Aug. 4, 2025
Episode 38: Be Curious, Not Judgmental: Climbing the Next Mountain in School Leadership!
Send us a text That moment when you've built a solid foundation, but find yourself staring at the ceiling wondering, "What's next?" This summer, after three years of transformative work as building principal at Hastings High, I hit that wall. We'd successfully tackled culture, transforming our school from "welcome to the jungle" into a place where students and staff felt valued. We'd implemented systems that increased daily attendance by nearly 4% and reduced chronic absenteeism by 8.9...
That moment when you've built a solid foundation, but find yourself staring at the ceiling wondering, "What's next?" This summer, after three years of transformative work as building principal at Hastings High, I hit that wall.
We'd successfully tackled culture, transforming our school from "welcome to the jungle" into a place where students and staff felt valued. We'd implemented systems that increased daily attendance by nearly 4% and reduced chronic absenteeism by 8.9%. The electronic hall passes, thoughtful device policies, and collaborative approach had worked. Yet success created its own challenge: identifying our next mountain to climb.
The answer came from Ted Lasso's iconic dart scene and the powerful philosophy of being "curious, not judgmental." This mindset shift illuminates everything we're doing this year. When a student struggles, rather than judgment, we exercise curiosity. When district initiatives emerge, rather than resistance, we seek understanding. When teachers face challenges, we ask questions instead of making assumptions.
Our next frontier is clear: instructional excellence. While maintaining our cultural gains, we're focusing on growing instructional capacity through peer observation, curriculum alignment, and deeper professional learning communities. I'm committing to spending at least one block period daily in classrooms, engaging in curious conversations rather than evaluative walkthroughs.
Four questions now guide my leadership: Do people love coming to our school? Would I send my own child here? How can I be 1% better today? How can I exercise curiosity in every interaction?
Whether you're a seasoned administrator or an emerging leader, this episode offers a transparent look at the cyclical journey of educational leadership – how building culture enables instructional growth, which further strengthens culture. What's your next mountain to climb, and how might curiosity transform your approach?
Episode 8: Reducing Chronic Absenteeism in Schools!
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01:56 - Wrestling with what comes next
02:58 - Studio updates and summer reflections
06:35 - Three years of culture building
10:54 - Tackling attendance and electronic devices
15:34 - Freshmen orientation initiative
20:10 - Be curious, not judgmental
26:45 - Instructional growth as next focus
31:01 - The four guiding questions
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Let me ask you something what do you do when you've spent three years building something and you suddenly realize you're not sure what comes next?
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That was me this summer, staring at the ceiling, wrestling with questions not about where we've been, but where we're going.
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We've tackled culture, we've reimagined systems, we've improved attendance, but now it's time to ask what's the next mountain to climb?
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Today, I want to take you behind the curtains.
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This episode isn't about programs or policy.
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It's about reflection, renewal and powerful mindset shift that's guided everything I do this year Be curious.
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Ted Lasso said it, but it's deeper than a quote.
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It's a challenge, a call to lead with empathy and grow with purpose.
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So let's talk about it what we've built, where we're going and how curiosity just might be the key to unlocking our next chapter.
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Now let's get to the episode.
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Welcome back everybody for another episode of the Educational Leadership Podcast.
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I am so excited.
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If you watch my videos on YouTube or on TikTok, instagram any of those platforms you'll be seeing behind me my brand new neon sign Educational Leadership with Principal JL.
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It's sweet.
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My family got it for me for my birthday.
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So my daughters and my wife all got together and got me this sweet sign.
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And then just this past weekend, I actually painted and redid the studio area that I record in so I could have this sign ready to go.
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I'm super excited to kind of show off this sign today in this episode.
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If you're listening on the podcast you can't see it, so watch out for some videos coming up.
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You'll get to see it in those video clips that I create when I do my episodes.
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Well, in today's episode I'm going solo.
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Today I have some things I've been really kind of just thinking about.
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This summer's been really a great summer for me, but at the same time, if I'm being completely honest, I kind of hit a wall.
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I'm kind of like going man, what's next for us?
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I needed to be ready for the 25, 26 school years of the building principal.
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What do I need to get my staff ready for?
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So there's a lot of things going on.
