Cracking the Code of Turnaround Success in K-12 Schools

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This is true of any initiative, but it's especially true of turnaround efforts in the K 12 space. If you find yourself in a K 12 turnaround effort, you've got to be able to balance the needs of your team, your students, your community, and your board. Miscalculate on any one of those pillars and you'll find yourself stalled.

So how do you thread that needle? That's what we're going to tackle in today's conversation. And joining us, we have Jenera Walters, who is the superintendent of KSD one 11 in Illinois.

gree in social work from the [: 00:01:00

She has presented at various educational conferences and has coauthored the book. What works for special education and at risk learners, a framework for general education, teachers, and administrators. Janera welcome to the show.

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[00:01:28] Dr. Jim: Yeah, I'm looking forward to this conversation. And I think it's going to be interesting because you have the opportunity to do a look back on your experience within the K through 12 space as a leader within within the space. Now you've moved on to other things and there are some other priorities that you're going to be focused on, but I think we have a unique opportunity to think through some of your big successes and share with the audience on what those look like.

e we dive in to all of that, [: 00:02:00

[00:02:12] Dr. Genevra Walters: So in the context of Kankakee School District 111, I think it is important to know that I was born and raised in Kankakee. And so I attended schools from preschool until high school. High School and Kankakee School District 111 and actually was a graduate of Kankakee High School. So that is really important because part of leadership is really understanding your context and those values that your community has because sometimes those values can be part of the issues that have to need to be addressed and realigned when you're talking about changing from where you are needing to be turned around to a school district that's functioning well for all students. I also, I went to University of Illinois, Chicago.

originally wanted to go into [: 00:03:00

And so I decided to go into school social work. Started working in Kankakee School District 111 as a social worker, moved on to become assistant principal at Kankakee High School, then became the principal at an elementary school called Mark Twain, was recruited to develop and run an HR department in Chicago Heights then moved up to be the superintendent in that special ed school, and eventually came back to my hometown.

milies opportunities through [: 00:04:00

[00:04:01] Dr. Jim: I want to pull out a few additional details from what you shared with us. So you have a unique perspective of having quote unquote, grown up in the district and experienced it firsthand as a student. And then you took up leadership within the district at various levels. What did you notice? From your experiences as a student and also your experiences as a leader within the district That remained consistent and indicated some pretty significant problems that needed to be tackled

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There's six of us and she was the oldest of the girls and and she's older than me. And I realized. And I realized that [00:05:00] she struggled with reading and didn't understand why that was as early as first grade. And so then I started trying to do what I thought as a five or six year old that I should do is just do her homework.

And I realized that wasn't the answer. And then as I grew up into the system, I noticed as an eighth grader in gifted and honors classes, that some of my neighbors were not having the same educational experience that I was having and wondered why. What I was doing wasn't what they were doing. And I saw the disparity then and started thinking, okay I want to be a psychologist or someone that works with children to help children overcome whatever those barriers are to access.

Then I went into high school and I listened to students say they wanted to be doctors and they were failing science. And there they didn't seem to see the connection between what they wanted to do and what they needed to do in high school and what courses they needed to take to be successful.

to go into education to be a [: 00:06:00

And so that is the reason why I went into social work. And that's been my mission ever since making sure that I'm mitigating the barriers that affect students access to education.

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And that seems like something that [00:07:00] everybody should be in favor of, but that's not the case depending on who you're talking to. So when you're looking at. Serving the needs of all students and you're applying this lens to it. What were some of the common obstacles that you ran across? And how did you overcome them as you tried to move these initiatives forward?

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And most of those students are students that are gifted in honors or accelerated or have some kind of Some kind of support and advocacy naturally built into their life. And those are also [00:08:00] families that are often politically connected or have a strong voice. And so the barrier to change was getting people to understand that these changes would help everyone and not harm the students that benefited from the traditional system.

And honestly, that was A battle that I don't know that I completely won because there were, there are still people that are very disappointed in the changes and are trying to convince other people that the changes were not in the best interest of everyone. When really the changes were not in the best interest for maybe 10 percent of the population.

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Who is getting left behind because of the [00:09:00] system that exists? And the reason why it's important is that when you ask both of those questions together. Oftentimes those who are benefiting have the misconception that in order for those who are getting left behind to catch up, it means that those who benefit are going to lose out on something.

And that's clearly not the case when we're having these conversations. And it's interesting how, not just in education, but in a lot of different things, it's this a zero sum game thinking that everybody is in when it's easy to Not based in reality. It's your feelings about a particular thing is overruling your actual rationality about it.

ong. It's a series of things [: 00:10:00

What was your process for unwinding all of these things that were going on and deciding what should be prioritized in terms of your, Go forward plan.

