The Role of Data-Driven Storytelling in Effective School Leadership

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A fairly progressive town and being a university town. Strong workforce and we have the benefit of a very supportive community even in tough budget times, it's a community that supports our schools and raising dollars through in our state levies and bonds. We have outstanding school board leadership filled with board members that a superintendent's dream where there is school board members really caring about the entire district.

And we have a real clarity of our governance model. We have a very senior leadership team, high caliber staff working for us. And then it's been a place that my family and I moved to 14 plus years ago. And it's been hard to think about a better place here than in Bellingham. It's got all the conditions that one might hope for a successful school district.

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One of the things that got me interested to reach out to you was actually the Bellingham Promise. And I thought that was a very nice way of encapsulating everything that you're trying to do with the district. And you've been around enough to be able to see through a lot of these initiatives.

In your opinion, what are some of these initiatives that you're most proud of?

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So it [: 00:03:00

alue of all children will be [: 00:04:00

That's led to all types of things, including our PTAs joint fundraising for all 14 elementary schools or for all middle schools and putting dollars in and saying, it's not okay for one school to have resources and do these things. We're doing it for the collective. And that's real been a real powerful storyline for us.

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And in our state, when you think of public education, people usually say K 12 like kindergarten through 12. What we said It's prenatal. If we ignore prenatal all the way until they get to us in kindergarten, we've missed one of the most opportune times for development of children. Even though we don't provide services to every prenatal, newborn, we want to work with our community partners.

e and have a place for their [: 00:08:00

I'll give one more example. I used to be a high school teacher and principal. So I came from the secondary. So the early childhood to me was a lot newer body of work. And one of the things that we pushed on was we have kids coming into kindergarten that are behind, and they're behind for a variety of reasons, often socioeconomic reasons, their parents don't have the same resources as others, and they come in behind.

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rt kindergarten a whole year [: 00:09:00

So those are a few of the things that we did that really pushed our system and push the state is don't just accept that we're a K 12 system. Think about prenatal birth all the way up, what role do we play and what community partners do we work with.

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ds in our district, two have [: 00:11:00

So we do a lot of storytelling. Measure our promise yearly and report to our board and community. And we've really Brought out the importance of quantitative data and qualitative data. They each play a role and it's the mixed methodology is the best approach where we use both. Part of what we've done is invested in our communications department or that is a strategy and we work hard to tell people the storylines. Like with the early childhood work, I remember being up in front of the staff in the community and making the play to put in millions of dollars in early childhood.

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I want to now switch gears a little bit and move to your own personal leadership style. You talked about merging both qualitative and quantitative data into some kind of story, storylines, right? And I'm a big believer that the data doesn't ever speak for itself.

It always has to be within a framework of a story. And only then can data be truly used for the power and potential that it has. How do you think you developed this perspective as a leader? Because this doesn't come naturally to most people.

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So test scores, you have to be able to measure it with a number. Through my experience at Harvard, I spent a lot of time with qualitative researchers and some of the best in the world and saw the other side. That's not true. Both qualitative and quantitative play a role. And if you only believe in one or the other, You're going to miss the opportunity to really see a potentially a holistic approach to what the problem is and solutions and measuring what you do.

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Like we just are presenting a board report tonight to the board on how we're achieving our outcomes. We have 17 outcomes in the promise, and you're going to see where we'll take an outcome will give quantitative data. But then we'll do a case study and we'll say, here's an example of a kid at this school, within the system, and you go deep on it and tell a story, and it makes the quantitative of that bigger picture come alive and Oh, my, that makes sense.

So our board is really tuned [: 00:15:00

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our career that I wanna be a [: 00:16:00

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I remember him saying someday you're going to be a superintendent. So that's the first memory I have of anyone ever mentioning being a superintendent was my first, second year of teaching. I didn't then put that as my goal, but that's somebody put that in my head. And that was the moment I can remember.

I then, as I went on my journey, I had an opportunity to do some administrative work in a district. It seemed every year I was being promoted up and given more responsibility. I was in my twenties and I had another mentor come and say, before you keep doing these ladders, in the district, you need to get back into school as a school leader.

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It was helpful for me to be a teacher go into a district office back into a building and then back. When I was a principal and I was very young, people would talk about the district office as like those people and I had just worked in a district office for four years. I was like, no, those people are great.

They're working hard. They're trying to support you. But the principal ranks hadn't worked in the district office much. And so I've taken my whole career where I value principals taking it some time in a district office and going back into a building to build that understanding. Then when I was a principal, My superintendent came to me and said, the short version is there was a person from Harvard that was in an urban superintendents program doing a year long internship in my district.

professor from Harvard came, [: 00:18:00

So that was the moment where I was in a program with the superintendent title in it that really changed the trajectory of what I was probably thinking about.

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That is not a typical path. Do you think it should be? Because I've seen this in other industries as well, where there's a lot of value in rotating talent out of an operations role, because it gives you a different perspective when you come back as a leader. And,

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There's this additional element of having to do stakeholder management or whatever it is to work with the district administration. Whereas having gone through that path and coming out it's just a lot smoother. Do you think that should be common practice across school districts?

