Mark Edwards

What is your number one concern for the 2023-2024 school year?

Our entire district was very new last year. We had a new superintendent, I’m new, a new treasurer, a new high school principal, and we’re a small district. We had a lot of new people in the central office, new administrators, new athletic director, and a new assistant principal at the high school. Last year we really focused on building culture and establishing culture in a positive way. This year we need to take that momentum that we started in that culture-building to demonstrate to the staff and community that the culture piece is now embedded, that it wasn’t just something we talked about for one year and then it went away. It’s an initiative that’s totally rooted in who we are and what we do. So as far as the number one concern for this school year, it is to add on to that culture piece. As an organization, we’re continuing to move forward, not only for our students, but also for our staff to do great things for our students.

Dr. Damon Davis did a great job of setting that culture goal for last year. We did engage in a culture survey so we could hear from our staff about the things that were happening in the district and the areas we could improve upon. They were very honest, and we thank our staff for their honesty. Sometimes it’s difficult when taking a survey. Especially if you came from a toxic culture environment, you would be hesitant to possibly be honest in surveys. But I feel like our staff is very honest with us, and tactically we then made action plans to work on those areas they saw in the past were issues. So, we made those action steps. We reviewed those action steps at the end of the year, and now we have new goals moving into this year. We’re going to retake that survey this year to see how we’ve moved. Have we moved that needle in the areas we said we were going to move the needle on? I’m really excited about seeing that data again.

What is the district’s longer-term vision?

We understand that any meaningful change that a district goes through must be embedded in who we are and what we do and our goals and mission for the district. If the culture that we’re operating in is not conducive to that change, it’s going to be a hard battle to make that meaningful change. We’re going through a tremendous change in education in general coming out of COVID, understanding that there’s significant ways in which education can be delivered. If you think about AI and ChatGPT and all the things coming down the pike, we must be adaptable and flexible to meet the needs of our students. Putting this at the forefront is really setting the soil for our district so we can move and grow into those areas. You need good soil.

Moving down the road and we look at a five-year plan, we’re looking at re-imagining how we deliver education and the goals of education for our district. We’re going to be going through a project called Portrait of a Graduate. It essentially takes five characteristics that our community, business partners, students, and parents want students to come away with after an education at Reading Schools. And then after we get those five characteristics, much of the time you see similar characteristics come from graduates of other places, where they talk about work ethic, grit, responsibility, leadership, communication, creativity, and soft skills. Creativity and AI are going to be paramount for students moving forward. It kind of takes the emphasis a bit off meeting these standards and moving on, to becoming this person. Become someone great who makes the community proud of who you are.

Once we get that Portrait of a Graduate in place, the next step is how do we measure that our students are becoming what we want them to be and putting those processes in place. Then, re-imagining and re-evaluating our steps to do that and being intentional about it. There are some districts that will create a Portrait of a Graduate, put a graphic on the wall, and they won’t refer back to it. Our intention is to refer back to it, if not on a monthly basis, then a weekly basis, or daily basis. How can we embed this into our curriculum, how can we embed this into our assessment, how can we embed this into the reports we give to parents? The report card has been around since public education has been around and it hasn’t changed. There’s been some innovative aspects like standards-based grading, but still standards-based grading ignores a lot of the soft skills that a Portrait of a Graduate says is important, so how can we change the way we are engaging with parents about their students’ development towards those five key areas?

How do you see technology advancing in your district?

The next great frontier here is how do we embrace AI and leverage the human capacity to enhance what it can do and enhance the learning of our students. There’s some apprehension around AI, I know some people are fighting it, but I don’t think it’s going away because it makes us more efficient and powerful, and learn things at a quicker rate. I think about this in terms of the development of the internet and how people thought we wouldn’t need to know things anymore, but knowledge is still important, and the skills become more important. How can you navigate this world and really build into skepticism because information and misinformation are everywhere, and how can we vet the information that we get to make sure it’s accurate – these are the skills and areas where we see technology moving, and our instruction and curriculum need to be able to react to help our students in this new world they’re going to be living in. AI is going to enhance us, but we need to be able to be curious, develop better questioning techniques, and then the skepticism to verify that what we’re getting back is accurate.

How are you dealing with teacher retention and staff shortages?

This is my 22nd year in education and I never thought I’d see the day you couldn’t hire a P.E. teacher because there weren’t any. It’s absolutely crazy. Last year we had a full-time sub take our P.E. position because we couldn’t find anyone to fill the position. A lot of colleges stopped offering P.E. as a college course pathway because there was such a saturation in the market, and now that’s gone. All educators are no longer saturated. The pathways into education have been a little more difficult. I know the state is being very innovative and developed an apprentice model for teachers which is going to be interesting in how that plays out, but yes, we are dealing with that and trying to combat it with a positive culture. So, word gets out and people want to work at Reading because it’s a great place to work. But also marketing ourselves with our partnerships and teaching colleges to say hey, bring in your student teachers and practicum students so we can already have that connection and get to know our future employees a little bit better.

What are you doing for your student athlete safety?

I think it starts with training. Even going back to these safety aspects with student athletes that are highlighted at a national level in instances like Damar Hamlin that happened right here in Cincinnati. These things make us as a district and we want to make sure our community, our students, feel safe. Because in the end, the participation in student athletics has a great correlation to student success, not only in high school, but post high school. We want as many students to take part in extracurricular activities as possible. We start with the training. We want to make sure all our staff that are involved with athletics have the proper training like AED and CPR. I think we have maybe five different AED machines in the building, and we have a traveling AED machine for away matches. Our football stadium isn’t on campus. So having tools and equipment necessary for our students is important. One thing that’s very exciting is we’re hoping to have a sports medicine class next year. Because just like our teachers, the people that keep the athletes safe are also having a hard time with their pipeline and getting more trainers into the field, so we would like to help our next generation of athletic trainers keep our students safe into the future. Creating that sports medicine class will not only help with that pipeline but also athletes themselves. Most trainers were athletes at some point because they like it and hopefully will also help them be more cognizant of safety and helping to communicate their concerns of their teammates.