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So no one's going to argue that we're not one community. We're not one district and that we shouldn't have a vision for every student. And so there was no pushback for that that [00:11:00] model that I interviewed with and ended up on our letterhead. So that was easy. The second thing that I did was say that we were going to focus on student engagement and student engagement encompasses so many different things.

But in my head, the goal was to I don't want to say take the education out of the hands of the students. The teachers, the better way to say it is to make it more student centered versus adult centered and that the students need to be active learning learners and participate in their own educational experience.

And so I had a meeting prior to even starting officially. I had been named the superintendent, but I started in May. There was a meeting in April and I addressed all the teachers and said our hedgehog concept, the big idea, the thing that we're going to focus on is student engagement. And that's it.

be engaged, that is when the [: 00:12:00

It's traditional system. But fortunately, that took about two or three years before I started to see a little bit more intense pushback because they started to see the practices, the daily practices that affected their lives needing to change in order to support students.

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What's the thing? What's our why? What's our north star? Those are that was really important. And I like how you highlighted that. Yeah. The other thing that I like about what you described is that Is focusing in on who is it that you serve? So when you're thinking about these [00:13:00] questions that you should be asking, it should be centered on what, what's the mission that we can rally around?

And primarily through that mission, who are we serving? And you describe that there was the mission? Relatively low friction when it came to building a case around those two questions. Now, what I find interesting about that is as this started gaining momentum, there was a change management element that became apparent.

When it came to adult behavior that needed to be changed, that's where a real pain point started popping up. And oftentimes in any initiative, the change management process can make or break whatever that initiative is. So when you start seeing these change management issues, how did you respond to it?

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They understand how to get to college. They understand how to develop a concept of what I want to do when I grow up. And so I wanted to replicate that by having students talk about their The possibilities of all the things that they can do as early as kindergarten. And so in kindergarten, they're looking at the human services field because children already understand doctors and teachers and nurses and firemen and policemen.

And so embedded in the academic experience was supposed to be practicing being These different careers. The first pushback was that teachers had their lesson plans that they probably use for 20 years. And this process did not fit into what they had been doing for the last 20 years. And so what usually happens is the teachers push back on the administrators who have to work with the teachers on a day to day basis would push back on me.

d having to collect data. So [: 00:15:00

They just said it won't work. It doesn't do this. It doesn't do that, but they had never actually opened it and looked at it. And so what I learned from that, that I would do in my next life, Is just have a time period where I'm working with different stakeholders around what is this and what does it look like?

h is a central office staff, [: 00:16:00

[00:16:13] Dr. Jim: So I really like how you broke that down because what, to me, what you're describing is that when you're trying to execute a transformation of any type or a turnaround of any type, it's not enough to just have the strategy and alignment. You need to have a communication and action plan that is embedded.

Across all layers of the organization. So you can build build traction and momentum on it. Now, one of the things that I like about the structure that we're talking about is you talk about the career exploration plan as something that gets embedded or at least started as early as kindergarten.

cational pathways for all of [: 00:17:00

So tell us a little bit more about how the career exploration concept tied into your overall vision for what. Access to education looks like in an informed way or in an intentional way that best serves the student.

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And so in my development of this system that I hoped would lead to post secondary opportunities. I knew that students need to understand the why of the reading the math and the, social studies. I want to be a doctor. Like, why is math, science, English, social studies important to that field?

I want to be a landscape [: 00:18:00

field, and I really need to focus on my math and science skills in order to go into that field their freshman year. They know that instead of finding out their junior senior year after they failed two years of math and science. And so that was the idea. Long look backwards planning. Like the goal is to be a doctor.

But I'm in kindergarten. And so what does that look like as a kindergartner that wants to be a doctor? So that's how I was thinking of it. And what are those expectations that you would have along the way so that by the time the student is a senior, they're prepared to enter college in kind of a pre med program.

is the reason why I need the [: 00:19:00

[00:19:07] Dr. Jim: So it's interesting the way that you describe it, because there's elements of what you're describing that has parallels in both the Asian education system and the European education system where you're talking about these things very early on. And it's. Part of it involves a level of questioning of the student.

Oh, I want to be a doctor. Why do you want to be a doctor? What does it take? Like automatically what happens here is I want to be a doctor. Okay. These are the things that you need to do, but we don't really spend a lot of time in digging into why is it that you want to be this? Do you know what's involved in it?

actually this is the reason [: 00:20:00

So to make my Indian mom happy, I went and got a terminal degree because she can still brag to her friends about how she's got a doctor in the family. But that exercise of really communicating what's involved in the job. And then having the student apply it and really understand, okay, do I even like this?

also driving more successful [: 00:21:00

[00:21:09] Dr. Genevra Walters: so I'll tell you 2 things that stick out in my mind. An accountability plan which I didn't have a district wide accountability plan. I work more with the, it's a large enough district that my, most of my contact is with the administrators. But what I realized is that I needed to have an accountability plan at all levels.

