JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. - As she enters her last month as education commissioner, Chris Nicastro has become a magnet for controversy in Missouri's education system.
But, she said, every one of the contentious decisions made during her tenure was made in the best interest of Missouri's children.
Her motivation to help students has driven her since her childhood in Manchester, Missouri. In fact, she began teaching before she reached the first grade.
"I was always convening the neighborhood kids and having school and trying to get my brothers to sit quietly so I could teach them something," Nicastro said.
Many years later, armed with a college degree, she traded her imaginary backyard school for a social studies classroom in a Jefferson County school. Through the ensuing years, she held several jobs in schools throughout Missouri, including assistant principal, central office administrator and finally superintendent at the Hazelwood School District, north of St. Louis.
Her next career step was Missouri's education commissioner, which brought a bit of a shock to the lifelong educator.
"As a superintendent, you have a given community you work with. Most of your community has pretty similar values and points of view," Nicastro said. "In this position (education commissioner), you have no control like you do as a superintendent over your budget or your staff ... and you have many more constituencies and many more people you have to work to satisfy."
These people, according to Nicastro, are more than 500 superintendents, 200 legislators, the governor and the Missouri State Board of Education.
For Nicastro, satisfying everyone has proven to be a difficult task. Her time in office hasn't been without criticism.
In 2010, the academically underperforming and financially strapped Wellston School District was merged with the Normandy School District in north St. Louis County. Two years later, the district lost accreditation for failing academics and eventually lapsed after students transferred to receive a better education in nearby accredited school districts. The Normandy district was then taken over by the state and renamed Normandy Schools Collaborative earlier this year.
Riverview Gardens School District was another district that lost accreditation in 2007 due to low student achievement and was put under state supervision in 2010, and it was managed by a three-member appointed administrative board. A few years later, staff contracts in Riverview Gardens became void, and the district remains unaccredited.
More recently, the education department was faulted by an audit for hiring consultant CEE-Trust to overhaul Kansas City's formerly unaccredited school district. The school district had been grappling with low test scores, several school closings and a struggling school board.
"In this job, there are always going to be people ... who want to accuse you of things you never did or thought about doing," Nicastro said. "That goes along with the territory. You just have to be resilient enough to be focused enough on your personal mission, your professional mission, and then you'll be good."
But reorganizing unaccredited school districts isn't the only work Nicastro has done - in fact, the educational and political landscape has evolved greatly since she took over as commissioner.
Since she began her position in 2009, Nicastro successfully applied for a waiver to the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind system.
Nicastro has also implemented the Top 10 by 20 initiative, which aims to bring Missouri to the top 10 ranked schools in the United States by 2020. The program is defined by three objectives: to allow all Missouri students to graduate ready for college and a career, to guarantee that all children will enter kindergarten prepared to be successful in future schooling and for Missouri to prepare and support effective educators.
The goals were determined, Nicastro said, according to various research and data that provide the most critical leverage for designing and supporting a successful education system.
Missouri has since seen improvement in some areas - in 2014, the state's average ACT composite score rose from 21.6 to 21.8. In addition, 56.6 percent of the state's school districts increased scores, according to annual performance reports. However, for several grade levels, the rate of proficiency in math, English and social studies fell compared to 2013.
Overall, Nicastro is pleased with the change in attitude concerning the goals of Missouri's school system.
"I think there's a bit of a shift in how we see ourselves," Nicastro said. "I also think that people are understanding much more now that it's critical for kids to have additional credentials than that of a high school diploma."
With about a month left on the job, Nicastro said that she still has goals she hasn't checked off of her commissioner bucket list.
"The reality is, it takes a lot of time to do things," she said. "We've made a lot of changes over the past five and a half years. And in any organization, there comes a time when you've been going through a period of significant change, you have to pause and reflect."
As Nicastro prepares to leave, she hopes the state education board will choose a successor who is capable of this sort of reflection.
"I'm confident that the State Board is going to hire somebody with equally high expectations, with somebody who's not satisfied with the status quo," Nicastro said. "They're going to strive to do better. And I think that's really important."