[00:00:00] Dr. Jim: Thanks for joining us today, this is your friendly neighborhood talent strategy nerd, Dr. Jim. You can have a collection of elite players winning And still not come close to winning We've seen it before where a group of all stars joins is The same thing happens in the public and private sectors. This can be especially true in the K through 12 space where the resources are. Resources across the district aren't properly allocated. In those situations, what you end up dealing with is extreme competition among schools for those limited resources.
So how do you navigate that environment and solve the root issues while at the same time creating a cohesive and high performing district? How do you build a highly collaborative team in that setting? Those are some of the questions that we're going to tackle in today's conversation So who's going to play the role of storyteller in this discussion?
Joining us we have dan sherry . Dan's dad was a pastor and his mom was a teacher and based on behavior and experiences He chose the correct [00:01:00] path of educator over being a christian shepherd Superintendent Sherry's teaching career began as a middle school science teacher and assistant basketball, baseball, and football coach at Greater Jasper Consolidated Schools in Jasper, Indiana.
Dan taught science for 11 years. He then garnered valuable experience as a athletic director, assistant principal, high school assistant principal, high school principal, assistant superintendent, and eventually superintendent. Dan has been the superintendent of the North Spencer County School Corporation for 15 years.
North Spencer has received a district wide letter grade of A since the inception of the rating system in Indiana. He's married to a second grade teacher and has three adult children. Two of them are in our public school teachers. Dan and his wife, Jill, both will be retiring from their current positions in 2025.
So the first question of the show, Dan, welcome. What are you going to do after you retire?
[00:01:50] Dan Scherry: Thank you, Dr. Jim. That's a great question. Going at a breakneck speed for so many years, you have some trepidation about what you are going to do. So hopefully I [00:02:00] will decompress a little bit and then maybe there'll be a second career. Actually my, Vision is I'll be selling minnows and worms at a bait shop at by a lake somewhere.
So hopefully that comes true. And I can actually make ends meet doing that.
[00:02:13] Dr. Jim: Now, that sounds like a great second career and actually what's what's interesting is that if somebody asked me that question, my first answer would be, I'm going to be a full time fish fisherman. So I'll I'll freshwater fishing and and do that for as long as I can function. I think this is going to be an interesting conversation, especially given the perspective that you bring to the discussion.
And when, and this gives a great opportunity to look back and reflect on some of the things that you've done, but before we dive into the main Topic of the discussion, which is building a high performance to school district and eliminating competition amongst schools within the district. I think it's important for you to set the stage a little bit and share with the audience a little bit more about some of those impactful experiences that shaped your overall leadership philosophy [00:03:00] as you are navigating your career.
[00:03:01] Dan Scherry: You listed the various levels that I have navigated through enjoyed every level. And, it's so interesting you're in your intro talking about superstars and, for many years, I've wondered why former coaches have moved into school leadership because, that emphasis changed about 30 years ago, moving to more of an instructional leadership model versus a management leadership model.
So that was challenging to move my mindset from managing people to. Really learning about instruction and how that plays together. So I think that background of coaching really helped to, to understand how those pieces have got to work together in a human kind of way.
[00:03:44] Dr. Jim: It's interesting that you mentioned how former coaches tend to be navigating or at least transitioning into this space. And one of the things that caught my attention about what you were talking about was the shift into instructional coaching.
Or instructional excellence [00:04:00] as an area of focus in the K through 12 space. I didn't think that was really the direction that you were going to go, because one of the things that I know of coaches at least in the sports arena, is that they're able to motivate people in unique ways that are specific to that each individual.
So I was thinking you were going down the road of talking about that. piece of coaching that lends itself to really well to K through 12 leadership. So walk us through some of the things that you noticed as being a former coach that really served you well, when you transitioned into your leadership roles as a principal and eventually as a superintendent.
[00:04:37] Dan Scherry: Yeah, and I think you can, you could use any of the 3 sports that I had background in football, baseball or basketball, but, focusing on, let's say a basketball comparison. You have such a specific roles for each of those players on a team, in, in a school setting you have for us, for example, we have 4 elementary schools and middle school and high [00:05:00] school, but each of those.