So my plan was for the administrators. Like I'd say 60 percent was for administrative accountability. But every once in a while, we would send a team out to check on what's actually going into the on in the classrooms. And then we would actually tear our buildings and our administrators in terms of this.

s are happening on a regular [: 00:22:00

So the first thing that I had to do is have an accountability plan. The other thing is that we had, we did have to dive deeper in the why and have everyone to really understand the connection between why, what we're doing now versus what we did 20 years ago and how it's important to do what we're doing now.

Whether it's the career exploration, because, there are teachers that felt like you're taking away from from core instruction. No, we're not taking away. We're trying to show them the application of the core instruction in terms of what they may want to do later. So a lot of discussion about the why a strong accountability plan and then every once in a while having to reset and making sure that everyone understood how to actually operate.

coaching instead of just one [: 00:23:00

And with the teacher shortage. We tried to free up high performing teachers to actually provide support to other teachers in the classroom.

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[00:23:43] Dr. Genevra Walters: I recommend really looking for freshly retired teachers. And actually that's what we ended up doing towards the, like right after COVID we really ended up recruiting teachers before they actually retired. I hope you're going to come back and, and serve as a coach. And so that, that was at the [00:24:00] beginning of my tenure.

We did have licensed teachers. There wasn't, this extreme teacher shortage that we're providing that, that coach, those coaching opportunities last year, I'd say we may have had one coach and the rest of the support were, was coming from freshly retired teachers.

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But one of the things that you mentioned was that you caught a lot of resistance from teachers who may not have updated their lesson plans in 20 years. And that was an area of friction for you. What did that tell you in terms of how education should be applied and how student [00:25:00] achievement should be evaluated.

How did that inform sort of your decisions on those two fronts?

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It's ultimately people, but it's the system that starts blaming the children and the families. And so when I came into the district, it's the kids are this, the families are that if the parents would just do this, then it would be better. I started talking about locus of control. We cannot control what parents do, and we cannot control the students that the parents send to us.

y concern about teachers not [: 00:26:00

and Johnny has this particular issue. And so then we're going to have this support and interventions provided for them during this time period. Every week there should be a look at what we've taught, what students have learned and what kind of changes that I need to make in order for students to grow.

And what it seemed like we were doing is that we were just saying I taught now, whether the constant was instruction, not necessarily learning. So what I wanted to change is the constant being learning and not the instruction. And so every teacher can say they taught, but we could not say every student learned. And so we talked a lot about learning being the focus.

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[00:27:18] Dr. Genevra Walters: So we also re, we call it our communication flow chart. We also rearranged our communication flow chart so that we showed how information should be communicated across the district and within the building. So we develop instructional learning teams that were to be meeting at least once a month to talk about Their student learning data, any issues that they have and develop plans around interventions or instruction.

also had our just our staff [: 00:28:00

Like we started to talk about like how our staff meetings should be structured. So we have a communication flow chart that showed how communication should go vertically and horizontally in order to make sure that we were all on the same page in terms of data and the outcomes and what processes needed to be adjusted on a monthly basis.

Now, the challenge is making sure that those meetings don't become gripe sessions.

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[00:28:25] Dr. Genevra Walters: That's where we have to, we had the accountability plan. We would send administrators to sit in on some of the staff meetings and an instructional on the IOT meetings is what we call them. And just observe and take notes and give feedback to the administrators in terms of any adjustments that needed to be made.

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And the importance of this in front of the community, as well as gaining alignment from the board to support this, because this is a pretty big change. I think I think what you're describing could be a shock to people that are used to feeling oh, the way that we're doing it was just fine.

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Do you like them or not? When I pulled the data from 10 to 15 years prior to my start, 80 percent of families were in favor of uniforms, but they just never did it. And so I decided to have a a forum on the implementation of uniforms. 700 families showed [00:30:00] up for that forum, which is like I was even surprised.

I get there, there was standing room only in the auditorium that we held the forum and we gave parents an opportunity to say yay or nay and why, and the, myself and the board listened to. What their comments were. And then we made a decision on whether or not we were going to implement uniforms.

And we had a financial crisis before making any changes. I had an open forum about our financial crisis and the recommendations of what we would do in order to resolve our crisis. We had to create Modified grade level centers because we have a magnet system and we have students that are not in magnet.

And so all of the students that are not in magnet, we call the College Career Academy. Now they all of the kindergartners going to go to one building. First graders go to that same building and they go to a different building. Not ideal, but it did help us to cut the budget. And then we had to close the school.

uperintendents will tell you [: 00:31:00

So I would say post COVID has been I've had the most challenges with the community. Because we weren't meeting during COVID, people were afraid to meet in person after COVID and people started creating their own narrative around what was going on, including just the natural anxiety that came out of COVID.

