Matt Younghans

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

My number one concern and goal for this year is to get back on track, and to keep recovering after the pandemic years. Academically, to focus on getting kids back to where they are supposed to be and pushing them beyond those limits. From a mental health perspective, making sure we are checking in and attending to all kids, making sure kids have what they need and that they’re in a good place. It was a battle before the pandemic, but now we are playing a little bit of catch up but making progress. Those are the two concerns and two goals to get back to where we should be, and then work to get even beyond that point. Another goal, in as little time as possible, we want to get kids in a place where they feel good about themselves and can really self-regulate their emotions whenever necessary. We want to give our kids those skills to do be able to that on a regular basis.

Another one of our focuses this year is a short-term vision; to really build our students’ global competencies. We want to use the technology that we are fortunate to have in a way that allows us to connect with other cultures and other countries and build a set of learners that are tech savvy and tech literate and make them global connectors and global citizens.

In your building, do you deal with teacher retention or staff shortages?

I am grateful and fortunate to be able to say – not really. We are a suburb of New York City, so we have a lot of city workers; corporate, financial, and many first responders. We are a large suburban district with just under 9,000 kids year to year and our structure is a little unique. We have nine elementary schools that feed one exceptionally large middle school, and then out to two high schools. I’ve been lucky to have worked at all the levels in our district and am now into my eighth year as an Elementary Principal. Teacher retention here is not an issue.

In fact, every year with the volume of staff you can imagine for 9,000 kids, we hire every year for new positions because of attrition and retirement. We have a talented, seasoned veteran staff at this point. I have very few new folks. Most have been at our school in their roles for either four or five years, or ten to twenty years. It is a good place to be because it takes a little bit of the coaching for general teaching practices out of the mix and allows us to focus on shaping the way we do things with skills that are already built and established. We are extremely fortunate.

It is also great for community building as well, because being one of the smaller Elementary schools in our district, we get to know our families year after year and build relationships between staff and parents, and staff and community. It is fantastic for our kids and our school community, and ideal for me as a building leader.

How do you cultivate an environment that promotes mental health?

I really believe that it is a top-down approach. We started this work right before the pandemic, doing a full year of just staff and administrator training on this topic before we ever took it to the kids. That is not typically how things work in education. You usually get books in your hands or something over the summer, and boom, in September, you implement. But it is important that as district leadership and building leadership and staff leadership, we understand the skills that we are trying to impress upon the kids. I think we have done a really good job of that. It is about understanding what the kids need and connecting with them so when there is something troubling them, if they don’t have the skills to self-regulate, there’s enough of a relationship built that staff will pick up on that and support the child however they need.

We’ve been working on this for about five years and implemented it with staff (in hindsight, by pure happenstance) the year before COVID hit, so it was a perfect coincidence that we were bringing it to the kids that school year. Now we know that as much as they needed it before, they needed it badly then. We went through some little hiccups with COVID on the training and implementation as we were out all spring and then on a hybrid schedule the following year, but now we’re firing on all cylinders with this work; with our anchor tools and the approach we’re instilling in our classrooms. We use the RULER approach through Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, which is a fairly modern and prevalent program in the Northeast US.

Whether from your building and talking about the level in which elementary kids play stretching up to the district, are you able to address what is done to protect the safety of student athletes?

We have athletic coordinators at each of our secondary schools, and one that oversees the whole district’s athletic programs. They are great about student athlete safety when it comes to sports and extracurricular, modified, and high school sports. But also, we deal with our colleagues at the elementary level, where there are no sports, more so from a temperature perspective. We are consistently communicating about heat days, pollen, even cold days in the winter – about what’s appropriate to send kids outside and what’s not. There is an open line of communication between our colleagues and the building leaders in those 13 buildings in the district so that’s an excellent partnership. Our union membership does an excellent job helping us out, as we deal with all operations and chaos in our buildings at times, which is super helpful to us.

On another front, in terms of general staff safety protocols, we have a phenomenal Director of Business Services, Maureen Sullivan, and I collaborate very closely with her and the district safety team. All our staff training is year to year, and we are doing our best to make those training courses informative and valuable to staff so that they understand all that information relative to district and state protocols. We have done a lot of work in the last year or so around alternate evacuation sites and family reunification in case of emergencies. We have had a couple emergency type situations, not violent acts, but things like a gas leak, for instance, where we had to move an entire Elementary school to their safe site, and that fast forwarded our work on that topic. We are trying to ensure that if this happens, regardless of the incident, we have procedures in place to reunify our students with their families effectively, which we did thanks to our partnership with Maureen. As you can imagine, a large part of that work is working with our local law enforcement, who have been willing and collaborative partners with our district for a number of years. It is good work, it was necessary work, and we’re in a much clearer place than we were before, so there’s a sense of pride there for me.

How is the role of technology playing out in your building?

We have had a shift in the last few years. We were building towards a one-to-one environment, and then when the pandemic hit, we needed to get that finished immediately. We have been living in this one-to-one world for a few years now. We are finally in a place where we manage all our software apps through Chromebooks. Our touch screens are for our younger students, but we are building up with new leases to our older students districtwide. Our upper grades take their technology back and forth to home every day or as needed for homework and additional long-term projects. This year, Kindergarten and Grade 1 leave their devices in charging ports overnight, so it is always charged and accessible to them when in the classroom and lightens the backpack. Our students utilize the technology quite frequently for literacy software, math software, some educational games here and there so they are very well versed in the functionality from 5 years old and on. It’s incredible to see their growth and how good they are with the apps and technology by the time they get to Grade 2. It coincides nicely, thank goodness, because our state just shifted to a mandatory computer-based state testing environment last year. It was a bit nerve wracking there, more so relative to the connectivity and software that the state was imposing on us, but with some careful planning and testing by our district administrative team, everything went well, and the kids were able to navigate the testing generally without issue.

Final Thoughts

I am very hopeful that this new school year and getting past the pandemic will allow us to continue to put the pieces back together in a big way. I am confident that we’re going to have a great year where we can walk in and do what we do from day one, providing the ultimate experience for the kids we serve.