In addition to its new central office learning and curriculum staff, Jefferson City Public Schools has new directors of special services, nutrition services and quality improvement for the coming school year.
The women at the helm of these departments agreed to talk about what they do, how they think they're prepared and what they're looking forward to in their new positions.
Bridget Frank comes to the job of director of special services with 11 years of experience as a school psychologist, four of which were in North Kansas City, and another four were in Columbia. This year will be her fourth with JCPS. She's from St. Thomas, but "Jeff City's always kind of been my hometown."
As a school psychologist with JCPS, she was stationed at South, Moreau Heights, West and Cedar Hill elementary schools.
"I am a little bit unique for this position. Typically, administrators come into this role," she said of her new job, which has wide-ranging supervision over the district's behavior interventionists, school psychologists, early childhood programs, occupational therapists, speech language pathologists and special education teachers.
Special services also encompasses supervision of 504 academic plans for students with disabilities, school nurses, social workers, English language-learner students and their teachers and tutors, and the gifted student or EER department.
Gifted students are those who excel in classrooms, and they receive weekly enrichment instruction to keep them engaged in curriculum and broaden their academic horizons to their fullest potential.
"I've actually done quite a bit of work with special education students, and I've worked with each of those people that I've mentioned," she said of the professionals she'll now be leading. "I know the day-to-day functions of what they do, and I've worked closely with our parents and our kids with disabilities, too, so I have quite a bit of more 'real-world' experience than what is kind of typically served in this role."
She added her experiences in North Kansas City made her familiar with a multi-tiered system of support for students struggling academically or behaviorally. "That's really kind of where my heart and passion lies, because that's kind of why I first started in this career," she said of coming up with "a continuum of services that we can offer."
"We've made a ton of progress with that in the Jeff City public schools in just the three years that I've been here."
She's hoping to bridge her relationships with school-level professionals with her "working knowledge of the systems piece."
"I like making a difference for kids individually. But I know that you have such big bang for your buck on a systems level, and if we work smarter, not harder, that we can impact so many more kids."
The nutrition services department Dawn Matthews directs will certainly impact large numbers of students in the district every day.
Matthews said JCPS is a little more than double the size of the Camdenton school district, where she had been director of nutrition services for the past 13 years.
She said her immediate challenge would be "learning my employees" - all 95 of the full-time staff in the department, their strengths, what they enjoy about their jobs and what motivates them.
"We want to make our customers happy," she said of the end goal of providing students with acceptable and exciting food products.
She said the JCPS food program is in great shape. She worked with the previous nutrition services director, Terri Ferguson, for a year and a half as a nutritionist.
She was also a nutrition supervisor with the state's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education for five years.
"All my past experiences got me to where I am today."
Brenda Hatfield's new position of director of quality improvement is also new; the job didn't even exist before a couple of months ago.
Hatfield comes from a 12-year background of private consulting, "working with the Baldridge Program - strategic planning, measurement systems, customer focus and human resources." Before that, she was with the Missouri Quality Award Program.
"I still work with a variety of companies, both in Missouri and in some other states, trying to help them improve what they do," she said. "(Superintendent) Larry (Linthacum) asked if I would be interested in doing the same thing, only on a part-time basis for the district."
One of her children is a graduate of JCPS, and another is a student at Jefferson City High School, where she's currently president of the Parent-Teacher Organization. She served on the Jefferson City Public Schools Foundation board for six years - including as president - and she coordinates volunteers at the Southwest Early Childhood Center and was the campaign coordinator for the Citizens Investing in J Plus C Committee, the group of community members who independently supported the successful April ballot proposals for the district's two high schools projects.
In her new job, she asks the questions of "What is the outcome we're trying to get to, and then, are the processes or steps we're taking to get there going to get us there?" she continued. "The idea is 'how do we get to where Larry wants us to get to?'"
"What I bring is sort of that outside perspective," she added.
She's already presented the district's Board of Education with ideas for information they could gather or share with the public to better chart the district's progress in areas of stewardship and building community partnerships: things like expenditure per pupil, staff retention rates, and the average fill rate and qualifications of substitute teachers.
She wants to get a comprehensive staff satisfaction survey operating on a more consistent basis. "It's not enough to ask (staff) what they want; we then have to follow up on that and try to start improving things. And I think (the district has) done a lot of improvement stuff, but I'm not sure that we've re-surveyed to make sure that works for them."
It's been two years since the last staff satisfaction survey, "and I would say it needs to be an annual thing."
Her first charge, though, will be to take a look at the district's hiring process with the new director of human resources, Shelby Scarbrough. Hatfield wants to know what principals and hiring managers need from the district's hiring process and learn from recent hires about how that process could be improved.
She's hoping to deliver recommendations and have a plan in place by the end of the coming semester, in anticipation of January and February when many of the district's hiring decisions are made.
After the examination of the hiring process, she expects she'll work with department heads like Frank to determine their goals.
"One of things that we probably need to do a better job of is making sure that if (for example) Cedar Hill wins an attendance award, that we actually share the strategies that Cedar Hill implemented to make sure that all the other elementary schools know about those. Right now, there's not a formal process, a formal way to make sure that that happens." Although she knows principals are talking to each other informally, "we're looking for a way to try to make that easier for them, so that they don't have to make the call, that we actually have that information gathered for them, and we can disseminate it to them."
She said her biggest challenge will be time, because staff like principals are "never not going to be busy, and trying to make sure that I get the right information from them, in a respectful manner so that I'm not wasting any of their time, I think is going to be the biggest challenge."