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nd you can develop trust and [: 00:20:00

That's one place that districts can take teacher leaders, bring them into the district office to help work on things as a teacher leader. And that gives them some of that experience. And then we train them and then they go back as assistant principals and principals. And then they come back to us as directors.

Once you get to a certain level, it's hard to go back as a principal. Mainly because of pay challenges, but we've developed a lot of principles on special assignment where they come out of the building, they come do work here for a few years and then they might go back in the building.

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Like right now, we just opened a new district office a couple weeks ago. Our building has been 120 years old, horrible building. We went through a 15 year change process to build this new building. And we made all of our conference rooms named after schools. And in the conference room is a picture of the school and will be artwork from that school.

And part of it is so staff feel ownership of the district office. And that's part of that us versus them. There's a lot of ways you can diminish the us versus them. It's not all about positions and where you work, facility and use and feeling welcome is another strategy.

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Like I didn't get to choose them, per se. So I think I've been fortunate and lucky that people chose to invest their time and energy into supporting me.

There is probably some level of you need to be a self advocate to bring in mentorship as well. Like I'm thinking of when I was a principal, I had an inequity at an old building and we got all the old stuff where there's an alternative high school.

remember calling four senior [: 00:23:00

And they said, yes, I did. And I brought them to it was our fitness center was in an old bathroom, broken urinals was horrible. We had all the old equipment from the other schools, the conference of high schools that had new stuff. I drove them around to the newer, the comprehensive high schools that have these beautiful weight rooms, and then I ended the hour with coming to ours, which was back in a bathroom with broken urinals.

I didn't have to say much, but I was making a point that we have a problem here. So I was advocating, these were four people that had served some level of mentorship for me, and I was probably using that to my advantage, but also bringing them along is I need your help to figure out things, which is a mentorship role, like problem solve with me.

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And it goes back to what you said earlier about, your first or second year. As an educator and someone's already planted the seed in your mind that this is your potential and I'm wondering, is there a way to engineer this more deliberately with um,

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People want to spend their entire careers in the classroom and that's okay because that's their passion and that's their purpose. But there are others who seek other things, but they may not know that they do. So is there something that you're doing or that the district is doing

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So that's in the realm of what you're saying. I spent quite a bit of time trying to learn what best practices were outside of education. How does the corporate world do it? And then we started developing and using best practices, both in education and corporate world of leadership development.

And as I came to Bellingham, we spent 14, 15 years refining that and trying to grow it. So a couple examples. One is we have a aspiring administrators program where we try to tap educators out in the classroom that we think have potential. And that might be I see it or one of our supervisors sees it or a principal sees it or another colleague in a school.

But I put out every year a message to all staff of here's an opportunity and it's grown to where it's not just classroom teacher leaders, but it's operational leaders as well. Classified folks that aren't traditionally you think teacher principal pipeline and they can apply for this aspiring administrators program.

apped for that. We're trying [: 00:26:00

If you're a new leader, we have a whole cohort for brand new leaders. Again, setting the stage for their success, but then trying to figure out who might be. So I think the big one is what you just said is coming out of the classroom building and seeing yourself as a leader outside of that.

And oftentimes it's us trying to see something and somebody tapping them on the shoulder who has a relationship with them. Hey, have you thought about whether it's applying for that program or being a dean or a building leader when your principles gone? Like, how do we give them some leadership opportunities so they can maybe see themselves that way?

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That's really served us well.

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So these talent scouts go out and what I'm hearing from you, it sounds like it's a good talent flywheel that you're building because you bring someone through and the aspiring administrators program, they learn what it's like to be a leader in Bellingham public schools.

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There's a path. And I can aspire to that. So that's really great. The last area that I want to touch on is, we're building these leadership pipeline and you sound like a person that's been very methodical and deliberate in building up your organ and next generation of leaders. Do you see any direct impact on student outcomes in the school buildings and, from the district and so on?

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nice data over a decade plus [: 00:29:00

We also, within the Bellingham promise if someone was to look at it, you would see 17 outcomes. And there is categorized under knowledge character and action. And this isn't just Bellingham, but we've been at it for a while of that whole child piece, and we want all kids to graduate with a wide range of choices and develop a whole child kind of viewpoint, and I think we've done a nice job.

I remember you'll probably remember to, it wasn't that long ago with no child left behind where we were so laser focused on math and Literacy scores that we at least in my experience, often throughout the whole child piece. We're not going to put you in music.

least We went too far in one [: 00:30:00

Every kid has to go to college and get rid of vocational opportunities. We've really tried to balance that. We want every kid to graduate with the ability to go to college, but we got to give kids choices. So I think we have a lot of good data and we changed our whole high school schedule to give more opportunity for more courses where and this is language out of the promise, find your passion, so it's not just pass math and literacy state tests, that's part of this, but find your passion, explore, build your character, figure out how you can take action in this world.

And we've done a nice, a better job of doing that than a decade and a half ago in the middle of No Child Left Behind in my experience, in my opinion.

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This has been such an invigorating conversation. Greg, really appreciate you taking the time. If anyone listening to this wants to continue the conversation, what's the best way for them to reach you?

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Thanks once again for listening and I hope you found something useful from this leadership story.