 Hello and welcome to the third season of DEI Matters, Conversations with Margaret Credo-Thomas. Today I want us to talk to Dr. Elizabeth Homan as she is also going into her third year as superintendent of schools for Erlington. And I am so excited to have this conversation with her. One of the things I wanna mention is that the reason why we have this show is so that we can have outward conversations with the district and the community to talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice. So let's know holds bar. Let's get into our conversation with Dr. Liz Homan. Hi, Liz. Hi, good to see you. You too. Thanks for having me. So Liz, you are finishing your second year, starting your third year. And what are some of the accomplishments that you feel like you've gained in the last two years as being superintendent of Erlington? Great question. So it's hard to believe. It's both hard to believe that it's only been two years and hard to believe that it's been a whole two years. So I think we've done a lot of work over the last couple of years. You've been an integral part of a lot of that. Some of the first bits of work we needed to do when I started was pandemic response. And I'm really proud of the work that our team has put in to continue to respond to the emerging needs that students have and families have based on what they experienced during the pandemic. It's something that I think we feel like we've come back from. And at the same time, we know very much that we haven't. We're still seeing the impacts on kids, depending on where they were developmentally when the pandemic hit. Some of the needs manifest themselves differently. And it's been true each year post the onset of the pandemic. And our team has been really focused on students' mental health. We have some early results back from the Youth Risk Survey that we do with our older students every year that are showing that our response has been really strong and that our students are feeling the impact of that. So I'm really proud of how we've handled ourselves in a crisis while also being very forward-looking. So one of my other things that I'm really excited about having accomplished is the development of a five-year strategic plan for the district. And that has been very forward-looking, very optimistic. We're very focused as a district now on establishing a system that promotes growth, joy, and belonging for all of our students. And we've thought very much about what the action steps are that need to happen in order for us to create environments like that that will lead to student success and academic achievement. And that has been a huge community effort with well over 100 community members involved in the development of that plan. The school committee has fully adopted it. It is not my plan for the district. It is our collective plan for the district. And it's a big win. You've done a lot in the two years and not to mention you have a new vision and mission statement. Well, we have a new vision and mission statement for the district. So there has been a lot that has happened in the last two years. And I forgot, you did start where we were kind of still in the midst of the pandemic. So that must have been also challenging. Definitely. What are some of the challenges that you felt like you encountered in the last two years? I think that they go hand in hand with the two big accomplishments. It has been, I think, challenging as people have dealt with some of the needs of their families of needing and wanting to have balance in their lives to do a lot of some of the proactive work while also needing to address what are some lasting traumas, some lasting challenges that have been a result of the pandemic. People's mental health took a really big hit during the pandemic. And that's not just our kids. That's their parents. It's us, right? I have noticed a trend that I think is a positive one where we hit summer and a lot of us, we still work in the summer. Some of our administrators still work in the summer, but a lot of us slow down quite a lot and our teachers really take the time to reset. And I hope that our students have access to the camps and the summer opportunities to reconnect with family. And I think I see that as a positive trend. I see people really trying to establish balance, but I think that's a challenge as we are also trying to refocus ourselves less on logistics and pandemic planning and more on instruction and how we create really welcoming environments for our students while still taking care of ourselves and our loved ones. We always have, you know, rolling crises that come up or tragedies we need to address and respond to and support our families through. But we wanna do that while also staying really steadfastly focused on our end goal, which is to create those schools that close and eliminate gaps for students that have been there for a long time. And mostly those are about opportunities and access to opportunities. And that's really been the focus of that forward-looking mission and vision work. You know, you mentioned that you feel as though this year that teachers are really pausing and even leaders are really pausing as opposed to two years ago it felt like you didn't feel like you could pause and now this summer does feel different. I think people feel like I can pause, I have permission to take care of myself and to just be with my family or reset. You're right. What steps have you taken to address equity and inclusion within a district and what progress do you think that we've made? And I shouldn't say just you because although you're the superintendent, there's, it's we, you know, we try to use that word collectively that we are doing this work, not you doing this work that we are doing this work together. So what do you think, what are the steps you think that we've taken? I think we've gotten some processes and procedures and sort of structures in place that I'm really looking forward to seeing the impact of and that I think we're already seeing some of the impact of. One example of that is, here's a preface by saying no initiative that we do is not connected to diversity, equity and inclusion. Should every single thing that we do should be about improving access to opportunities for students. And so with that in mind, we've really taken a look at our routines, how we go about doing the work of educating kids and what new routines could we introduce into the system that will help us have that sort of steadfast focus on every single action we take, improving equity for students. And so one of those, I think engines we've gotten running is instructional leadership teams at every school. We started it at the start of this year. We had leadership teams at every school, like Arlington is a town that believes and shared leadership and civic engagement. And so