Pieces fit on a big on a, in a bigger team. And that personality needing someone who has a very concrete way of thinking versus someone who has really abstract way of thinking, we have jokingly on our team. We have our flower child and our extreme conservative thinker and the.
The dynamics of a group like that are so important to keep a balance. I think a tendency when you get to hire it on your own, you have a tendency to want to hire people like yourself and knowing, that coaching background gives you that perspective. If I can't have. 5 shooting guards on my team, even though they might be the best shooting guards.
I need a center. I need a point guard to distribute. So I need all those different pieces. And I really think that has helped me in establishing my bigger team as a superintendent in school.
[00:05:51] Dr. Jim: So there's something interesting that you mentioned about the hiring process and how people have a tendency to hire people that are like themselves. So what were some of the guardrails that [00:06:00] you set up? So you're not naturally gravitating for, or towards the person that's that's reminding you of you.
What were the steps that you took to build out that balance team?
[00:06:10] Dan Scherry: Well, I would love to say I had a notebook and bullet points, but I think ultimately I have in my career. Defaulted back to high character sincere heart. How do you measure those things on a piece of paper? How do you convince your school board that this is the right person for the job?
Again, it's, it comes back to relationship building and trust building trust with my school corporation school board of trustees. Trust with current administrative leadership team members to, to really talk through those things. And the only way you can build that trust is spending time together.
[00:06:45] Dr. Jim: Switching gears a little bit you rose through the ranks in various roles in school administration, and then you eventually ended up in your current role at Spencer County. Thinking back to when you first set foot in the district, What were your [00:07:00] early observations over that that ramp up period?
[00:07:03] Dan Scherry: I came here as a high school principal and when you begin, I was, I think, 3839. Your first job as a high school principal is stay between the, as I think you said, guard with stay and stay in bound, stay in your lane, whatever those words are. At the high school, I really was just trying to manage my own building, try to understand what we were doing at that level because that was my comfort zone.
Middle school, high school. And then as I got more comfortable at Heritage Hills High School, some of the interactions I was having currently with the current other elementary principals, the middle school principal, that 4 years of learning helped me to develop a little bit of a picture of what North Spencer was about versus what Heritage Hills High School was about.
[00:07:48] Dr. Jim: I get the tendency, or at least the desire, to stay within your lane as a first time principal.
What I'm curious about is when you first got in the big chair as the superintendent of the district. How did that shift your [00:08:00] view? And what did you notice that you weren't aware of now that you have a broader span of control?
[00:08:06] Dan Scherry: Yeah, so that piece was really, I think, the crux of what you and I want to talk about today. Going from athletics to the classroom nor Spencer has to affluent schools and to title 1 economically challenged schools. And what we noticed in high school was that our athletic and extracurricular teams, our sports teams, our drama theater, our choir band.
We're composed of mainly students that were coming out of those 2 affluent schools. We also notice the same thing in the classroom in the middle school. If you talk to the principal, you talk to classroom teachers. They could tell you which school was coming, which kids were coming from which school.
At that point, we, that helped me to realize, we had some balancing to do. We had some work to do instruction and curriculum wise and facilities wise to try to give all 4 schools and equal opportunity to get them on the same page.
[00:08:58] Dr. Jim: So when you look at [00:09:00] the schools in the district and in general, a lot of it is a lot of our conversations and be focusing on. Putting as many people on an equal footing so that you can raise the overall performance. So you started noticing some of these disparities in terms of funding and resources across the district. That's going to be a tough conversation to have with everybody because somebody is going to feel like. Oh, I'm losing out on something. walk us through what you did, the type of conversations that you had to bring awareness to the problem, because maybe people were unaware that this was even an issue to be dealt with.
[00:09:35] Dan Scherry: When, as you referred to, when you finally get. To sit in a superintendent seat or a seat of leadership, I think, in any realm you all then you get to pull back the curtain, right? You get to see finances. You get to see memos. You get to see history and 1 of the things that we that I noticed was just a discrepancy between the amount of dollars that were being allocated.
