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Colorado Springs School District 11’s three finalists for superintendent did a final, two-hour interview conducted by the district’s education board Tuesday at the Tesla Professional Development Building.
Earlier this month, the district named Peter Hilts, Tammy Clementi and Michael Gaal as finalists.
Here are some details about each candidate:
Peter Hilts
Current position: District 49 chief education officer
Education experience: Hilts served as principal, director of strategic programs and director of academic services at The Classical Academy nearly 10 years. He has been in his current position since May 2013.
On balance between parents’ rights and schooling:
Hilts said that a school district embodies a social contract much in the way the government does. Parents relinquish a certain level of control over their children to have them learn.
Parents should meet schools ‘expectations and schools should strive to meet the parents’ expectations.
Public interviews for District 11 superintendent finalists to begin later this month
He said the issue arises comes from when the school disconnects from the education purpose on which parents have agreed to, and deviate to a social purpose which they have not agreed. He said the school should be very clear on that which is social-oriented and that which is education-oriented, and the school should stay in its domain.
On staffing challenges and retaining high-quality members:
Hilts stressed a need to get the right people in the right position. He said one of the ways he has done so in the past is by posing scenarios to job candidates. For instance, a scheduling manager candidate had to look at a master schedule with a built-in problem. It was impossible to schedule all the classes in all the rooms with all the teachers, so Hilts took note of those who improvised and accounted for the built-in error.
Quote: Hilts said he did not wish to receive a multiyear contract for the position if hired. He wanted to earn his salary every year. “My job performance should be my job security,” he said.
Tammy Clementi
Current position: chief education officer of Education Is It, a consulting group she founded to help schools and school districts.
Education experience: Before Education Is It, Clementi was a consultant for Kidz Can Learn. She was the chief academic officer for Aurora Public Schools 2011-2013 and chief academic officer for Pueblo City Schools 2008-2010. She was an assistant principal for Fountain Middle School and taught as an elementary classroom teacher for D-11 for 14 years.
On balance between parents’ rights and schooling:
Clementi emphasized the need to understand each side of the debate without judgment and to understand that many will not change their minds on their held beliefs and find a way to move forward on shared values.
She said she would not announce her own stance and that the community should work together for the good of the students.
On staffing challenges and retaining high-quality members:
When asked about challenges with staffing shortages in the district, Clementi acknowledged that it’s a teacher’s market but that culture, more so than salary, keeps staff in the district. She said that teachers and staff voices carry weight in terms of recommending the district to others.
She also emphasized the need to be creative in attracting people in the community. She mentioned providing scholarships for adults who are interested in switching careers. She spoke about providing support to paraprofessionals in terms of scholarships and encouraging them to pursue a degree and start doing what they are worth.
Quote: “This is just coming home for me. I say it would be more than just fate to round out my career in the career where I started. I’ve had my eyeball on D-11 since 2004 when I left,” she said.
Michael Gaal
Education experience: Michael Gaal was the deputy chancellor of innovation and systems improvement at the District of Columbia Public Schools. Gaal was chief of staff at the Oakland Unified School District, and the chief operating officer for the Michigan Education Achievement Authority.
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On balance between parents’ rights and schooling:
Gaal suggested the solution may be in communicating to not just the parents who attend school board of education meetings regularly but the other parents in the district. He also suggested looking at parent complaints and input from a geographic standpoint and seeing if anything can be gleaned from that data. If a certain neighborhood is struggling, the district can pinpoint strategies for that area.
On staffing challenges and retaining high-quality members:
Gaal emphasized the need to “grow your own,” by which he meant hiring internal candidates who already understood the work required and were already accustomed to the environment. He also spoke to empowering those people to be able to complete their education to take on bigger jobs in the district. Finally, he spoke to taking advantage of the many great universities in the area, forging relationships with them and placing student teachers in schools where there will be vacancies.
Quote: Gaal, who graduated from the US Air Force Academy in 1989, said he has seen damage done by the COVID-19 pandemic in schools across the country. He said the remedies are severely disproportionate to what each student lost during the pandemic.
“It is the greatest knowledge lost in the history of America. We have two years of learning lost in every school district in America and nobody is treating it like the crisis that it is. … It’s like filling up one sandbag when the dam in front of your house just let loose. “
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