there were leadership teams. The focus of those leadership teams was not always on the thing that is the most important, which is the instruction that happens with students for students. And so sort of refocusing and recasting the work of a leadership team at a school towards what teachers bring the most expertise in, which is teaching and learning and having really intentionally designed instructional leadership teams at every school was something that we started this year. And the goal of those is to both really focus the leadership work of the school on instruction and what's happening at the classroom level because that will build our coherence and consistency through the system. But also is to build pathways towards leadership for teachers who might be aspiring leaders or for people who just want to lead their colleagues a little bit more to understand who we are and who we're coming to work as build more collaborative sustaining cultures amongst our adults and create a space where everyone is a learner. One of the things in our vision statement is that we are that all learners in the Garlington Public Schools experience growth, joy and belonging. We were really intentional about that. You remember, you were part of the group. And we wanted to say it's not, we're creating growth, joy and belonging for students, absolutely. And we are all learners in this space, myself included, all of us included. And so that intentionality has sort of led itself through the development of the instructional leadership teams. And next year we're looking at having working groups for each of our strategic plan areas. And those working groups, the goal of those is to also give decision making capacity to people in the system to take action steps and to reflect on those and to look at data and measure the impact. And so I think some of those, they're sort of bigger picture things, but they're also smaller routines and ways we go about interacting with one another are gonna have a really big impact on our students as we continue to focus on what's going on with them in the classroom. And I also wanted to mention that you also are very, you also wanting to get the students voice also. Yes. When we talk about this diversity, equity and inclusion and you've been very intentional about it and you've been having us be very intentional about it this year as you've accessed us as leaders to do empathy interviews with students. And so can you explain a little bit more as to why you've been asking us as the adults to really get the voice of the students? I'll say what, I'll say why and what what they've told us. So I really, I think it's very important that when we are in decision making spaces that we're thinking about whether or not the people who are gonna be impacted by the decisions made in those spaces are actually at the table helping make those decisions. And the reality is that we would love to have students on every single committee and it's not always realistic. But what we can do is make sure that we include students in hiring committees, that we get their feedback if we do a demo lesson. For example, we're hiring a teacher doing a demo lesson in a class, get the kids feedback on how the different candidates did, use that to contribute to decision making and make sure that we are scheduling time in our days as leaders to connect deeply with kids and do deep listening with them. So empathy interviews are a mechanism that allows for this. We did empathy interviews as an entire leadership team towards the end of the school year at the various schools with questions connected to asking the kids what does growth mean to you? What does joy look like at school? What does belonging look like at school? Their answers to these questions are, first of all, it makes it extremely easy to connect with the students because their answers often very much mirror what our answers would be as their teachers. And can offer us really new insights into what kinds of learning experiences are sticky or most powerful for kids, really stay with them. We heard a lot this year, one great example about the civics action projects that the kids did in eighth grade. This is a new curriculum from the state. It's new standards for eighth grade civics and it requires the students to do an action project in their community. And we had students who went to town meeting and presented and went to finance committee and presented and they really felt empowered by that and that came up in the empathy interviews. They said, this is what growth looks like. I didn't think I could have an impact like that. And I learned through working with my peers and even when we disagreed, figuring it out, what kind of impact I could actually have on my community and that's growth. And I felt belonging because my peers and I had to work something out and we weren't sure if we could do it, but we really came together as a unit and as a group and I felt like they knew who I was and I knew what they could do better because we did that project together. We videotaped some of these. I'm looking forward to sharing some of that with the full community when we get into the fall because they had some really cool things to say about what it looks like. Yeah, that's the action project. They were also still emailing me because they had some wonderful ideas that they were discussing and doing. Let's see, what strategies have you employed to effectively communicate with various stakeholders, including our families and our teachers, our educators and community members? And this is exciting. It is. So we have a new role and a new department in the district and I am really looking forward to developing new strategies to help us with this very area as a result of that. So we have a brand new welcome center that's opening this fall. It will be in the brand new offices that will open in October that are connected to the new high school, the new district offices. Wesley Tienpierre is our new director of communications and family engagement. That role will be overseeing our registrars, our registration department, as well as a communications specialist role that will help us to be really routinized about how we get information out to the community. And I'm hoping we'll also give us opportunities to do family education, partner with maybe our LinkedIn community education, but also sort of target some education opportunities for families to learn about what their kids' experience is like about adolescent development. We do have forums that we've held in the past that we're hoping we can wrap into some initiatives like this and really help us get some protocols in place that will make communication consistent, make it be as close to what families need and staff need and kids need as possible. I think we've really done some work on that over the past couple