This is the 4J Super Insights podcast. Ten minutes of conversation with 4J Superintendent Dr. Andy Dye. And in this episode, KRVM broadcast student and award-winning podcaster Avery with the questions. Hello, my name is Avery Walkoviek and I've been at 4J since sixth grade, so about six years now I believe. And I'm going to be a senior this year. And so I'm here with Dr. Dye. I'm Andy Dye. Dr. Andy Dye, I'm the superintendent here in 4J.
To get started, I have some questions just about you and just your work and stuff like that. So why did you choose your education as your career? It was not a direct path. I started off wanting to pursue a career in medicine and got through my junior year in college and had a collapse of faith, I think, and ended up working in the Northwest Youth Corps here in Eugene.
I don't know if people are aware of that, but really enjoyed working with young people, felt like I was doing with them what I wanted to do in medicine, which is help people make good decisions about their lives and how to be happy and independent and just continue to pursue that interest. And it led me into a master's degree in education and then into administration. And here I am. Amazing, amazing. So what made you select 4J as the place to share your time and talents?
You know, when I got out of school and got my first job, I didn't select 4J. It was a really tough time to find a job. Ended up working in Lebanon Unified School District a little bit north of here, close to Corvallis. Was at Lebanon High School and got reduced. That was when I think it was the tech bubble burst is the way we old people refer to that time and ended up applying for multiple positions. One of them at Roosevelt Middle School.
I lived right by there, was able to walk to school and had done my student teaching with Judy Francis. I don't know if anybody remembers her Donna Moffitt and Judy Francis and she retired and I got the job. And so I started teaching middle school at Roosevelt and the district was really supportive. I was young in my career and they invested in me, folks at the time invested in me and other people that were new to the career. And I live here.
So teaching is very, very complex and really difficult and you invest a lot of your time outside of when you're supposed to be thinking about work. And if I'm going to do that, I'd much rather do that in my own community where it betters my own community, not that other people's communities don't need better if that's a word. But I'd much prefer to work in my own community and work with families in my own community and make a contribution here. Amazing. Amazing.
And then what are your guiding principles for 4J? You know, I've got this three, three, what I believe are hallmarks of high quality educational institutions that I refer to as my three rocks. Timely communication and community engagement and those are really two different things.
It's one thing to give you an email with lots of accurate information and that's really important but that does not provide you with the information that maybe you need to be a better student or you need to be a better partner as a parent with us. If we're just always sending information out, we're not getting the necessary information back so that we can be better. So timely communication and meaningful community engagement.
Equitable outcomes for everyone with an amplified focus on the desires, not just the needs, but the desires of students that have historically been underserved. Our schools are set up to give most everybody what we believe that they need. But there are also programs and opportunities that students want in schools because school is not just a series of classes that one takes. It's an entire experience, you know.
So what are the things that need to be a part of everyday experiences for everyone to make school relevant? Like you feel as though it's got something for you beyond just preparing you for the next class. So amplifying focus on the desires of what those students who might not find school so relevant, how can we make it that way? And then safety and well-being for students and for staff, and that has changed over time.
When I first got into education, when you referred to safety, it was more about campus security, no fighting, no physical threats to violence. Now there's a whole lot more that's involved in safety. It's a lot about how you feel and how the degree to which you feel like you belong in school from your peers, from the adults, from the community surrounding the school. And so that's an ever-evolving body of work. Right.
How did those principles, how did you hone down those principles and how did they come to you as you, as you've gone along in your career? One of the most important things for me, I believe, has been to build and maintain an evolving network of professional peers. It's really easy to get bogged down into the relationships that you see, that you have on a daily basis, interact with the people that are closest to you.
And while that's fantastic and you build strong relationships, you might not see how other people do things, other districts do things. I've had the benefit of working in multiple districts and actually in multiple countries and being on accreditation teams for schools all around the world. And that has been very helpful. And I have just stolen, frankly, ideas and perspectives from other people. There's nothing new under the sun. All the great ideas have been had.
