ton of money in their facilities.

State of the art gyms and state of the art this and state of the art that, and that's important to a kid and it's important to parents. So I think they see that we are dedicated to raising the bar. We're just not building a square box with a couple of basketball hoops in it. We're saying, how do we go bigger?

hy not? It's just because of [: 00:19:00

So we got a digital class called the slam academy. They'll be working on content for these screens. Business academy working on, going out and getting advertising from, so hopefully some fundraising going through the screens. So now we're taking a facility and we're making it a place we can also learn things as well because that's a job skill, going out there and being able to make content.

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But, um yeah. And all the district I've been in, I've had that support. Imagine being in a little school district, being a principal superintendent, 400 kids. Middle all farmers, and bringing in one to one apples computers for them and at first like whoa, what are we doing?

But then they're like, oh my gosh and that's 25 years ago, kids were doing i movies and things like that and we were pushing the envelope because the board said let's do it. Let's push it.

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You've got to ask them questions. As you're going through your interview and say, these are the kinds of people I want to work with. Is this going to be a fit as we go through, but then it goes down to research. It's a, you go drive to these communities, you see what's going on the weekends, what's going on at night, just talk to people, what do you think about the school.

If you're gonna go into a place, you gotta be all in, and you gotta make sure you talk to your significant other. Are they ready to go? When you go into the community, they want to know who you are. You're just not this person doing schoolwork.

to know who the person is. A [: 00:22:00

I've learned throughout my career, just, looking at advertisements, and say, I'm gonna interview at this place, looks real nice, and I didn't do the research, I go to the interview, and then walk out and go that's not me. That's not me. And it's probably a place they would hire me But I had to learn to say it may not be compensation. Are these the people that I can work with with my skill set. I'm very social, i'm very personable. I also have a business background so I understand investment.

I understand this idea of Advertising for kids. Some people are still catching up to that, and they get angry, but I tell the board, if you want to do this, I can do this. And when they're nodding their heads and they're saying.

ay? If they don't choose you [: 00:23:00

But having a clear personal vision of what you want to do is, I think, extremely important. I'm a lot like my father, he's a doer. He wanted to go into school districts and make change. He wanted to start the change, see the change. He didn't want to do all that, be outside the district doing politics, or go into a bunch of meetings.

We go to some of our stuff, but if you ask anybody in this district, I'm always here. For the most part, I'm here. I go to a few meetings a year that I think are important, but other than that. I want to be here doing things with my community and with the school district.

So it's a process through years. I don't think we do a good enough job. I think as people go up the ladder and they want to be superintendents of really talking to them a lot about this is what it looks like. This is what it is. It's one of the hardest jobs, but one of the best jobs. So it's that balance.

But If you don't come in [: 00:24:00

So that gets your mojo going so you got to find those strategies. How do you keep yourself going. I'm a change agent.

I'm looking for that next thing. I take notes every day, I leave the offices if I'm creating problems to solve. It's time for me to move. You've got to really say I love being here. If my skill set's still important then i'll be here if I feel like it's all done and it's time to go then I should go and I should do something else because i'm no good to them if i'm just sitting around you know creating problems to solve so checking yourself is very important, and no one's perfect.

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I'm also very honest. I don't sugarcoat the job. Say it's going to be good. You can do good things, but it's tough.

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could see why people were in [: 00:27:00

I had a great principal and I was teaching. I say, Hey, can we do this? Clara Johnson, she would say, sure, Mike, whatever you want to do, what do you need? And that helped me build things around this school that gave me a resume, as a teacher that a lot of principals didn't have, cause I was building program.

I was doing facility work. I was always thinking about what more could I do for these kids? And when I got that opportunity, when somebody called me and said, Hey, want to apply for the superintendent principal job at 30? I went up and applied and went to it in the middle of nowhere and I got the job, that was another huge challenge because I was 30 and my youngest teacher, I think was 40, 48, so what was I going to teach these people that have been teaching a long time? So that's one of those leadership skills is okay, I'm going to listen a lot. I'm going to see what's working here.

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We get 20 to 30 applicants. Maybe we get five. So the idea of becoming a site administrator or a leader at a school is not as attractive as it used to be. So how do we as leaders make it more attractive and go out there and recruit and build those leadership. But, I think it's all about being honest. Yeah, I get in front of these young ones.