of years, trying to make sure that our information blasts when we send them out are concise, that staff have information before we're sending it out to families, that we're catering whatever information we're sending out to our audience, but we know we can do more and we know that there are ways we can improve. And with this added capacity, I'm really hoping that we can support the school's communications to be consistent and concise and easy for families to access and find and use. And at the district level, we can improve upon that a little bit more, too. It's one of the initiatives in the strategic plan. Yes, strategic priority number four. 4.2? It's scary when we know the 4.2. And I think one of the things I wanted to say is that what I've heard from families is that they appreciate the transparency of the communication that they've been receiving in regards to anything that is happening within the district. They feel like they have the understanding of what's happening, what's coming. And so I think, like you said, we've been working on it and I think it's very exciting that we have this new welcome center that's coming. I think that starts to have our vision statement really live when you say we have this welcome center, we have this new role, we have this new department. So I feel like the vision statement is coming off the page and it's just kind of really living in the district. So that must really be exciting for everyone to see. So we already talked about this, but how do you plan to engage students more further into the decision-making process? So I know we talked about student empathy interviews. It is difficult sometimes to get students on these different working groups based on time and their schedule. I think something new that has happened that we had students that were sitting on interviews for our district level positions, which was very new. So what are some other maybe ideas that you have or that your team has in order to bring their voices, elevate their voices? So I think this gets at, so I gave a couple of district level examples, but I think there are things we can do, strategies we can employ at the school and the classroom level that could be really powerful too. So when we think about what made the Civics Action Project so powerful, it was that the kids got to make decisions about the topic that they were gonna study, the people they were gonna go connect with. They had guides, their teachers acted as facilitator and guide, but there's a lot of sort of power given over to students to empower them to give them the agency to sort of guide their learning. And I think finding as many ways as we can to provide experiences like that in the learning environment, that's what's going to help students be empowered decision makers because it's gonna be about them to making decisions about their own learning, not necessarily making decisions about sort of district level things that we are trying to do more of that. One example of another place that we're working on doing this is in the adoption of a new curriculum for our elementary literacy program. So we're adopting EL Education as our new K5 literacy program. And we are doing this with about 25% of the elementary school sections next school year with the hopes that the following school year everybody else will join in. And the reason why this was the chosen curriculum is because it's a project-based curriculum that gives students some sort of control choice at the end of each unit around a project that they have a lot of design sort of capacity to be creative within. And it also gives our teachers a lot of opportunity to be creative with how they design the students' projects and expectations around those projects too. This curriculum also involves kids in sort of all the standard surrounding communication which includes standing up in front of your peers and presenting, sitting on a set and maybe being recorded. So all tasks that are really good for them to experience at a young age because it's gonna build their confidence and capacity to do things like the Civic Acts from project when they get up to eighth grade and have really powerful projects there. So there's student involvement and decision making at every level of the organization but I think some of the most powerful and what the kids have told us is the most powerful experience with that is when it hits the classroom level or the school level. One another example, at Brackett this year we had a new school council. And that school council had a lot of impact on the sort of environment of the school. They had a lot of initiatives that were new that they rolled out as student leaders. And so having more opportunities at the school level too for students to say, design Audison Day or design workshops or opportunities for them to connect with their teachers in a more informal environment or shape what the advisory lessons look like. The more of that we can do, the more the students are going to feel like this school is not there for them, it's there by them and with them and designed with them at the table. Because then it creates that sense of belonging that we were talking about when they are there at the table and doing and that they can bring themselves who they are into all of that. That's amazing. How do you plan to address the evolving educational landscape technology curriculum? We talked about curriculum a little bit. I think I really wanna emphasize the impact of the current events and what's happening, especially in regards to diversity, equity and inclusion and how it feels like we just come off of this pandemic and it feels like people are really forgetting, right? What transpired during that time? I think those things were happening. It's just that the pandemic it just really kind of unearthed it. And it just feels like people are just going back to status quo. What are your thoughts on that? I think that it is increasingly challenging to be in roles like ours and in roles like teachers roles. Trying very hard to center the humanity of the work that we do every day, right? We are shaping future humans who are going to be members of our society and we are needing to teach them in many cases how to hold a lot of different truths together at the same time that often feel conflicting and that media and social media and television media will say there are sides. There's this side and that side. And I think that the more we speak in size, the more we or our society or any of the messages that we send out to students polarize us or the more we model that polarization, the less likely we are to create citizens who understand how to deeply connect with people who may not share their same viewpoint as they have who are different from them, who look different from them, who speak different from them. And so one of the things