To each building, [00:10:00] some buildings were brand new. Some buildings were 25 years older than those new buildings. And gradually as members of the admin team moved on. After my 1st year, 2 of our sitting principles moved on after the 2nd year, we had 3 brand new elementary principles. And that helped.
To have those conversations with all 4 of us. We did. I never at any point sat down with everybody and said, hey, guys, we got a problem. We're spending X amount of dollars here and X amount of dollars here. It turned into more of a curricular conversation where our director of learning was able to say, there's a difference when kids come from this school or that school.
They have a different set of skills. And so we began to work on that really consistency across the corporation in instruction with grade level teachers and making the principles be involved in that. And so that there was implementation immediately, not just conversation. I don't know what Jim, I would have done had all 4 of my current principles with their [00:11:00] current mindsets.
What they would have what they would have done, how they would have reacted. And I honestly, I think they moved on because 2 reasons they were ready in their careers age wise to move on. And I don't think they wanted to get involved in some of that conversation. It's just not comfortable. To build relationships if you're not in a relationship building mindset.
[00:11:21] Dr. Jim: No, that makes sense. And so part of it was, if I understand it correctly, part of the process was to surface the issue and have those conversations and try to build a unified curriculum that led to some churn in the organization. So you have new people coming in with the right mindset that you're going to put in a seat.
So that transitions in process, but eventually the community is going to hear about that. Some of this stuff, and they might have some opinions. So what were the things that you did in terms of community engagement to communicate the need for this sort of transformation that you noticed was going to be necessary?
[00:11:56] Dan Scherry: Are what I referred to earlier is our affluent schools. [00:12:00] They had buildings that were constructed in 1992. And those buildings were still pretty new and fresh and it wasn't difficult to feel to even have conversation about the. Schools and the other 2 are title 1 schools.
And 1 of the things we did is we came in and gave them some new furnishings. We, we hired a extremely dynamic principal at 1 of our title 1 schools who literally led by example, got in with her husband pulled out all the old mulch out of a playground. Put new molds, new liner new boundaries on a playground where, you know when you do that in a small town people take note, all of a sudden there's work getting done.
There's energy gaining. So the folks from the other schools didn't really push back on trying to bring all of our schools up to a higher level. In fact, I think they encouraged it and we're appreciative of it. So we were able to do that, Jim, without. Taking anything away from the current schools that would [00:13:00] be anything noticeably abrupt, as far as, Hey, we're taking this from you guys.
We were able to just spread it out better. And really we began to take maintenance guys from one school and sharing them at the other school where there'd be two guys working together instead of working in isolation, we had that same mentality with our.
administrative staff, they would be seen together a lot. And that really, again, whether it was by conscious design or just happened as these relationships organically developed, I think there's probably a little bit of both, but most of it was just a an organic human relations. Let's make sure that we're doing what's best for our kids. All of them,
[00:13:40] Dr. Jim: It sounds like part of the strategy was to mobilize your principals and have them be more active in the community engagement side and specifically have them be visible in some of the improvement efforts that are being done at the school level. What else did you have the principals do to further their visibility within the community and [00:14:00] engagement with their families to make this transition smoother?
[00:14:03] Dan Scherry: so we had a, an activity in the summer called kids 1st festival, where we had all the as many people from the community organizations as we could find, from mental health to urgent care to law enforcement to firemen to Kwan is optimist. All those community organizations. And we used to do it just for 2 of our schools are our 2 title schools and we open it up to all of our schools and we moved it to our high school, which is really centrally located in our community.
Kind of like a hub and spokes are our high school and middle school campus or is a hub for elementaries would be spokes surrounding that hub. And so that was a real, I think, yeah. Noticeable thing that we did was opening up the kids 1st festival where they get free school supplies.
They could meet all 4 principals. There were teachers milling about really a, almost a fair type atmosphere. We even had some little [00:15:00] side show games and things that kids could play and I think that seeing that we were becoming North Spencer and not. Chris knee and David turn them and linking trail and Nancy Hanks, but nor Spencer, I think, in a real palatable tangible way, you could start to see some of that belonging occur.
