Recommendations & Lessons Learned

        As I come to the end of my Superintendent certification program, I have been asked to reflect upon recommendations and lessons learned through my internship activities.  What follows is a summary of those recommendations.

Job Entry Plan

Dr. Creel spoke last Thursday on the importance of having a job entry plan. While mine is fairly rudimentary, I hope to improve it over time. Having a strong, effective job entry plan can make your transition into a new (or out of an old) role much smoother. I believe him 100%. It makes perfect sense.

Anyway, enjoy...

Comprehensive Competency Reflection

Below are the results of my competency reflection.  While it took awhile to write, this certainly shows how busy the last 8 months have been.  Please feel free to reply with your thoughts and suggestions.
 

Position & Leadership Goals

Position and Leadership Goal

As I navigate through my career, my career goals have progressed.  Initially, my goal had been to serve as a high school principal or possibly a Superintendent or Assistant Superintendent.  I have discovered, though, that I have a strong affinity toward Academia.  I can now say that my long-term career goals include ultimately serving as a member of doctoral faculty in Educational Leadership. 

Competency Review - End of Program

As I compared my previous responses from September to my current responses in April to the superintendent competencies, I was pleased to see that I had improved significantly.  The large majority of my responses were considered strengths.  Specifically, Competencies 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, and 10 all were areas in which I scored myself to be all strengths.

Most of the remaining competencies were scored mostly strengths, with a few competent and very few needs improvement.  Competency 8 is the only competency area in which there remains significant work to be done. 

Within Competency 8, the primary driver (for improvement) seems to be a lack of “on the job” type of experience.  To date in my career, I still have very limited experiences in working directly with Board members, working with the budget (on the district level), and most of the other “district level” activities within the competency.

Overall, I am very pleased with my progress since September.  I have gained greater insight into the role of the superintendent and have more confidence in my abilities to function in a leadership role at the district level.

The following is a summary of my findings:

Annual Financial Audit

The Deputy Superintendent for Finance was not physically able to meet me for an interview.  I submitted the questions via email.  The responses below are as received.

How is the external auditor selected?

The District employs a full time Internal Auditor, whose reporting responsibility is directly to the Board of Trustees.

The District maintains budgetary controls to ensure compliance with legal provisions embodied in the annual appropriated (official) budget as adopted by the Board of Trustees. Activities in the General Fund, Child Nutrition Special Revenue Fund, and Debt Service Fund are included in the official budget. The level of budgetary control (i.e., the level at which expenditures cannot legally exceed the appropriated amount) is at the fund-function level as required by the Texas Education Agency. In addition, lower level organizational units' expenditures are controlled through the District's automated financial computer systems at varying combinations of the account code structure. The system also provides controls limiting accessibility to budgetary account codes. Oversight control of all District expenditures is maintained by the Financial Services staff.

Understanding Teachers' Salaries

We monitor other districts’ salary schedules regularly and make necessary modifications to our salary schedules to remain competitive.  Based on the State budget deficit and funding reductions for public education over the 2011 biennium, an early recommendation in our budget review process last year involved freezing salaries in an effort to preserve as many jobs as possible.

The 2011-12 budget froze salaries and the original plan for 2012-13 was to do the same.  Freezing salaries meant that we had to lower our beginning teacher starting salary and reduce our hire in schedule to avoid a situation where a new teacher would have a salary greater than an existing teacher with the same or greater years of experience (assuming appropriate performance evaluations).  The thought was that this strategy best supported the district’s mission, values, focus, and goals given the difficult financial circumstances.