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I got some time to get away for a while, be with my family, do some camping, boating, doing some fun stuff like that.
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I also got to go to the National Principal Conference and got to meet up with some people that have been on this show, like Dr Cynthia Rapeto.
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We have Dr Ed O'Eckett, you know I got to meet.
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Oh yeah, dr Sanfilippo, I'm going to leave some people Principal Mo I got to meet all of them in person, as well as getting to meet like Principal Caffele, principal L, you know meeting some really great people and really having to do some really cool just learning through the conference and those things like that.
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So if you've never gone to National Principal Conference, I would encourage you to do that as well, as well as doing the state conference as well.
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Also, bill Curry he's the Nebraska Middle School Principal of the Year.
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He was out at the National Conference.
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I also got to run into him at the state conference here in Nebraska, got to meet up and talk with him.
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Him and I had some fun while we were up in Seattle.
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So it was a great time to just network and get to see those people and I would just strongly encourage people to network and do those things if you get a chance as well.
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With the state conference I got to meet and get to see a bunch of people in the state.
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Some of you guys listen to the podcast.
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I really appreciate those of you that have said hey, keep going, we really like what you're doing.
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That means a lot to me, coming from the people that I network with and things like that.
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But I also have some really great guests coming up on the podcast.
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I got Principal Erin Jones.
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She is actually a Region 4 president.
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I'm going to have her on the show coming up.
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I'm going to have Bill Curry, the Middle School Principal of the Year in Nebraska he's going to be on the show.
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Jerry Mack he's the High School Principal of the Year from the state of Nebraska and I'm going to have him on the show as well as Jemay.
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Jemay is also at principal of the year out of Iowa and I'm going to have her on the show, so I'm excited to bring her on, as well as Dr Donovan small.
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The second is also scheduled to be on the show.
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So I have a lot of great guests that I'm going to have coming up here over the next months and have some more guests on the works.
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I'm not going to really say who they are until they actually get scheduled in but, like I said, I got some really great things going on with the podcast.
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I'm really excited.
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But with that further ado, I really want to dive in to some things I was thinking about, like I said, this summer.
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You know I hit a wall.
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I was lost and trying to figure out what to do and, to be honest, these last three years, as being the building principal of the school that I'm at right now, we really focused on culture.
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We really focused on being a team, working together, collaborating, creating a welcoming environment for our kids, for our staff, for our community, because when I got here, there's a lot of negativity surrounding the school and we really wanted to change that narrative.
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Something that I learned from Dr Joe Sanfilippo is you want to control that narrative from Dr Joe Sanfilippo, is you want to control that narrative?
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You want to be the one saying all the great things that are happening, find the joy in your job.
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Those things like that really resonated with me as a young principal and something that I really thought about a lot this summer when I was thinking about what's our next step, which way are we going to go?
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In order for us to really move forward, I have to think about what we have done over the last three years.
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In the last three years, we really focused on creating that warm, welcoming environment.
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One of the things we did, we use our PBIS team in this situation to where we wanted to have people understand like, hey, we want to greet kids in the hallway, we want to say, hey, we're glad you're here when somebody is not there and they've been gone.
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For instead of saying like where you've been and give them the business and 99 questions and trying to figure out and having that.
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You know that type of rapport.
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It's more like hey, you know, we're glad you're here.
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Hey, you know I missed you.
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Know, we're glad you're here.
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Hey, you know I missed you.
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I'm really glad you're here.
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If there's anything I could do to help you get caught up, I'm here to help you.
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Things like that, like that just changes the flow or just the energy that you give those kids when they are gone.
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Because when I got here, kids didn't want to come to school.
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They were just like no man, I want to be there and we have kids just wandering the hallways.
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It felt like just a crazy atmosphere.
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Really we talk about welcome to the jungle at our school and really it felt like a jungle in that first year with everything that's going on.
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You know, I listened to the staff.
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I got my school improvement team involved and we really started working in that first year.
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How do we change the things?
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What are the things that are holding us back and what do we need to do to make those changes?
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Not just talk about them, but actually create real change, have systematic approaches and things like that, so that first year we're talking about welcoming the kids, welcoming the staff, and I had to model.
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I had to go out and go.