You've got to combine new ones to make something slightly innovative. And so it's just been through the benefit of exposure and experience and the fortune of, like I said, the district investing in me and helping me connect with people that are really good at what they do to make me better at what I do. And what are the ways that you have seen yourself grow or learn new things? Gosh, that's a complex question. It's a little bit of a complex one.
I could talk about it in the last five years or the last 10 years or the last 20 years. But I think that, you know, I mentioned earlier, experience and experience is what you get when you don't get what you want. And good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.
And so you have to be really honest with yourself and realize when you have maybe pursued not the greatest idea for a little bit too far, you've got to be willing to acknowledge some deficiencies in your own thinking and find people that think differently than you, people that are willing, whose opinion that you respect, who are willing to be really, really hard on ideas and really at the same time respectful to you as an individual.
It's not a fun place to be to feel as though you have to be right all of the time. I think that that's really damaging to someone's psyche. And so growing comfortable with not knowing the answers, but seeking them from others until you feel like you've related in the right spot. I think that's been a really important part of my evolution as a professional. Yeah, that's incredible. And kind of shifting to more like, I would say light, lighthearted, less complex questions.
What is one thing that people probably don't know about you? One thing that people probably don't know about me. Well, it depends on how well you know me. I've been in Eugene for a very long time and Eugene's growing, but still at the same time, pretty small space and if you worked in education for a long time, you see a lot of people over the years. But I'm not from here. I'm originally from South Carolina and I was born in Buford, South Carolina, Parasile, and my father was a Marine.
We moved from there when I was really young and I grew up outside of Nashville, Tennessee in very little towns, Ridgetop and White House and Greenbrier and came out here actually by accident. To be honest with you, I was going to come here for a five-week job and that's turned into 25 years of mortgage and a career.
So my exposure growing up as a young person was to a very different pace and I think social philosophy, political dynamics, economic dynamics, it's benefited me to have a different perspective and at the same time be here long enough that I choose to call this home. Yeah, that's amazing and what do you like to do in your free time? That changes over time too. I used to be a pretty avid endurance athlete. I did a number of marathons and half Ironman competitions, long races.
I've played guitars sometimes kind of good and sometimes really poorly. Pretty big gardener and my favorite thing to grow is hot peppers and I grow all kinds of super hot peppers. All my family lives in Texas and I'm originally from Oklahoma in Texas and so we've experienced some really hot peppers. We've tried to grow them ourselves but for us at least it's been pretty tricky to do.
Yeah, they like the heat and other than that, I very much like to be on the water whether it be high mountain lake or over at the coast or on one of our local rivers. I spend as much time as I possibly can on the water. Amazing and then shifting over to 4J, can you share some positive things that have happened to 4J at least this year? This past school year?
Yes. Yeah, I always say this when I talk about 4J, certainly not because of the work I myself have done exclusively but we attract some of the most talented teachers in the area. Eugene is a community and as a school district has a reputation that is really magnetic to a wide profile of people.
It's a wonderful place to live and it's a great place to work and I think that through the pandemic and all of the things that we had to endure as a community, not just a school district, that those bright people kept their eye on what schools can be and help pull us out of what I would think to be one of if not the most challenging episodes in the district's history.
4J is not, Eugene in general and 4J in particular is not a community or a district that likes just to be told what's going to happen. We are all about process and getting the best answer through dialogue and through COVID that wasn't possible.
And you know after doing something for a couple of years, people can get into the habit and forget what things, how things used to be and everyone to a person was pretty focused on coming out of that and changing our mindset, not just what we do from day to day but changing the way that we think about what might be possible and I think that that's set us up for a great year this next year. Thank you so much for being here and for doing this with me. This has been amazing. I appreciate it.
It's my first time on a podcast so it's pretty exciting. Perfect. Well, you're doing a great job. Thanks. It's time for the next episode with Dr. Dai.