I'm like it's tough, site administration is one of the toughest jobs around principal, vice principal. But guess what? These kids like you. The kids want to see you. The kids need you. We need you. But we just keep stacking more challenges on these site administrators and principals, through the pandemic.

o do with what they learned. [: 00:30:00

So we're having to rebuild, I think, that whole group as they're coming through, because, and that's going to be a big, that's really a P 16 problem, which means we got to have the universities, really pushing their educational departments, and that is another area where you used to have kids after kids in college say, I want to be a teacher.

And that's becoming less and less. So until we really work together with the colleges and there's some sort of emphasis if you not only have a low pool of good superintendent candidates out there that want to do this job. As you go down It's less and less.

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What I like to do is try to identify everybody in my cabinet. They will hear until I'm blue in the face. You ready to become a superintendent? You ready to go do this? Because that is part of my job. It is to help and if they don't want to do it That's fine. Okay, but everybody that works for me has that talent to run a school district it's just whether or not that it's that time in their life.

I don't think we do enough of that as well, really recruiting from within. The future is not going to work for leaders. If we don't start building within. Seeing, looking at people that are teachers. You've got a leadership skill.

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Those are the things that were given to me. People give me opportunities when I was young. People telling me the truth, but I was blessed to have family around and every time I need to pick up the phone and find out what's going on, these are my family members were some of the best superintendents in California.

I take their advice and move forward. But we got to do a better job. That's one area I really worried about. In our industry. I don't know if our state really has taken grips on, we have this dying industry for a better word, and we'll keep pushing. Like I said, that's one of my things on my list as I move forward is how do I put myself in arenas to hopefully mentor or help people get say this is not as bad as people make it look. It's all in your mental outlook it's I need to be here.

up every morning you go Okay [: 00:33:00

There are some great teachers out there. Teachers are leaders too. They're just leaders over here in this classroom. The thing I hear too much of? I don't want to go up there because I won't have any contact with kids. That's not true.

That's a choice. Good principals should be out on the playground every recess. Playing with kids, in classrooms, reading, doing those kind of things, going to games. So it's hard sometimes as you get older, as you get higher up, but it's a choice. Whether you use that, I don't want to be, don't move around kids.

You can, no one said you couldn't, so we'll keep working on it. It's something that I know some of the groups, AXA and all them, it's something we're working together on is how do we take these principles and move them up here and take teachers and move them up here. We'll see.

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What would you advise them to do?

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Some people think they like leadership. They've read a book on leadership, and they've seen things out there about leadership, but it's really still gotta be something inside you that you do want to come in and take a challenge on and fix a problem. You got to have that kind of mentality and drive, and that's where we need to do a better job at those levels, finding those people.

a superintendent. That one's [: 00:35:00

No, you're actually built for this. And you're built for that. And that's okay. Because, you don't know how many people get their doctorate or get their tier one administrative credential. I can't wait to be a principal. And then they get there and find out I'm not good at being a site principal.

That doesn't mean they don't have a worth in education. There is a place for everybody, but finding where that fit is. It's part of everybody's personal journey. And then we need to help people, when we're teaching them or, they're going through universities, they're trying to get their doctorate and master's, how do we guide them?

And there's gotta be more of that. There's gotta be people saying, I need to talk to you after class. Have you ever thought about being a superintendent or are you ready to go? Okay. Yeah, I was thinking about, talk to them honestly about it, because every job's the same. Whether it's the private sector or the public sector, the higher you get up, there's challenges.

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And you're ready to move on to the next one. I've been here 12 years. I'm proud of everything we've done. I'm proud of every step, everything we've put in. You can't sit there and go, Okay, that was great.

We have to raise the bar. We have to step it up because a lot of the people that started here 12 years ago aren't here, so you have to rebuild. When I speak to people that want to be Supes and the people that really reach out to you and say, can we have lunch?

Can we talk about this? That's somebody right off the bat wants to move forward. In our school district, we don't have lifetime vice principals. You want to be a vice principal then we're grooming you to be a principal.

irectors. The good ones will [: 00:37:00

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And so I don't think we do enough of that. I ask people all the time. So you want to go do it? Well, How much you gonna pay me? Oh, I am paying you because that experience will be on your resume that will get you, the compensation you are looking for later on. I beat out 15 principals.

My first job that had been doing it, they were principals for 15 plus years. Okay, they wanted to be the superintendent principal. I had zero, but my resume was bigger than all theirs. Because I did all these things as a teacher on assignment. Things like that. Boards like that you've done things. They like change. They like to move, they want to see stuff that you can't come to interview and just say I'm just going to come here and run the school district. You gotta dazzle them a little bit.

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or sharing all your insights [: 00:39:00