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You know what, if I'm asking my teachers to do these things, I'm going to do them too, and so I really wanted to greet kids and get to know them, get to know my staff, do my interviews.
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I talked about that in my other episodes.
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I went around and purposely, intentionally, got to know my staff by name and things I like.
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Those were really important steps I had to take in that first year, but it really was the collective effort of our school improvement team.
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We already have a leadership team.
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That was really great, because it's our leadership within our building that we'd look to try to help kids.
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That's where we run our MTSS process through and everything like that.
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The school improvement team is that team of teachers where we get people from each department be able to go back and go.
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Hey, here's some things we talked about.
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Here's some things we need to do.
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Here's some things we're thinking about Get that input, bring it back to the group and really just have dialogue and talk about what are next steps.
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How are we going to make those changes?
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So, really, in that first year that School Improvement Team tackled these issues we had to tackle.
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What are we going to do about these personal electronic devices?
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That's where we looked at updating the policy we have on hand.
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The other thing is is there's kids everywhere?
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I felt like we were chasing kids, trying to get them back in class.
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We're going here, we're going there, so how do we get those kids to class, be where they need to be?
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That was another issue that we tackled as well, and so these are the things that they came up with.
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Hey, we're going to create a electronic device, a personal electronic device policy, to where you can't access these things during the class time.
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Yeah, you can have it between periods, you can have it at lunch, before and after school, but if class time, instructional time, we're going to hold tight on that and we're able to roll that out.
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The other thing was is we created the e-hall pass system?
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We didn't create it, we just got the e-hall passes because we're selling paper passes right.
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That's ridiculous to keep doing that with a thousand kids and the staff we have doing the electronic passes.
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We're something that we really were interested in.
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We were able to do that as well, and the teachers asked for this hall monitor stuff.
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They used to have it a long time ago but they wanted to bring it back and I was, like you, sure this is going to add an extra duty.
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And we talked about it and they said yes, and they were really dedicated to making this better.
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Well, we implemented all those things in year two and I will tell you, man, it really cleaned up the hallways.
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Kids were in class.
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I had students saying, hey, I'm paying attention more in school because I'm not on my phone, I'm not on my electronic personal device because I know I'm not supposed to be.
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At the same time, we have these.
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We're one to ones with computers, so there's really no reason why they need to be on them.
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But at the same time, there's accountability.
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Everybody was on the same page and the best part about that is the teachers were the ones that rolled this out, and that was the best part about it is being the collaborative team mindset and be able to do these things together and so we had about a 95% approval rating after the second year with all these things and, like I said, they always got cleared, kids were in class.
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It seemed like, yeah, man, we're doing really, really good.
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But we still had this underlying problem was chronic absenteeism was a huge deal, and it's not just a huge deal in our school but it's a huge deal across the nation.
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And so that's when, in year two, the school improvement team took what, my assistant principal and my former superintendent came back and said, hey, we saw this at admin days.
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Let's look at it.
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We did, we looked at it and we just basically thank you, norris High for the attendance policy, because we took their attendance policy and we created it for Hastings High School and make it work for us.
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And how do we do that?
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And we have a holistic approach to attendance.
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We have an MTSS system that we rolled out in year three from the work in year two to roll out to create systems for attendance.
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We were able to help kids right away.
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We were you know, hey, you're missing a day.
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Boom, you know, our attendance coordinator was right there asking those kids were.
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You know, really, you know what can we do to help you make sure your school, because we're really really got tight on our attendance and we really wanted to help kids and so we wanted to help kids, want to help their family.
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We have it to where.
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You know, we have three layers of supports and you can check this out.
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I have a whole episode on how we battled our chronic apathyism and how that whole system worked.
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You can check that out.
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I will have to put that episode in the show notes because I'm not remembering off the top of my head right now, but I'll put that episode in the show notes.
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It really talks about that chronic apathyism and how we battle that through our systematic approach.
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But that was year two, that we are year three.
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We implemented from year two, you know, school improvement team and this last year was kind of like man, what do we do next?
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And so we talked about a lot of things.
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Well, one thing we kept going back to this third year as a school improvement team is trying to get our freshmen off to a great start right, and so getting our freshmen off to a great start.
