On Outreach & Training: The Walk to the Baldridge Gold Award
By Arlana Bedard
Member district Meridian CUSD 223 will receive the Baldridge Gold award in September. This honor signifies being “the best of the best” in the profession from the only federally recognized award program for organizational performance for healthcare, non-profits, and schools.
John Smith, School Board President, and PJ Caposey, Superintendent, were interviewed by Arlana Bedard, IASB Director of Outreach & Training Director, to share their story about the process and resulting recognition.
Smith, Caposey, and Meridian CUSD 223 are also presenting at the 2024 Joint Annual Conference in November.
Arlana Bedard (AB): Why did you pursue Baldridge?
PJ Caposey (PJC): When I arrived in Meridian, I was the fifth superintendent in three years. John had just become the board president. There was board turnover at that point as well. I’d always fancied myself a systems thinker, but I didn’t know where to start. I found the Baldridge Framework for Excellence in Education, a robust framework, based in research and tested, from which we could strive and model our improvement efforts. I remember when I first started sharing it with the board as a strategy base for us to move forward a decade ago. After three years, we wrote the application. We were able to get a site visit that first time and were awarded a bronze, which is the lowest award level.
John Smith (JS): PJ has always been someone who pushes the envelope. We gave him free rein to pursue the framework and come back to us with his plan going forward.
PJC: Free rein includes discretionary spending, as appropriate, to get there.
AB: Has the nature of your relationship changed as you’ve moved through this process?
PJC: The Board is always cheering me on. If I screw up, it’s ok. But if I sit still, it’s not ok. I’ve always known that they’re rooting for me and that they’re going to allow me to pursue big, audacious things and not hold it against me if we don’t quite get there. Our relationship is good, stable, and full of trust. I think Baldridge is an example of that. I don’t know if it’s a driver though.
JS: The implementation of processes and the establishment of norms has allowed us to expand the level of trust dramatically and fairly quickly. When you have norms and can hold each other accountable, it makes the trust level stronger.
AB: What does Baldridge Gold represent for you?
PJC: For me, [it means] we’re doing the right work in the right way. It gives us a little more freedom to focus on the results. Now we have to graduate from process to performance.
AB: How has your organization changed since you’ve been on this path?
PJC: The alignment is from the strategic plan that drives everything. While there were pockets of excellence before, everything is in alignment now. I think that there is a high level of clarity among the board and leadership as to what we value and how we make decisions. We’re somewhat boringly predictable as a board and as a leadership team.
JS: Well-said. It’s just a consistent, continual commitment to the plans that have been put in place. We can grow from there, and we don’t have to start over each time, but it’s not the end of the journey.
AB: How has this journey impacted your community?
PJC: In no way could they articulate it because we don’t talk about it. They don’t realize everything we’ve done in terms of our school improvement. They don’t correlate that to Baldridge because that’s just the way we do business. I would say that hopefully they would tell you that the culture, systems, and performance of the district are dramatically different and that it is better.
JS: The community, the staff, everyone sees the demonstration and commitment to the work that we say that we’re going to do.
AB: How did you make this happen?
PJC: We employed a consultant, Joe Kilbride, who helped us to distill all the things you’re supposed to do down to 20 key approaches, which we prioritized. Once we started with the higher leverage ones, the lower leverage ones took care of themselves. That was step one. Step two was the actual writing of the application. Joe Mullikin, our former assistant superintendent, did the heavy lifting with the writing. Stage three was getting the feedback from the experts who visited us for a week.
AB: What has been your biggest challenge?
PJC: Money. We couldn’t do some of the things that we wanted to do. For example, when we first applied, we really wanted to develop a professional coaching program because job-embedded professional development has the highest rate of return on investment. We couldn’t afford it at first. By the time we applied, we rolled it out because we made it a priority over time.
AB: What has been the board’s role?
JS: The board’s role is simple because this is staff work. The board knows their role. We have supported, encouraged, and continued to pursue outside of the education box.
PJC: But I think he’s underplaying their significance. Our board has earned IASB School Board Governance Recognition for eight consecutive years. Our board president and secretary have received awards. The basis of everything in Baldridge is largely the strategic plan, which is the board’s document. The board’s support of the process and doing their job well has been an incredible enabler.
AB: What’s your next milestone?
JS: I think the next milestone is to get the next superintendent in and maintain the trajectory that we’re on. It will be a piece that they know is important to us because it maintains what the staff has been working toward for the past 10 years.
PJC: I would agree. The next layer is the national award competition. We are ready to go onto the next level based on process.
AB: What advice would you give to our colleagues?
PJC: The alignment piece would be where I would start. When you have a bad back, your whole life sucks. If the organization isn’t aligned, there are going to be pain points all over the place. Having the courage to call ourselves out when we’re not in line would be the first step and that it’s nobody’s fault. It’s not going to happen in a year.
JS: That establishment of the norms and then staying in lock-step with those norms as you go forward. It’s difficult but it’s simple. If you do your job and you stay focused on what it is your role is and you allow the people that you put in place to do their role, it becomes much easier. It doesn’t feel like a journey; it feels like a walk together.
AB: Anything else that you’d like to highlight or include?
PJC: Sometimes people see that there is a fee associated with it, and then I explain we had industry experts come live with us for a week and provide us with 35 pages of consulting feedback. That’s the cheapest consulting you’re ever going to find.
JS: One of our board members is an attorney. When she got the 35-page report, she had no idea that this was the magnitude that was going to come from the site visit.