An Interview with Dr. Antoine Reed, Superintendent of the Sun Prairie School District: Lessons on the Streets, the Field and the Classroom (Part 2 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.
Throughout his career, Reed was intentional about how the next position would prepare him for the position after that. Reed left his position in South Bend, IN and took a job in West Allis, a suburb of Milwaukee, to take a principla position.
“I went to Nathan Hale High School,” Reed said. “I was also hired at the same time for Milwaukee College Prep to be their coach of the principals. And I said, ‘This is what I like.’ I was coaching the principals. I became the principal of the high school. And I loved the work that we did there. We had some tougher situations the year before. There was a lot of fighting and hitting. That turned around fairly quickly. The year before, we had 96 fights. My year as principal, we were down to 6-7 fights. One wasn’t really a fight. The kid did a little shoulder bump. But I didn’t play with that touching. The kids saw me as a part of them. They didn’t see me as a disconnect for them. They knew that I cared about them. So I was able to hold them accountable. And it was called Care and Accountability.”
From there, Reed became Chief of Culture and Student Engagement under Superintendent Dr. Ehren Jarrett for the Rockford Public Schools. Reed had an up-close view of what it took to be a superintendent.
“He made it clear that I was going to be able to do everything I needed to do when I left this role to become a superintendent of a district, whether it was dealing with the budgets, curriculum and instruction or coaching,” Reed said. “Dr. Jarrett just let me do the thing. He was so confident in what he had done and how he had navigated. He was able to put me in a situation to be successful. I have to give credit to Dr. Jarrett. He really molded and motivated me to be a better me, to show up a certain way, to show up prepared.” While Reed would have been in a position to compete to be Jarrett’s replacement, he jumped at the opportunity to become superintendent of the Sun Prairie Area School District.
“I got the opportunity to become the superintendent of the most beautiful place in America with the most beautiful minds,” Reed exclaimed. “The way that we think in Sun Prairie is different than anywhere else. You can be in Sun Prairie and see an older White woman jogging with an older Black woman. And they look like they have been best friends for life. And to see us try to cure things that other places have talked about but have not addressed is what makes Sun Prairie the most important dynamic place that I’ve lived anywhere. And I am fortunate to be here. This is something that was an opportunity. Everybody has challenges. Every place has challenges. But I saw through the challenges and I saw the inspiration of the people and how they navigate each other. And I saw this sense of urgency behind the scholar. And I saw that we had all of the pieces of the puzzle there. We just needed somebody with the skill set to bring them together. And I had all of those skill sets that I had in my past. I am able to puzzle things together here. That’s what makes this the perfect fit. I turned down other places because I needed the fit. And Sun Prairie is the fit for me.”
Reed leads a school district that serves 8,600 students, a school district that adds students every school year. And Reed celebrates the diverse student body.
“We don’t just celebrate culture during the month. We celebrate culture all year round. And that’s what makes us a little different. We don’t wait for Asian American Heritage Month to celebrate the Hmong families. We are celebrating throughout the year. We don’t wait for Black History Month or Hispanic Heritage Month. We are celebrating culture as a norm. And we want all cultures to show up and show out in Sun Prairie.”
Reed is committed to making sure that every Sun Prairie student succeeds in their education. And that involves understanding the factors that allow students from each culture succeed and the impediments that they may face to succeed.
“I think you do have to make sure that you are mindful that all cultures exist,” Reed said. “I will say there is a subset of scholars that life looks different for them if you don’t get it correct at this level. And our population that goes to prison or have negativity happen, we can’t be naive to what that looks like. If you don’t win with these scholars while they are babies in transition to where they have to go, we fail them as a society. I think other cultures are seeing different results. In particular the African American population needs that intentional focus on their aspirations. They need you to make sure that you have put them in a situation where they can compete. Systems were not likely built around their strengths. So we have to make sure that our training helps them to become stronger.”
Reed’s goal is the develop students who are empowered and engaged, capable in succeeding in many different environments.
“The focus is the same,” Reed said. “High level, high quality education for each scholar. I think the manner we are using is a little new. We’re using a thing called BAGSs, Behaviors, Attendance, Grades, Social and Emotional Well-being and a small s for scores. We feel that the scholar BAGSs is a portrait of who they are. And they will have test scores that are high. But they also will be good people, good humans for society. They also will be able to resolve conflict peacefully because behavior for us is about leadership. We’re teaching them to behave as leaders. Attendance is not just getting to school. It’s about how engaged you are and what is going on while you are in school. And grades is not about penalizing but taking risks. Are you able to take risks? Fall off your bike and get back up and let’s go on a ride together. And can you balance the technology, resolve conflict peacefully, and know how to get help when you need it. That is a well-rounded human.”