And but before COVID, having those town hall meetings, whenever a major decision was being made, helped tremendously in making sure that the community was aware of the why and the process for implementation.

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[00:32:00] Dr. Genevra Walters: I would have had two more years, which I'm not wishing, I'm saying, but this past year I started to see things settle down a little bit more to go back to where I could have really, Gotten us back to the why, and then in the continuation of implementing what we were implementing I'm not sure that I left at a time where it's institutionalized because I know that there are groups of people that still feel like we should go back to the traditional system.

And so I will tell you in the next year or so, I will know, did better. The changes stick or did they not stick? One of the things we implemented was competency based education, which people were really against because students can retest. Students aren't penalized for late homework.

in tissue because that's not [: 00:33:00

[00:33:29] Dr. Jim: Yeah. So I want to dig into that a little bit more. So you just mentioned competency based education. Tell us about what it is and how it's applied in the education context and why you decided to. Go with this model as a go forward model within the district.

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And I can give a really good example. I'm a really good test taker. And so I can test, I can pass a test just by studying overnight. I can read a map. If you give me a test on any map, I'm fine. But I cannot use a map to get to Detroit. So I can't apply it. And so if I have a friend that can apply, it can actually show and demonstrate that they can use a map to get around the school building, which I couldn't do.

And then I have my, me as a student that can take a test and show that I know how, a map should be used. Then I get credit, but the other person gets credit too. So my son took culinary arts. Last year, he's a senior. He actually was a senior. He graduated. And one of the classes. He's on a blended schedule, so he's not there every day, but the teacher felt like he should be.

show you that he's competent [: 00:35:00

And she had to take the videos as evidence that he had competency that he could cook a full meal with measuring by himself. And so they accepted that. We had students that went to Kanky Community College and if they could pass an English class at KCC, let's just say their junior year, then they got four credits of English.

Because the assumption is if you could pass it at the community college, then you have the competency to pass it at the high school level. So that's basically competency based education. We're not saying that the only time that you can get credit is if you're in front of the teacher in a school building, you can show that you have competencies anywhere and then you can get the credit.

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The way that you described it is actually. I used to be a recruiter and I used to have this conversation with hiring managers all the time. Your job description is listing all of these like wishlist items that you want for this particular person in the role, but you're not really spelling out what needs to be accomplished in the role.

You're tying it to years of experience and all these time and seat measures, but you're not really driving towards the outcomes. What are you trying to accomplish? And the competency based mod, but My model is really an outcomes based education model. Just like when you recruit, if you eliminate the time and seat stuff, Hey, we want somebody that can do X thing that opens up your entire candidate pool because you're looking at.

ht be junior candidates that [: 00:37:00

So I really liked the, Parallel that it's what you described struck when you were talking through it. So Genera, this has been a great conversation. And I think there's a lot of discussion that we could still have on any number of things that were brought up in this conversation. So what I'd like you to do is share the key principles that other leaders need to keep in mind when they're trying to execute their own turnaround initiatives. What are the things that they should be paying attention to, to give them the best shot at successfully pulling a transformation initiative off.

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You cannot divorce the work that has to happen in the community from the work that has to happen in the school district, because there's a lot of overlap. The next thing I think that a person needs to do is just to get to know the people and who is benefiting from the system remaining the same.

And how can you win. To understanding that something needs to change and they're going to be a part of that positive change and get them to understand it will be a struggle, so it's not going to be easy, but you want them to be a part of the change. So you'll have some people that are excited.

10 percent will be excited. And they're going to do it anyway, 10 percent are not going to do it, no matter what you say. So work on that middle and pushing them to the, they're going to be excited and buy into it and isolate the influence of the people that are never going to buy into it.

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[00:39:01] Dr. Genevra Walters: So if anyone wants to get in contact with me, feel free to contact me through LinkedIn. It's Janera Walters.

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I think the first thing that came out early in the conversation is really building an understanding of who's benefiting from the current system or process that's in place. And that's going to give you a line of sight into Why it's benefiting those people. But conversely, it also lets you know who is getting left behind those two questions that you ask early in the process is going to help you define what the roadmap should look like.

second part that I think is [: 00:40:00

And in your example, the number one constituency that you're trying to best serve is the student population. And when you center yourself across those three questions, who benefits, who's getting left behind, who is the constituency that we most want to serve? Answering those questions, honestly, and building consensus across all of your stakeholders on the answers to those three questions are going to set you up for success and make sure and help you gain the momentum that you need in order to impact change.

aring the story overall, but [: 00:41:00

And if you like the discussion, make sure you leave us a review. 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 for another conversation with a great leader. Tune in next time where we'll have another great leader joining us and sharing with us the game changing insights that helped them build a high performing team.