Edsell
Clark-Pleasant students and staff head back to school this week with a new superintendent at the helm.
Tim Edsell took the job as superintendent of Clark-Pleasant Community School Corp. earlier this month. He came from Indian Creek schools, where he had been the superintendent since 2014.
Originally from Pennsylvania, Edsell began his career as a math teacher and later worked as a principal and superintendent in several Indiana school districts. He also brings higher education experience serving as an adjunct professor for Indiana Wesleyan and the University of Southern Indiana.
During his first week on the job at Clark-Pleasant, the Daily Journal asked Edsell questions about his goals and plans for the school district. Here is what he said, edited for length and grammar:
What drew you to Clark-Pleasant?
The biggest interest was to come back to a large school setting. I was at Indian Creek, as you know, for nine years. Prior to that, I was superintendent at Anderson schools, which had 9,000 students.
I would like to stay here for as long as possible … I love Johnson County, and I love what I have heard and what I’ve observed with my own eyes, about Clark-Pleasant schools in their pursuit of excellence in having good, strong academics and having strong athletics and having strong fine arts. That’s what families look for when they’re trying to figure out what school to enroll their child in is great academics, great fine arts, great athletics. Because we want children involved in as much as what they can be involved in inside and outside the classroom.
What are some of your goals for the school district?
The first goal that I have as the new superintendent is to build as many relationships and rapport and trust as possible with all of our different stakeholders. When I say that word, that’s from our students, to our employees, to our business partnerships to our parents.
That’s my transition plan for the next 90 days to 180 days — to strategically make sure that I am visible, have those conversations, schedule those meetings in person, virtually, you know, however, I can establish trust as the leader with our families and our staff and our students, so that we can look at our strategic plan and say, “this is the direction we’re headed because it’s our mission, our vision, it’s our values.” And all that starts with what I call a listen and learn to gather as much information to figure out what are our strengths, what are our weaknesses, what are our opportunities to grow? What roadblocks may be in our way?
How do you plan to be transparent with families about what’s going on in the schools?
We will continue to use ParentSquare as a mode of communication, social media. One thing that, again, as I get acclimated, I would try to schedule — we can call it whatever — coffee meetings, coffee chats … We’ll try to do that on a monthly basis, or whatever is going to be most efficient and productive. And so those are some immediate ways to communicate that come to mind that I think would be beneficial and hopefully well-received and well-attended.
You had some experience at Indian Creek with school construction projects. How do you think that experience prepared you for the upcoming high school project here?
What’s happening at Indian Creek, that took us several years to plan, strategize and it’s just a couple of months away from being completed. It was basically $40 million project, and it was the largest ever there. And it’s changing the footprint of that whole campus for those kids. Just like here we have a $235 million project that is academic-related, fine arts-related, and athletics-related. So it is exciting. And yet, it is stressful. And we’re just starting … We’re probably going to hopefully start the project around fall break.
It’s in phases. As you know, there’s this first phase all the way up to five phases, that’s going to be five to six years, and it’s going to be a headache. And so we’ve got to be good communicators about the headaches with respect to, it could be traffic flow or an impact inside the building that we need to make sure everyone from staff and students stay away from.
… It’s definitely a long process. Every large construction project is, but at the same time it’s really, it’s communication. It’s following the plans that are going to be finalized and taken out for bids. It’s making sure that we work with the architect, the construction manager to get the product that we want, because that’s what we’re paying for. And that’s going to impact how kids learn and hopefully attract more families because the project hits those three areas, those three prongs of what’s important about what we do in education.
There were a few high-profile incidents related to bullying and fighting at the high school and middle school last year. Is this an issue you want to see change?
What I would tell you is I want to have a lot of conversations about that with our employees, who are invested in the students and in trying to make sure that we have a safe learning environment. When you have issues like bullying and fighting, that’s got to stop. So I can tell you that as the new person coming in, we’re going to follow the law of bullying with respect to knowing the definition of it, knowing that we must conduct a full investigation and communicate to parents both of the victim and the perpetrator, trying to resolve it. Same thing with fighting — it’s important to intervene before that happens. Now, sometimes that does happen, but you’ve got to hopefully have some mechanisms in place for peer mediation for conflict resolution.
… Being the new person here, I haven’t heard of all of that yet. But again, I’ve been in this state for 30 years. And I understand that every school deals with those issues and has to constantly have them on their radar so that we are lowering those incidents to provide a good, safe environment.
Do you think mental health help has a place in public schools?
It does because it is important that we help our students who are living in a world that has a lot more challenges than it did 20, 30, 40 years ago. There’s a lot more violence, there’s a lot more issues that students see both not just at home, but you know, on social media. That is disturbing. That is challenging. Not all children come from a two-parent home in a two-parent family that is, you know, going to help them, so we have to help them too. Because our job is to educate. And if their basic needs are not met, we know the research shows they’re not going to learn effectively. So we’ve got to help them with their basic needs so that they can have good behavioral performance and needs met and academic needs met. It’s Maslow’s Hierarchy. That’s so important to understand.
With having some background working in higher education, do you have any goals to help show students different paths they can take after their K-12 education?
That’s our preeminent goal in K through 12 to prepare kids when they get to the high school level, explore different options, different plans, and different pathways. Is it in the medical field is it in the agricultural field, is it in the business field, is it military? The more we can give exposure to students to take some courses or dabble in internships or do some type of workforce learning environment or development. That’s the direction we’re headed in the state, and I know here that’s a definite goal to improve upon. Options for students to pursue a career so that they can graduate with a diploma and be successful … not every student is going to go to college or higher ed. So our goal is to prepare them so if they have likes and interests and strengths, they can get an experience to see if they like something. If they like it, great. If they don’t, then they know they can pivot, maybe pursue another avenue.