[00:15:17] Dr. Jim: So that makes sense. And I think that probably smoothed away for progress in those initiatives. We got a little bit of a view into how some of these disparities showed up from an operations perspective, and you also touched on how some of these resource misallocations across the district showed up in educational outcomes.
So when you look at both of those issues, how did you come up with a plan to build a more unified district and build more consistency across the district, both from an operations perspective and an education perspective?
[00:15:52] Dan Scherry: In a, again, in a small community. I wanted to be very cognizant of not throwing my predecessors under the bus, the [00:16:00] folks that came before me set some outstanding things in motion regarding literacy, regarding a mentality of financial responsibility. I want to be really careful about not minimizing their contributions because they were going to be key players in moving forward.
By just by nature of personality, I was involved in a lot of community activities. Feeder programs in sports. My kids were at that age, so I was constantly in the public eye was at every ball game, high school, middle school, just visibility. And I think that developed some buy in.
But then, we developed some strategic planning regarding instruction curriculum. We began to meet with Grade level teachers from all buildings instead of meeting with the staff of Christie and the staff of David turn on the staff of Nancy Hanks, et cetera, we began to meet with the 1st grade teachers from all schools.
2nd grade teachers from all schools and talked about pacing [00:17:00] of curriculum and that went really well. And then we had a little bit of a low where we had some turnover. Our principals. And our principals weren't attending the meetings, and we noticed there wasn't the implementation that we needed. So the principals now attend all those meetings and so that they can go back into the buildings and make sure that implementation occurs.
There was a lot of, one of the things that in schools, teachers, parents, at times, I think, pressure principles to always be in the building, worrying about your building and what you have to do. And we meet 3 Wednesdays. Out of the month, and we have really deep learning conversations. We have deep personal conversations as a 10 member team.
We, I don't I very seldomly go and meet with an individual and say, you need to do X. it's usually a conversation. That we can all come to a conclusion of, yep, this is what needs to be done. And again, those, the relational piece of our [00:18:00] leadership is, I just can't imagine doing any other way, but I know there are other ways to do it.
[00:18:04] Dr. Jim: How much of your meetings with your executive team and your leadership team were focused on doing some of the blocking and tackling at their level down into the building and what they should be doing in terms of bringing their teachers or their educate, Their entire building teams into the fold as you move forward on this transformation initiative.
[00:18:24] Dan Scherry: A majority of it from again, the conversation about, the inner district mobility, for example, a student might leave Christie in September and show up at David turn them in September and the importance of that student. Being able to hit the ground running and not have to redo curriculum, not have missed any, no gaps in the curriculum.
So we wanted to make sure that was occurring 4 ways through all of our elementary schools. And that's an easy conversation to have with people who genuinely are bought into the, through the improvement of students. So [00:19:00] that was easy. And then the idea of, okay, here's the state standards we don't want.
Cookie cutter teachers. We want creative teachers, but we want creative teachers. That are our teaching standards, we, a lot of the conversation was guys, this isn't going to work if that 1 of our teachers are doing it. But the 8th 1 is not, we did a lot of enter, they call them groups.
Now. We just call them study groups where the building people would have. Study groups, the admin team would have study groups and we would do anything from a book study. We're doing a book study right now for this year to revisit where we've been in the last 20 years to make sure that our new staff, our new principles are.
Walking in lockstep, I, we, I think that history of where you've been is important so that people understand. Yeah, that's why we do it. And then it's pretty easy to say, hey, this has been working and we're growing. Here's the hard data that says we're growing. Let's keep going.
[00:19:57] Dr. Jim: So that makes sense from a [00:20:00] standardization perspective on the curriculum level. What, how did you build standardization from an operations perspective across the district?
[00:20:07] Dan Scherry: We had the opportunity to do smaller projects for the last 12 years. So we sat down with a clerk of the works. We mapped out what needed to be done. I was very cognizant that if we did something to one of our affluent schools it would just make that gap bigger.
