“Every staff member is an educator regardless of their role because we all influence the educational outcomes for students in some capacity,” Clardy said. “We are all focused on hearing the staff voice to make informed decisions, but also genuinely caring for one another. We’ve built systems of collaboration called PLCs where every Monday, regardless of your role, you are able to engage and learn alongside a peer. Instead of one person carrying the whole load alone, we now have multiple adults in a shared space working on behalf of our students and working on behalf of one another.”

While Clardy does make the hard decisions as the chief administrator, he also works hard to make sure they are the right decisions by engaging everyone in the decision-making process, making sure every voice is heard.

“We use a distributive leadership model whether you are in the superintendent’s office or you are at the building level, you have a voice in leadership decisions,” Clardy said. “No one wants to be in a corporation where there is a single person making all the decisions and you have no influence on the things that are decided. Here we understand that the magic of education happens in the classroom. It doesn’t happen at a remote location. We want to make sure that we are elevating their voices, understanding what allows them to be the best practitioners in their class and what helps them feel valued. The outcome is how we make leadership decisions together. I think shared leadership is a great way to distribute leadership. That is a primary focus here in our district.”

The Verona Area School District id a forward-looking district that works to deal with problems and issues before they happen.

“Verona Area School District doesn’t use the ‘I word’” Clardy said with a chuckle. “We don’t do initiatives. We are so intentional in our programming and we believe in having a singular focus. For us that’s on literacy. And with that singular focus, we are ensuring that every student gets a little bit better each day. We think about that from a staff perspective. Our staff doesn’t have to worry about a new initiative or the next shiny object. They know exactly what deal we are trying to develop together and we all can work in coherence and alliance instead of worrying about will 2024 be this initiative or will 2025 be that initiative. We always have one singular focus and that is to develop high literacy skills, build strong strategic thinkers and our efforts are invested in children.”

Verona Area schools has been ahead of the curve on the literacy issue, which has become a hot topic — and a hot political issue — during the past two years. Verona is already dealing with it.

“The legislative rule about a law that was put into place wasn’t why we were focused on literacy,” Clardy emphasized. “We’ve been focused on literacy for three straight years now. And the practice of what is called The Science of Reading, which is really a phonics-based approach to reading, we were already doing it. The only thing that the legislative law Act 20 did was speed up the process for us in terms of the resources that we were purchasing because we were scheduled to purchase them next year and we had to move that up and purchase them this year. But as far as our educational practice delivery goes, the Verona Area School District was already in that space. So basically the state followed after us. If they release the money that will support the resources and support our educators being able to do professional development, that would be excellent.”

Verona public school’s foundational, forward thinking approach has shown encouraging results.

“Our annual report shows some significant gains in literacy,” Clardy said. “We saw some gains in reading and math. When you talk about the three years, we’ve moved the needle a lot. We’re still working and we’re seeing growth in our focus groups. Whether it’s focus groups around racial lines or student ability or language, we still see some disproportionate outcomes that we are trying to close. For us, it’s not just good enough to be growing. We want to make sure that everyone’s growing and meeting the very high level of standards that we expect for student performance. And it should be regardless of your demographic background.”

The districts’ forward-thinking approach has paid off in terms of the financial status of the district.

“We’re not going out to referendum this fall,” Clardy said. “Our community really showed up at the polls and blessed us with the opportunity for a referendum for 2022 and that was a reoccurring referendum that was operations-based that really allowed us to focus in on hiring and retaining the best and most qualified staff around the area. And we’ve been able to really close a lot of the teacher shortage gaps that you see around the state and in essence the country because of that investment from our community. Our board of education has also been very fiscally responsible with the prepayment of debt on the high school especially as we were in a good financial position not to have to go back to our tax base again because of some very strategic budgeting with the support of our board of education. And we do know that because we are a significantly growing district that there is the likelihood of needing to build most likely an elementary school in the near future. So we wanted to position ourselves to go to referendum for that and not continuously asking our community to approve a new referendum year after year.”

Technology is a blessing and a curse for in-person secondary schools. While few elementary school students have cell phones, that isn’t the case for middle and high schools. The middle school has a policy of “off and away” on the middle school campus. It is more complex for high schools that have a “responsible use” policy.

“There are expectations that they are not to have their phones out in class,” Clardy said. “We are going to reinforce this with expectations. If it moves to the spot of repeating offenses, obviously there could be consequences. But we are trying to reinforce how important the educational process is and cell phones can be a barrier to our students accessing solid information from their teachers as well as their peers and can actually get in the way of learning.”

The schools must also deal with social media, which is basically blocked when people are on school grounds.

“When it comes to social media, overall, we have pretty strict responsible use of these in terms of no bullying or interactions,” Clardy said. “Mostly, we are really trying to teach that social media is a huge part of our society world-wide. Instead of completely kicking it out, we’re trying to help people understand when to use it, when not to use it and how to deduce good information from bad information.”

Artificial Intelligence, AI, is taking the world by storm, impacting everything including the school environment.

“This year we added AI to our policies because that is a newer facet of how social media is used,” Clardy said. “We still want to have learning integrity in making sure students are producing their own work. We’ve done workshops with our staff and students in how to appropriately use AI. It can be a tool when used appropriately that makes learning more efficient. We just want to make sure there is no copying or things that are against the integrity of the work that our students are producing.”

Through shared decision-making and leadership, Dr. Tremayne Clardy is guiding Verona area schools to a future where all students are valued and achieved.