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I'll be honest with you the last three years.
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Our freshmen are coming in, they're looking around, they're like going holy crap, this is a lot to take in.
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There's a lot of things going on.
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I'm not understanding this block schedule very well.
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It's a modified block, so that's added more confusion to them.
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But at the same time, our middle school kids are in a team concept middle school and if you don't know what that is, that basically means you have a wing of sixth graders, a wing of seventh graders and a wing of eighth graders and they stay on those wings.
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They have team A and team B, right, and they stay on those teams throughout their middle school year.
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There's not a lot of intermixing.
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There's some.
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There's a little bit, but not a lot.
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You come to the high school, you have four grade levels of craziness, it seems like for these guys coming in.
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So we really weren't giving our freshmen a great start to the year, and so what we did as a school improvement team is we really say you know what, we are going to take a day off from our service in service day.
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So we have four pre-service days.
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I'm taking four days and crunching into three for what we need to do.
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And we're taking that fourth day and we're bringing it.
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It's a mandatory day for freshmen.
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They have to come as a tennis taker.
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Those freshmen are coming to school by themselves and so we're going to be able to do things like hey, we're going to run them through their schedule, we're going to feed them lunch, we're going to have some fun activities, I'm going to do a presentation, the activities director is going to do a little presentation.
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She's going to talk about some stuff.
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I'm going to have them go through their schedule.
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So we have a black day and an orange day.
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We're going to have them, we're going to feed them lunch, I'm going to get them ice cream and then at the end of the day we're going to have an activities fair and it's not going to be like a full day, it's going to be our Wednesday schedule, so they're done by 245.
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But the whole goal of that is to have the freshmen come in, get acclimated, get to know their teachers before we bring everybody in and it's just a crazy zoo, it seems like at times at the beginning of the year we're.
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Hopefully that will be a great success.
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I believe it will be because it was a collaborative effort by our school improvement team and I'm excited about it because you know I've been, you know we've been planning for it and we got the things there ready to go.
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It's just to execute the plan and really do the things we need to do on those ends.
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Here's some things that we had.
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We had some mantras over the last three years.
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We talked about hey, how do you be 1% better every day, making incremental changes to get better so you can make those big gains throughout the year?
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We also had the the expectations are the expectations mantra.
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To where?
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Hey, you know what?
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These are the expectations.
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We're going to hold you to a high expectation because we believe in you, we know you can do it, so we're going to hold you to a high expectation when it comes to your personal cell phone device, when it comes to your attendance, when it comes to your ability to learn.
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We want you to learn and be the best you can be.
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But at the same time, we're holding ourselves accountable as well, because we're creating these systems to help us have a systematic approach to these issues.
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We're having and I'm going to say this after one year of putting in that attendance policy.
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We increased daily average attendance by 3.97%, so about 40 kids a day were attending school more regularly.
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We dropped our chronic aptitude by one year.
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Now this is from our 2023-2024 versus our 2024-25 school year result.
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So at the end of this last year we decreased chronic apnea by 8.9%, which is about 89 less students that were chronically absent.
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Now we got a long ways to go.
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We're not where we want to be with it, but we're in a great start.
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So I'm really excited to see the work that we have done over the last three years carry over.
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That's what I'm excited to see.
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That stuff just keeps going.
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It's not like we're going to stop worrying about culture.
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We're going to stop worrying about the things we're doing.
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We're going to continue those things.
00:17:27.792 --> 00:17:29.035
A we know they work.
00:17:29.035 --> 00:17:47.622
B it's a collaborative effort and we have things in place to hold ourselves and to hold our kids and hold everybody accountable so we can make the gains and the strides we want and make Hastings High the best high school in the state of Nebraska and, in my opinion, in the nation.
00:17:47.622 --> 00:17:48.849
That's the goal right.
00:17:48.849 --> 00:17:54.844
That's what we want to do and that's what our goal is is to make it the best place possible.
00:17:54.844 --> 00:17:57.736
That's the work we've done over the last three years.
00:17:57.935 --> 00:17:59.961
Now, that's where I started going.
00:17:59.961 --> 00:18:04.592
We've done our last three years.
00:18:04.592 --> 00:18:05.394
Now that's where I started going.