So we, those schools, they are too affluent, our two newer schools had built in cafeterias. Our 2 title, 1 schools we're eating lunch in their gymnasiums, then having to clean up the tables, having mopped the floor. So they lost use of their gym at least 2 hours every day for the last 30 years.
And in, in 2015, 16. We built cafeterias onto those two schools so they could have access to their gyms. And again, putting a school cafeteria [00:21:00] into a small community that Midwest United States is struggling. Economically. It's just such a. An uplifting thing, the community begins to use it for cub scout meetings and walk for cure cancer meetings, things like that.
Once what? Our vision was, we're going to touch every building in an improvement mode. But we're going to start out with our title one schools. And that, that has really made those communities feel like, we are now part of North Spencer. We have in Christie, we had probably, I think there were no zero new construction things for 20 years.
In the last five or six years there's new restaurant, there's new homes. There's a new dollar general, believe it or not. So I, that, that school being the focus point of a small community is just still true.
[00:21:48] Dr. Jim: One of the other things that I'm curious about is when you look at these long term initiatives like this, both on the curriculum front and on the on the operations and capital construction front, [00:22:00] how did you maintain line of sight into appropriate level progress to goals?
What was your process there?
[00:22:06] Dan Scherry: Again we basically created spreadsheets. We had school board retreats where we were able to, instead of an hour meeting on 2 Mondays a month, we were able to spend a day and a half. On those conversations, and it allowed me to get at a deeper level with our board and a deeper level of understanding from a school perspective, but also a deeper level of trust from a personal perspective.
But really, the pacing of that. Came from when was funding available? We were a very financially conservative area. We didn't want to raise any of our taxes by doing projects. So each time we saw a bond coming off of our debt service. We looked at trying to maintain that tax level.
We, I knew that if you let a tax rate plummet getting it back to [00:23:00] a, an average is going to be considered a tax raise. We didn't want to do that. We, so we shot for that middle mark, and we did projects as funding became available.
[00:23:10] Dr. Jim: When you look at that entire equalization effort or standardization effort across the district and you hit fast forward on all the stuff that you've done walk us through what the landscape looked like when you started and what it looks like now.
[00:23:25] Dan Scherry: In the early 70s, our 2 title 1 schools were actually 2 of the 1st. Prefabricated schools built in Indiana. Actually, they came, I think they came down from Wisconsin on a flatbed trailer or piece together when they got here. We went in and fortified for lack of a better word some of their thin walls, some of their mobile walls.
We, we put drywall in. We built Concrete block walls in some areas and really that again, that was a an easy sell because school safety is such an [00:24:00] issue. And we, those rooms needed to be have thicker walls. They needed to have more solid lockable doors. And so we went through. Those two schools and did that.
We moved the office. So again, back in, in those days, people came into the schools. They were, the doors were unlocked. Community members, parents would just walk in and find the office and ask what they needed to ask. So those office spaces were actually in the center of those two schools, and we relocated those to the main entrance.
So that. All patrons parents, whomever that came to visit the school had to come to the office 1st. And that again, as odd as that sounds, it was a big deal because there was a feeling that, the school is thinking through these things being proactive, even though no 1 is clamoring that this is a problem once they see the work done.
Have the conversations with either the superintendent, the principals, school board members who are very well informed and on board. That word travels very well.
[00:24:59] Dr. Jim: So [00:25:00] now we've covered a lot of ground in this conversation talking through kind of the transformation journey that you did in your district with other folks who are listening to this conversation when you look at what you did and you break it down into sort of core pieces. What are the two or three key things key building blocks that people should take away from this conversation when they're looking at solving for similar problems like you, you faced in your district?
[00:25:29] Dan Scherry: I hate to, I'm very poor example, Jim. I don't really, I think I'm fortunate and blessed many times instead of strategic. But, there were so many things that happened along the way that just paved the way to where we're at. We went through a real budget crisis.
In 2012, we created a blue ribbon task force of 25 community members where an outside group came in and led us through [00:26:00] conversations. And previous to that our corporation did not believe in spending money on outside people. We had a belief that everything that needed to be done, we could do ourselves.
