Mitch Tom

What is your number one concern for this school year?

We partner with Browns Stay in the Game! and Columbus Crew Stay in the Game! for attendance. One of the biggest initiatives we have is always attendance. We have struggled with attendance. A lot of districts across, not only Ohio, but the nation have struggled with attendance since COVID. So, attendance is a huge piece that we’re focused on and making sure kids are engaged here at school.

Safety is always a primary concern as well. How do we improve in a continuous way? How do we keep working on safety here in the district? Adam, Director of Business Operations, and I tag team safety. We have an SSO group that does an audit that we’re going through right now. We’re looking at what do we change from physical environments and what do we change from a procedural standpoint to make this place as safe as possible.

Probably one of the biggest concerns from a safety perspective is how do we take what we’ve trained our staff to do from an Alice standpoint and embed that with our kids. How do we do that in a manner that’s not going to cause alarm or upset?

For us as a school district, everyone expects us to say, ‘well, educating your student is the number one priority.’ No, safety has to be the number one priority, especially the day and age we live in right now.

How does that incorporate into the longer-term vision for the district and what other areas are top of mind as it relates to that vision?

It’s interesting that you ask that because our district has a new Superintendent. He’s been here a year, and one thing that has been noticeable is that we have lacked a strategic plan, mainly because we have been hyper focused on growth and how to accommodate all of our students and staff. So, one of the first initiatives we’ve done as a school district is we conducted an audit. Within that audit, we looked at perspectives of teachers, perspectives of administration, perspectives of community members, leadership teams, all the different elements of a district. We’ve looked at our strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvement. Right now, we’re in the process of developing a strategic plan.

With that said, there’s always an element of focusing on academics—reading and math skills and continuous improvement in those areas. I also feel like the vision that we’re talking about is under that climate and culture piece. Everybody hears about climate and culture, and it has a variety of different components; what does PBIS programming look like in our schools? What does safety look like in our schools? What does attendance look like in our schools? Those are elements of climate and culture.

I view what we’re trying to accomplish in the long term under the concept of climate and culture. When we’re building that strategic plan, I have a good idea that that’s probably going to fall under that element and that goal.

How do you see the role of technology in education in your district?

We’re improving. If you juxtapose us with other districts in the area within Central Ohio and within the Columbus area, we probably match up comparably in terms of technology and are probably ahead of others in some ways.

We’ve started a 1:1 initiative. With the pandemic we were able to get funding for certain things. And, right down the road from us, we have a great opportunity with the Intel plant that’s going in. It’s just about 10 minutes North of us, and just South of that we have Facebook and Google data centers that have gone in. Their donations helped fund our brand-new STEAM Lab at our high school, and they were a major player in us being able to get and move forward with 1:1 Chromebooks. From that aspect we’re moving forward in the right direction.

We’ve also outfitted a lot of our rooms with Cuomo boards. We’re turning Smart boards over into Cuomo boards that we’re using. Everyone mentions ‘What does it look like for a 21st century learner and technology?’ If we don’t know what that looks by now, we’re almost a quarter of the way through the 21st century. We should stop using that phrase because we should be well on our way to identifying what that looks like. But honestly, if you walked in our rooms, they look a lot different than what they looked like five years ago in terms of technology.

For us, the balance is this: kids spend so much time on technology, I have a fourth grader and sixth grader who go to school here, so the challenge for us is how do we balance their use of technology and using other things in the environment besides that. If they don’t have experience in writing, that’s a lost skill. I’ve also seen from a social standpoint, that sometimes our kids are socially inept because they’ve spent so much time on technology that they lack the ability to interact with others. It’s a fine balance in all of that.

Do you guys deal with teacher retention issues and staff shortages?

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s a reality for all people in education right now. If we go to our local universities, they will universally say that their enrollment in education, the education department, has plummeted anywhere between 35-45%. That’s obviously a huge impact on all districts around us.

Not only are they not going into teaching fields, but they’re also not going into teaching fields that are so critical and that have compliance issues tied to them. Like your special education staff, you just don’t have the intervention specialist. Your English language learner teachers, who we need a lot of, they’re not there. What we’re finding is we’re going to have to build our own capacity. We have to send people back to get their endorsements. We have to be creative in what we do and how we recruit.

I work very closely with our HR department. I went to a multitude of college fairs. I probably interviewed over 350 candidates from January until the end of July. We are having to work with contract companies to make sure that the needs of special needs students are met. It’s a huge concern.

That has to be something that we focus on. Especially with our high school students that are coming up and really guiding them with ‘Hey, we’ve got to have teachers because if not, we don’t have an education system.’

What do you feel is the district’s role in promoting the safety of student athletes?

In the state of Ohio there are mandates that all coaching staff receive specific training and understand what to do. I was a coach for four years with our district. Prior to that I coached at Ohio State University, Newark and we had men’s and women’s soccer there and I coached in both sports.

So, I’ve seen things happen in terms of injuries, head injuries, heat stroke issues, those types of things. And it’s scary. It’s really, really scary. When you see one of your student athletes going in the back of an ambulance and you’re worried if they’re going to be OK, it’s not easy as a coach.

The upfront piece is making sure that all our staff are appropriately trained and so you don’t step on the field until you have your certifications and that you’ve renewed all your training, and you know what to do. Our athletic department has done a very good job working with the athletic trainers. We hire Ohio State athletic trainers. All our trainers have gone through the Ohio State program. We have very specific procedures in play, so that way we know we have AED machines available out on our fields. We’re not running back and forth in between the building and the field. Our AED machines are mobile units that can be taken out to the fields.

One of the big things when I took over the department was understanding what does that look like? Where are our AED machines and what needs to be consistently updated on them? Are we looking at that? There was no record of how often we were checking those, how often we’re ordering new pads, how often we were switching out the units, because those aren’t things that necessarily last a lifetime.

We started by creating procedures on when to switch out batteries and switch out pads. We have a Google Form that’s filled out every month in all our buildings that go through and check all our AED machines, make sure they’re operational, and make sure they’re working as they should. So really making sure that we have equipment on hand and making sure that we’re following procedures are two big pieces.

What’s exciting for us is we’ve started a new school-based Health Center and we’ve done that in collaboration with Licking Memorial Hospital, which is the local hospital here, and Behavioral HealthPartners of Central Ohio, too. Our student athletes can get their physicals directly through that program. We’re making it easier for them to access general healthcare but also mental healthcare, too. We see a lot of issues you know where mental health impacts students, but student athletes, there’s a lot of pressure on student athletes. Making sure they’re connected with both behavioral health in general healthcare I think is a huge piece as well.

It’s brand new. We have about 6 exam rooms. It looks like an urgent care when you walk in. We had probably 12 or 14 physicals scheduled the very first day of opening the clinic. We have that there on campus and they can go to it at any time. If they’re sick, if they’re not feeling well, if they need to, if we need to schedule appointments with clinical counselors or psychiatrists, any of those types of things, we have the capability of doing that now. Which is amazing because you know, Nationwide Children’s Hospital is about a 25-minute drive away and it’s an eight-month wait to get into behavioral health. It’s a game changer.

It was a grant initiative, but really it was the hospital investing in us. It was roughly $1.2 million that the hospital put into this district as far as the build out goes, as far as the personnel goes. Now they’ll receive some reimbursement funding based on a grant for this initiative, but the vast majority was the hospital investing in the community.