It is important to Reed that the students have meaningful human-to-human contact with teachers and other students during their educational careers. Reed observed that COVID-19 has a negative impact on those contacts, something that schools continue to recover from.
“When you look at enrollment in sports and clubs, the energy to do things after COVID may have gone away a little bit,” Reed said. “Prior to COVID, you saw play an hour a day. Get out, experience and explore. COVID isolated people. It set you down, put you on TV. Parents were like, ‘Okay, I’m good. Take the phone. Do what you need to do with it.’ We’re slowly getting scholars away from that. The freshmen who are playing at your high schools now are the ones that experienced COVID. So you had a drop-off in participation in athletics and things. This is the year that we saw a little drop-off in our football participation because these are the scholars who were in 4-5th grade during COVID who are now freshmen. We’re seeing the effects that COVID had continue to ripple in different ways in education.”
In many ways, COVID-19 made students overly reliant on their cellphones and technology. While Reed appreciates the rapid advances in technology like cell phone capability and artificial intelligence, he feels that it needs to enhance the human touch and not replace it. For the 2026-2027 school year, cellphones are not allowed in any Sun Prairie school.
“We’re definitely with the no cellphones during the school day,” Reed emphasized. “But what you have to do when you take the cellphone away is make sure that education is engaging. I’ve been in classes where a kid is not thinking about their phone because the instruction is so engaging. But secondarily, when you have those larger blocks of time, we have to make sure that teachers are planning, and engaging the scholar. I want to go back to the days that when we go on trips and education is something that you touch, feel and interact with and not just something you take a lecture away from. I think the more that we make engagement a priority, putting that cellphone down can be dangerous because of the amount of time that kids are putting into technology is reforming their brain and how they focus and function. So their attention span is closing, so we want them to lock in. That can be tough. We have put cellphones up. Out of sight, out of mind during the operations of the school day. If the teacher is using technology, that’s okay. It has to be intentional. But we want to make sure that we are following the guidelines that those cellphone need to be up during the school day.”
Another challenge is the rapid advance of AI. AI can be beneficial as well as destructive. It is a matter of harnessing AI for the benefit of the students.
“AI is evolving so fast that the policies are not catching up with the practice,” Reed obnserved. “We are catching that plagiarism and things can happen. But there are anti-plagiarism mechanisms in place. But I believe what we are going to do with technology and AI is take the good of it. Use it to have differentiated instruction where you can see instruction from your favorite movie character. Use it to create platforms for kids to create movies. Use it in the way they use flip schools where our technology can allow our kids to see the curriculum that we are going to teach in advance because a confident kid walks in class saying, ‘I saw this before.’ And we just connect the dots. I think that many of our kids who struggle, it’s the first time that they are seeing things live. If you are a basketball player, but you never played ball and I throw you in a game live — that’s what the classroom is — you are going to be really hesitant. You don’t know the rules, the policies and stuff. We can use technology to help us jump ahead and use the good of AI to help us be creative and make education fun. It’s not going away. The internet didn’t go away and it exponentially grew to where it is today. And AI, whether we like it or not, is going to be so embedded in what our scholars do in the future that we have to make sure that our policies and practices actually catch up to what is happening with AI as a tool.”
Again, it’s all about preparing students for an ever-changing world.
“Things that take us 100 years to evolve, we can learn them in 30 days,” Reed said. “So what we have to do as a society is invest back in being great humans, good people to each other. There was a time that it was okay to look out after your neighbor and be a good person. It was okay for your family to lead that aspiration. So I believe now more than ever with the uncertainty of what goes on around you, we have to reground ourselves as families. We need our families back at the education table. We need to work as a community again. And we have to be okay with sometimes being uncomfortable is growth. You can isolate yourself in your own space. But then eventually, you have to come out. And when you come out, where is the world that you are facing and where is the world that you want your scholars to see in the future? We have to get back to those human skills, those soft skills because our mind is changing.”
Just as Dr. Antoine Reed was intentional about his own education, Reed is intentional on elevating each Sun Prairie student to be their best person be it academic or person-to-person. He is prepaqring them to be 21st Century citizens. The future looks bright.