New Superintendent Hits the Ground Running

Incoming Katonah Lewisboro Superintendent Dr. Paul Kreutzer officially started his job last Friday and has already met with scores of people since moving into his home on Truesdale Lake in South Salem last month.

He’s been briefed by administrators on the budget and contracts and met with parents, students and teachers. Today he attends his first school board meeting and is gearing up for a board retreat Friday.

Kreutzer, 40, former superintendent Robert Roelle, who in February. Michael Jumper, who has beensuperintendent, returned to his role as assistant superintendent for business on July 1.

One of his first goals is to improve communications and get to know the community and staff, he said during an interview Wednesday in his bare-bones office at central office headquarters in Vista. The district is mothballing the offices on Shady Lane and preparing for their move to , where Kreutzer will have a glass desk, symbolic of the transparency he wants to have with the community.

“We need to be very deliberate about our outreach,” he said, describing a connected web of parents, taxpayers, administrators, students, alumni and staff. “We need more genuine back-and-forth communication, two-way communication, feedback on what is working and a collective definition of success.”

Some of the ways he plans to accomplish this are through stakeholder meetings and “listening sessions,” a community survey and potentially, an alumni survey.

“You can pick up good qualitative data anecdotally, through conversations…but I’d also like to do a survey of all community members to measure what we value. We could do post-graduate surveys—let’s ask them if they are successful. What if we could discover a way to improve the experience for the current students?,” asked Kreutzer.

He shared some of his impressions gleaned during his campus tours prior to the end of the school year and from a staff survey he’d recently reviewed.

“I am so impressed with the gardens and greenhouses in our schools, and with kids knowing how sustainable systems work. That seems to be a part of the community’s definition of success—not just being fit, but having a balanced lifestyle and an appreciation for nature,” he said.

The use of technology in education came up on the staff survey and is another area he’d like to focus on this year. He described the element of time as a way to understand how technology can enhance—but not replace—good teaching.

“Educators now try to get kids to understand a concept in a finite amount of time, say 45 minutes. But a student may not get it. So time is the concept but learning is the variable. But what if we provided access to education through technology so that time became a variable and learning is the constant?”

He described a wireless network they created in New Berlin whereby students could access materials created by teachers, such as lessons, study notes, reading lists or appropriate educational websites. They collected data showing that students were connecting to this “filtered, deliberate” environment before and after school.

“What if a student who has attention deficit disorder could hear a lesson repeated on a podcast? Or students could engage with school on snow days?” he said, adding that the "burden would be upon us to do it well."

He said he’d like to look at the ways the district measures how a student has learned. The district's long range plan focuses less on traditional assessments, such as tests, and more on alternative assessments.

“If we’re focusing less on state assessments, then we need other data points,” said Kreutzer. “How do we know a student has mastered the material? Great teachers are checking in with kids every day as individual learners. Can we give students more trial-and-error opportunities for learning? Is it a crime to let them re-take a test if the end goal is to have them master the material? ”

He was enthusiastic about bringing his experience in implementing a response-to-intervention program in New Berlin, Wisconsin, to the district here. Next year's budget includes funds for rolling out an RTI model, which includes assessments of all students three times per year and provides needed academic supports.

“Every student has a right to learn something new and meaningful every day and 85 percent of kids do so from the core curriculum. But some need a different approach; when they don’t learn we need a collective response,” he said.

For example, he said, in his former district, there were teachers in the library—representing every subject area—available for extra help during study hours, and peer tutors who excelled in one academic area matched with students who struggled in the same subject. To roll out similar supports here, it might "re-prioritization" of resources, he acknowledged.

Kreutzer acknowledged the competing demands on a superintendent’s time and said wanted to increase the leadership capacity of the administrative team to ensure that issues are not micromanaged, but addressed at the appropriate level, to "give teachers and staff the freedom to deliver a high quality education."

He also said he intends to take a look at and understand the overall social and behavioral culture of each building, noting that excellence extends into social realms.

“I bring rigid behavioral standards with me, and excellence is not about diminishing freedoms but about accentuating values. Discipline doesn’t necessarily mean punishment; a cellist or an athlete can have discipline. How we choose to behave with each other is important.”