By Tyler Dahlgren

It’s 10:30 in the morning on a Thursday in early September, 15 minutes into a panel discussion at ESU 10’s Principal Meeting, and my hand is teetering on the edge of an emergency-level cramp.

NCSA Ambassador Dr. Cinde Wendell was invited to be a part of the conversation on school culture, so I figured I’d take some notes, shoot some photos and leave with a nice little blog post about a nice little morning in Kearney.

Then Denise O’Brien, who in addition to panel moderator serves as Teaching & Learning Director at ESU 10, asked her first question. Wendell, a retired school administrator who’s spent the last six years travelling Nebraska advocating and rooting for public schools, led off by knocking her response out of the park. Ord Elementary principal Doug Smith and Central Valley High School principal Todd Beck did the same.

That would become a theme that carried on throughout the morning and right on into Dr. Steve Joel’s early-afternoon presentation.

My goal was to jot down some highlights from the hour-long session. The more they talked, the more impossible a feat that became. Around the 15-minute mark, I gave up and hit record.

I should have known better. These are Nebraska educators, after all. Ask them about the pride they harbor for their school districts, and they can go on and on. Rightfully so.

For six years I’ve visited Nebraska’s public schools. I’ve seen some amazing things. In fact, after the meeting I approached Smith and lined up a stop at Ord Elementary for one of their daily morning assemblies. You can find that feature online early next week.

Big thank you to ESU 10 for allowing us to be a part of the day!

ESUs are an integral part of what makes Nebraska’s public schools successful, and professional development events like September 8th’s Principals Meeting are invaluable opportunities to learn, collaborate and network. The benefactor, of course, are the students, and that’s what it’s all about.

These are snippets of full answers. I tried to keep up….On to the highlights!

Wendell: “I have not been on the ground level for 11 years, but I have been rooting for you all for the past 11 years. My perspective is really old, but some things are timeless. When I think back to the things that I’ve done, teaching, special education director, school psychologist, SPED director, principal and then superintendent, building a strong culture always is about working with people. It always comes back to that. It’s hard work, but it’s about doing what you love with a passion and caring for all the people around you while you do it. Relationships, relationships, relationships. And communication. It’s a pretty simple formula.”

Beck: “Your idea, your picture of what you want your culture to look like and what you want for your kids always needs to stay in the forefront of your minds. What do I want to see our students be able to do? What skills are we teaching them? What’s happening in our classrooms that’s creating them and preparing them? Those are the questions you need to be able to have conversations about. And they’re not always easy.”

Wendell: “It’s always about the kids. It always needs to come back to what’s best for our kids.”

Smith: “Something I heard while in college that has stuck with me is ‘Hire good people, and make them better.’ If you can do those two things, and work your tail off on everything else, you’re going to be alright. Well, I’m still really, really working on the ‘make them better’ part, but I tell you what, we’ve been fortunate to have a lot of good people apply for jobs in our district.”

Wendell: “I never went wrong with hiring attitude, passion, and work ethic. I found if you have those things, you can teach the rest, but it’s really hard to teach passion. So find those people and give them opportunities to make themselves better, because they will.”

Beck: “We’re in the business of creating relationships. So when a candidate comes in and they haven’t made an attempt to create a relationship between you and them, it’s probably not going to happen. Take Mr. Carlson for example. By the time I was done with my conversation with him, by the time we hired him, I felt like I knew him. I felt like he could be a friend. I could see the way he interacted with everybody in the building, how he looked at the kids and what he thought of the activities and how he handled himself. Like Cinde said, you can teach people skills, but it’s very difficult to teach a candidate how to relate to people. We’ve had some very intelligent people struggle with being good teachers. So that relationship component, our school culture is all about that. It’s in the way we interact with each other.”

Smith: “We trust our older kids, our fifth and sixth-graders, to model what it means to be responsible and to show those kindergartners how to do things the right way in our school.”

Beck: “The decisions we make are so many times reactive, not proactive. We have all of these rules and all of these things that we don’t want the kids to do. But maybe we should really be thinking about what we want our kids to be doing, and then make our decisions from that perspective.”

Wendell: “They all play in to each other, too, the culture of your community, the culture of your school, and also the culture of your board. That’s huge. Your board has to buy in to what you’re doing. They guide policy and all of those important things. Having strong relationships with your board members is so important.”

Smith: “Todd talked about balance, and I’m going to keep going off that. Balance is one of the keys we talk about with our students. We really stress three things, and that’s having a strong body, a growing brain and a happy heart.”

Beck: “We do what we do out of love and we do it out of what is best for the kids. And in the end you hope everything turns out the way you hoped it would turn out. And the hardest part about education is not knowing if it did until several years down the road. You might not know if you made the right decision for two years. But then you have a person come up and say hi, and ask ‘Do you remember me?’, and that’s an amazing feeling. It’s funny, but the kids who still keep in touch with me are usually ones who spent a lot of time in my office.”