New King of the Hill

Students and teachers are wrapping up their summer break to return to the classroom next week, but there probably is not anyone more excited to start the 2012-13 school year than new Park Hill Superintendent Scott Springston, whose first day on the job was July 1st.

After nearly a five month selection process, Springston emerged as the final candidate to replace retiring Superintendent Dennis Fisher in February when he accepted a contract from the Park Hill Board of Education. Describing himself as a person with high passion and a focus on continually improving, Springston is now the top official overseeing the 15-school district responsible for the education of more than 10,000 students.

Educating and preparing students to become a part of a 21st Century workforce is what Springston said is one of his top goals for the Park Hill School District. It is a challenge schools are facing across the nation, but Springston believes it will require a working relationship with the business community to implement an effective strategy.

“We need to have conversations with businesses and industry to ask them what they need from their employees and how we can prepare them for that,” Springston said. “A lot of employers I’ve talked to in the past are saying they can teach the technical skills needed themselves, but soft skills are what employees need coming in.”

Like most school districts, Park Hill’s priorities are outlined in its annual budget and since the budget for the 2012-13 school year was developed and approved before Springston took office, a lot of what he will be doing in his first year is an evaluation of what works and what needs to improve.

“We want to be proactive, not reactive to issues,” Springston said. “It goes back to the question: if we want to be the best, what do we need to do? In this first year, I want to meet as many people as possible and help our staff get better. I want to meet with the kids to ask them how we’re doing, because they are our end-user and it’s their education.”

For Springston, coming to Park Hill is another opportunity to continue what he found to be a passion at an early age. Growing up in a family where his father was a teacher and coach, Springston shared an interest in working with young people and seeing their development take place.

“I did some volunteering and coaching in high school and really enjoyed seeing the growth take place,” Springston said. “When you take the teaching and learning aspect combined with system organization, this is a natural fit.”

After graduating from Gardner City High School and then Fort Hays State University in 1992 with a degree in biology education, Springston started working on his master’s degree right away while working as a teacher in the Hays Public School District.

“I started my master’s pretty quick because I knew this was what I wanted to do,” Springston said.

He went on to serve as an assistant principal and principal in the Blue Valley School District in Johnson County, Kan. from 1996 to 2004. But the accomplishments he is most proud of came from his work from 2004-12 in the Valley Center School District just outside Wichita, Kan. After earning his doctorate from the University of Kansas in 2006, he was named superintendent and identified two challenges facing the district that needed to be addressed. The first was a top-down focus from the administrative level, not bottom-up from the teacher-student level. The second was a rapidly growing student population that was beginning to grow beyond the district’s facility capacities, some of which were decades old.

“It was a very top-down culture that we needed to flip the other way,” Springston said. “We began to focus more on professional development for our teachers and staff, implemented a late start day to allow students extra attention they needed it, and created data based performance measures to compare our scores to state standards.”

To address the district’s growth, following a reported commissioned by Wichita State University outlining future growth projections and the critical need for more classroom space to keep class sizes as low as possible, in 2008 Springston along led an effort to pass a nearly $58 million bond issue. The comprehensive improvements included a new high school which opened last fall, additional classrooms to elementary schools, new transportation and administrative facilities, and increased security and access to technology throughout the district. Springston says it wasn’t just a matter of campaigning to pass the bond; it was about building a vision for the entire community, one which will affect students and teachers for years to come.

“We established a standard of excellence at Valley Center,” Springston said. “Park Hill is a high performing, high level district, and I want to work to make it better every day.”

When asked how the district could match and exceed the successes it has achieved by being honored with several prestigious state and national awards over recent years, Springston emphasized the classroom experience.

“Our focus needs to be on the teacher-student level and what happens in the classroom,” Springston said. “Awards just reflect that and will follow over time.”

Although the process which led to Springston’s hiring was somewhat continuous between the board members who led it and a group of active parents who voiced opposition to it, he didn’t take it personally. In fact, Springston believes it was a positive reflection of the district and showed a hint of the passion and improvement-oriented leadership Park Hill can hope to look forward to him uniting the district under in the future.

“I don’t think it was ever about one particular person,” Springston said. “We all have more in common than we don’t in the end. I’d rather have parents with passion compared to apathy. Park Hill is more important than any one person.”