00:18:05.394 --> 00:18:05.755
What's next?
00:18:05.755 --> 00:18:05.974
What now?
00:18:05.974 --> 00:18:07.318
What's my next step as a building principal?
00:18:07.318 --> 00:18:08.181
And I was lost.
00:18:08.181 --> 00:18:10.586
I was like going holy smokes.
00:18:10.586 --> 00:18:11.930
We've done all these things.
00:18:11.930 --> 00:18:15.454
We've done the, you know, building the culture, environment.
00:18:15.454 --> 00:18:17.738
What's our next step?
00:18:17.738 --> 00:18:24.607
Well, we have some things happening at Hastings that you know.
00:18:24.728 --> 00:18:38.413
For us, there's going to be a lot of change this year, right, we're going to be having a brand new superintendent, a brand new curriculum director, a brand new special education director and we're a brand new operations manager.
00:18:38.413 --> 00:18:41.019
Now, the operations manager is not new to the district.
00:18:41.019 --> 00:18:42.211
This is new to the role.
00:18:42.211 --> 00:18:51.960
So we got like four district office positions that are going to be new, and so there's going to be a lot of change, right, and that made me go, you know what?
00:18:51.960 --> 00:18:53.584
This year?
00:18:53.584 --> 00:19:06.663
We have to be curious, and be curious is the thing that keeps sticking out in my mind, and so, to kind of help you understand it I'm getting this from ted lasso, the dark scene.
00:19:06.663 --> 00:19:12.175
Right, be curious, and to help you guys kind of understand where I'm going to go with this.
00:19:12.175 --> 00:19:23.624
I really want to play the scene, the dark scenes, about a minute long to, where ted lasso is talking about being curious and not judgmental.
00:19:23.624 --> 00:19:27.915
So I'm going to go ahead and play that for you and then I'll talk about it at the end.
00:19:28.498 --> 00:19:29.140
What do I need to win?
00:19:29.869 --> 00:19:34.121
Two triple twitties and a bullseye.
00:19:34.501 --> 00:19:34.903
Good luck.
00:19:34.903 --> 00:19:43.755
You know, rupert, guys have underestimated me my entire life and for years I never understood why.
00:19:43.755 --> 00:19:44.659
It used to really bother me.
00:19:44.659 --> 00:19:50.097
But then one day I was driving my little boy to school and I saw this quote by Walt Whitman.
00:19:50.097 --> 00:19:51.536
It was painted on the wall there.
00:19:51.536 --> 00:19:54.376
It said be curious, not judgmental.
00:19:54.376 --> 00:19:56.102
And I liked that.
00:19:56.102 --> 00:20:09.898
So I get back in my car and I'm driving to work and all of a sudden it hits me All them fellas that used to belittle me Not a single one of them were curious.
00:20:09.898 --> 00:20:12.990
You know, they thought they had everything all figured out.
00:20:12.990 --> 00:20:16.190
So they judged everything and they judged everyone.
00:20:16.190 --> 00:20:19.780
And I realized that they're underestimating me.
00:20:19.780 --> 00:20:22.723
Who I was had nothing to do with it.
00:20:22.723 --> 00:20:25.993
And I realized that they're underestimating me who I was, had nothing to do with it.
00:20:25.993 --> 00:20:28.701
Because if they were curious they would ask questions.
00:20:28.701 --> 00:20:38.919
You know, questions like have you played a lot of darts, ted?
00:20:38.919 --> 00:20:53.824
Which I would have answered yes, sir, every Sunday afternoon at a sports bar with my father from age 10 to 16 when he passed away.
00:20:55.911 --> 00:21:00.773
Barbecue sauce.
00:21:00.834 --> 00:21:05.717
Wow, like, think about that Really, really let that sink in.
00:21:05.717 --> 00:21:07.678
Be curious.
00:21:07.678 --> 00:21:10.240
What does that mean for us?
00:21:10.240 --> 00:21:13.021
Be curious, like you talked about?
00:21:13.021 --> 00:21:15.222
You know, no one asked him questions.
00:21:15.222 --> 00:21:22.387
No one was curious about him as well, and so he learned that to be curious and not to judge things.
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