St. Joseph Schools gain necessary feedback at community input sessions

By Jazmine Knight

The St. Joseph School District will be heading into their next board meeting with tons of local opinions after they completed a series of community input sessions.

Spring Garden, Bode and Robidoux Middle School each hosted an hour-long session where parents, staff and local residents could voice their thoughts and opinions about the district’s search for a new superintendent.

The Missouri School Board Association (MSBA) led the guided discussion where they asked residents what traits or professional experience would they like to see in the district’s next leader.

Cydney Puckett, graduate of the St. Joseph School District, says she’s been concerned with the direction of the district for awhile and wanted to find out how residents can get involved.

“In this community, it seems like we have negative voices that are the loudest when there’s so much good going on within the school district,” she said.

For Puckett, it’s important that the district hires a superintendent that is trustworthy and can address the community’s specific needs.

“We have high free and reduced lunch rates. We have students who go to title one schools,” said Puckett.

St. Joseph resident, Dick Shot, says he has worked in education for 32 years. Shot was impressed with the district’s college placement programs, however, he too was concerned with the lack of support for free and reduced lunch families.

“We know that the system here is about 70% free and reduced,” he said.

Additionally he says the next superintendent should address test scores. He believes this can be attributed to the school system, not the teachers.

“We had a 70% failure rate in our algebra one state test,” said Shot.

He would like to see students and parents get necessary resources earlier in their school career instead of waiting until it may be too late. Shot also suggests examining the teachers at each school and potentially taking some of the veteran teachers and putting them in the lower performing schools.

He hopes the new superintendent is someone who has experience dealing with situations that are similar to the ones the St. Joseph School District faces.

“They need to come from a school system that’s at least 10,000+. We need a large system,” he said. “The second thing is that the system where he’s coming from has to have a free and reduced population of at least 50% and higher.”

He expects the next candidate to come in knowing what the district’s challenges are prior to their first day in office.

“We want them to know on their first day that there are issues that we have in terms of attendance, in terms of graduation rate,” he said. “But we also want him to come from a system where he did that and succeeded.”

Former SJSD board member, Kenneth Reeder, says he’s glad MSBA is involved with the search but he still has concerns with the long range plan and future tax increases. He hopes the next superintendent can focus more on student issues before moving onto bigger agendas.

“[On] the attendance issue, we need to be more hard core,” Reeder said. “One of the biggest attendance rate problems was kindergarten…you can’t call it a parent problem, you need to work on what’s making that happen.”

Reeder would like to see a non-resident fill the position. He believes much of Edgar’s success can be attributed to his experience in other districts prior to coming to St. Joseph.

“Somebody coming in from the outside, one advantage is they aren’t going to have the normal St. Joe baggage,” said Reeder.

One thing Puckett appreciated with current superintendent, Gabe Edgar, was his early intervention approach to figure out what’s effective and what is not.

“Kind of like what the first lady does. She picks an issue and focuses on that,” she said. “I liked seeing him think about how we can change things in the district to try something different and see the results of that.”

The next step for the St. Joseph School Board is to use the community feedback to create a job description tailored to the communities needs. Applications are expected to open October 16.