An Interview with Dr. Antoine Reed, Superintendent of the Sun Prairie School District: Lessons on the Streets, the Field and the Classroom (Part 1 of 2)
Dr. Antoine Reed has used education and a myriad of academic and non-academic experiences to become an effective school superintendent.
by Jonathan Gramling
Dr. Antoine Reed took over as the superintendent of the Sun Prairie Area School District on July 1st although he got a running start by beginning his employment back in May. Reed is an engaging person with a myriad of education and experience that will allow him to tackle the many issues facing public education and the district.
Reed grew up on Chicago’s west side, but then the family moved to the south side. And no matter what was going on in the streets, it was what was going on in the home that kept Reed focused on his academic journey.
“I want to say that my mom was always the educator, whether she was an actual teacher or not,” Reed said. “She was always into education. I remember being younger and she was giving me the calculator and taught me math. She always kept me ahead. And she was really an informed parent no matter if she had to work nights or she was working days and my dad was working. She had that educating mindset as a parent. So I was always raised a certain type of way to respect teachers. She was old school. And so if I didn’t do that, it might have gone the wrong way. I’ll just say it that way. My parents grew up in a tougher time when they understood that the racial divide and barriers were still in existence. And so they set us up to accelerate.”
Reed ended up p[laying football and track in high school and got a football scholarship to Missouri State.
“That’s where I played football,” Reed said. “Looking back, I signed with the first place that I visited. I didn’t have a lot of guidance. I should have listened to people. I had multiple scholarships leaving high school and junior college. I just ended up signing with the first place I visited. I remember Morgan State was like, ‘Hey, you didn’t even accept our invitation.’ I didn’t know any better. But Missouri State how we were going to do things and have fun. I just signed. It was a great experience. I was a little guy and I didn’t want to get hit. That is how football worked for me. And it got me to where I had to go.”
While Reed had aspirations to play pro ball, an injury during the pro camp ended those dreams and pointed him in the right direction: education.
“It was a great experience,” Reed said about his time at Missouri State. “College is an experience that I wish every family pushes their kids to experience in some form or fashion because you learn how to socialize, how to understand culture, how to look at how communities work through the lens of a college atmosphere. It’s different. You learn how to be a young adult in that college atmosphere. There is so much that goes along with college. I do want to push that. I want that door to be open. If a kid says, ‘I don’t want to take loans. I don’t want to do that,’ that’s fine. But I want the door to be open. Many times, our students are not becoming scholars in the sense that we aren’t telling them that they can be a scholar. I want them to believe they are a scholar from Day One. I want them to make choices because they have all the doors open to them. They can go to college. They can go into the armed services. They can do whatever they want to do. But it should be their choice and not that the door is closed and they just go through the door that is open.”
When her returned to Chicago after graduation, Reed got a job as his alma mater, Harper High, coaching.
“The experience of college in Missouri was phenomenal,” Reed said. “And I always thought, ‘Why don’t the kids where I am from experience this?’ I had not seen the demographics of race in my own area and you are within a one block radius, there are a lot of things going on around you that are tough to navigate. So you don’t get to experience culture. So I wanted people to see that college is cool. They should experience college. Coach Kerr told me to coach. I coached football, track and wrestling. We had some really good teams. I was able to help out other coaches and get a lot of kids Division I scholarships to places like Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern and you name it.”
Reed also taught gym class.
“Coach Jones was also a gym teacher,” Reed said. “He helped me get my teacher’s certification while he covered my classes for me. He said, ‘You need to be a teacher.’ And so I began teaching. I ended up teaching math and special education. I would be in the PE classes as much as I could. It was just fun. It was my old high school. I’m back teaching my own siblings.”
Eventually, Reed needed to branch out away from home and got a job as an assistant principal at an elementary school.
“I began to see that education moves people when they are young,” Reed said. “You can turn them a lot more when they are younger. The kid I get in high school is harder to turn. You can do it. But it’s going to take a lot of work. There are a lot of things that you need to unpack. I was fortunate to become an assistant principal and then a principal of a charter school. And it was a high-performing charter school. It was the first time that I saw a lot of diversity. There were Hispanics, Whites, Blacks and kids from other countries. And it was a high performing school. And I wanted to take a high performing school and make it even better. I was able to do that.”
Reed then took over at Perspectives Charter High School.
“Anthony Davis, the basketball player, went to Perspectives and it was really political,” Reed said with a laugh. “It was All-Star weekend and he and LeBron James would get into it. LeBron had a school in his city. And Anthony Davis had Perspectives. And so they were competitive in how their charter schools were better. Obviously ours was much better than LaBron’s; I’ll just say that.”
When COVID hit in 2020, Reed took a job with a school district in South Bend, IN.
“They were doing some turnaround work in some of the toughest schools in South Bend,” Reed said. “It was called an Empowerment Zone. And so I was able to get out there and do some of that work. And I think at that point, I started to think, ‘I want to be a superintendent. I can do this on a larger scale. I want to impact how the systems work.’”