And that's just not true. So having that outside perspective helped ultimately. Relationship building this idea that We need to be on a niche or whatever all these different marketing sites are. That's good. And but the face to face relationship building trust building, doing your very best to honor your word to have integrity, especially in a small community where you plan to stay now, if you're a shaker and a mover and are looking to climb the ladder, maybe it won't work.
But. That piece of where, for example, when we went through our budget crunch, we had internal conversations about having to close 1 of our 3 or 4 elementary schools. And through that process, obviously, inevitably that information leaks out and. And people grab it and say, you're not going to close our school and you're not going to [00:27:00] close our school and you're not.
Being able to have meetings with those people that were concerned, being able to go to their meetings, being able to meet with them in the church basement, wherever and say, that's not our goal. We don't want to close your schools. The purpose of this study was to make you aware that there's a crunch coming and if something doesn't change.
We're going to have to make some really hard decisions and, the people, because of the previous 10 years, they were able to understand and not come out here to our office, come to our school board meetings with torches and pitchforks, they were willing to listen and get on board. Now, fortunately, we happen to have a year where the state of Indiana.
Made some changes on a statewide level regarding public education. They began to push performance pay and new evaluations, and we. Happen to have a mass exodus of retiring teachers and we just didn't replace any we also created an in house preschool that began to garner revenue. And so things turned around for us [00:28:00] pretty quickly.
But through those conversations, even deeper relationships were built so that, there's a level of trust at North Spencer that. Even though last year, our tax rate went up. Because we had some reassessment go on in our community, there was a little bit of pushback, some not nice things said on Facebook, but that lasted about 2 weeks.
And now we're moving forward and getting ready for our next budget. And, people are just satisfied and happy with where we're at. And I think that's about relationships.
[00:28:30] Dr. Jim: Got it. If people want to continue the conversation, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?
[00:28:35] Dan Scherry: Email is probably the best and then I can drop a phone call or email them back and getting contact be great. They can come to Santa Claus. Jim by gosh, it's a wonderful place to visit.
[00:28:45] Dr. Jim: yeah. Home with Jay Cutler. So great stuff, Dan. I appreciate you hanging out with us. When I think about the conversation that we had and the game plan that makes the most sense when you're solving an issue [00:29:00] of inequality in any form across a district where you have an unequal distribution of resources, there was an interesting framework.
That popped into my head as you were talking. I think when I break down the story or the conversation that we had and break it into steps, there were four key things that you did that I think. led to the turnaround that you experienced. The first thing was when you got into the district, you took a view into the landscape of the overall district and particularly the operating rhythm that each building is going through.
And you identified key differences in terms of how one building operates versus another. And the thing that stood out was the conversation about how lunch is done at those various buildings where You know, one building had a dedicated lunchroom. The other building was multi purposing their gym for it.
And I think when you look for differences in [00:30:00] operation operating rhythm that creates inefficiency in terms of what the ideal looks like, that's a good first step in moving the ball forward into balancing the scales. The next thing that stood out in terms of the conversation that we had was the effort you put into making sure that your leaders at the building level were visible and acted as a conduit into the community on.
That's an important thing that all leaders need to be aware of. If you want to impact change, you need to be visible and you need to be constantly You Temp checking on how the activity that you're doing is being received and if you I'm a believer that you need to lead from the front. Others might disagree, but that's generally a better way than being an armchair quarterback and taking a backseat.
And then the other part, and the 4th element that I think is really important about your story is that. You measured things over time. You talked about having meetings three times a month with your leadership [00:31:00] team where you're actually evaluating how things are going. You need to have that disciplined, constant engagement to gauge progress.
So you have line of sight into what's going on and you can triage problems. So when you're looking at building a framework, those four elements. Viewing the landscape, understanding the operating rhythm, making your leaders visible, and then measuring over time provides a key framework that anybody can apply in any transformation initiative that can put you in a position to be successful.
So I appreciate you sharing that with us. For those of you who have been listening to the conversation, We appreciate you hanging out. 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. 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 help them build a high performing team.