I really value about Arlington is that this is a town that values diversity, equity, inclusion has shown that through how it spends its dollars and that we have a populace here in town that really care deeply about one another when crisis hits, we know we can count on one another here. And I've really leaned on that in conversations about DEI that can get polarizing and can get polarized even here locally. And the more we can use that as educators as an opportunity to say, here's what I'm taking from this hot topic. Here's what I believe is going on here. What do you think and hold space for people to have an honest conversation about what they think is going on there? The further we're gonna get, one example of this happening this year was that we had a curriculum challenge come up surrounding the human growth and development curriculum, our puberty curriculum that we teach. And the community got very involved in this discussion. And we had a lot of community members who very much felt as though their identities were coming into question or were being attacked or weren't gonna be represented in the curriculum. And we had community members who were concerned about the way we're conveying certain content and who had questions about that. And being able to answer questions and engage in dialogue and validate every single human being who walks through our doors, our staff members, our students who identify as LGBTQIA plus, we need to be able to do all of those things as a school system. And that can be a tough balance to strike in a highly polarized and politicized space and in a society that has a lot of media messages that go out that deepen that polarization. So I think continuing to, and our senior leadership team does this, we practice this as much as we can with our leaders. And I think our teachers work very hard in classrooms to set up spaces where everybody can feel seen and heard and where everybody's identities can be represented. We're gonna keep doing that because that is the most important thing for us to do. There is disagreement. We need to lay that on the table and surface it and process through it and practice sharing how we feel about what somebody else might say or how it impacts us based on where we're coming from. The only way to do that is to have trust in one another and to know one another and strengthening that trust with the community is the top priority. That's the growth. Yep, totally. Yeah, we're going there thinking. So one question is, how do you maintain a healthy work-life balance? Say healthy. I just got back from vacation with my family. I have two little kids and they're my pride and joy and my whole heart. I really, when I am with them, try to turn the volume down as much as I can on Arlington as much as I love everybody here and spend my time with them. They are into so many activities right now and I'm hitting that part of parent where I'm a chauffeur driving everyone around everywhere. What's the schedule? Yeah, they bring me great joy, watching them learn new things, brings me a lot of joy and helps balance me out. The relationships I have with our team here in Arlington, we now have a reshaped cabinet team. We've restructured some of the leadership roles in the district and I think are really well set up to have the capacity to move together towards that shared vision. And I know that you're asking a question about sort of personal work life balance but that helps a lot when you have a lot of trust in the team that surrounds you and you can delegate and know that we're one group headed towards one goal that makes a really big difference too. Yeah, that is huge. That's why you could go on vacation and feel like, yes, that's great. I also like to run and sometimes read, I love to read and just finding the time. And so, right? You do so. I do so, I've taken a break from sewing to do some knitting. I can only do one. One or the other? At a time and very slowly. I wanna get back into crocheting because I used to crochet. Oh, it's so relaxing. I used to do hats and the scarves and things like that. There's a lot I used to do. Yeah. It's good for the brain. Yes. And the hands busy. Yes, yeah. What is on your reading list? What is on my reading list? I'm reading Coherence by Michael Fulin right now. It's a book that John Mehta, who is a professor at Harvard, does a lot of work around organizational leadership, has recommended to our leadership team. So I'm reading that right now about sort of coherence in systems and how systems establish sort of a coherent sense of identity and shared vision mission. And I am also reading, oh shoot, I'm gonna forget the name of the other book. Inward. Inward's the name of the book. I can't remember the author, but it's a collection of poems. Oh. And it's about sort of self reflection and self empowerment. And I'm also, I've been reading some text about sort of prioritizing your time and making sure that you engage in rest and sort of how much power that can provide, especially for teams and especially for folks who are coming from spaces that might have been historically marginalized and the messages that are received often are be more, do more, constantly give your whole self into work and how actually damaging that can be to the work itself. Because there's no, you don't have rest because what I'm learning is that the more you rest, the more creativity kind of gets birthed out of that when you can rest. Yeah, what is, the last question we have is what is that inspirational motivational song that you have, that you know, it's that type of day and you're like, oh, I just, let me just. Lately? This changes for me. Lately it's lean on me. And I think it's because, I think it's because it's been played a few times at a couple of conferences that we've had from spring into the summer. But yeah, that one's been motivational lately, especially as I think we welcome new team members on. The one thing I want are new principals and our new senior leadership team members and any new families and new students to our community to know is that you can lean on us and that we got you. And like how do you show that quickly? Like right when somebody's walking in the door. This is why we need a welcome center, right? So that people know where to go and that somebody's gonna take care of them. And if I don't have the answer or whoever they're talking to doesn't have the answer, they're gonna go find it for you and that you can lean on us. I like that. Well, thank you Liz for being my first guest for this season. It should be, it should be you since we're getting into this five-year strategic plan so we should find out where we're heading in the next couple of months. So I just want to thank you all for being part of our topic today and our conversation with Dr. Liz Holman and we will be back with you soon.