Interview with Blake Hazelton
1
Brennon Sapp
A500
Instructor (Dr. Whitaker)
September 20, 2004
Interview with Dr. Blake Haselton
(transcription)
Interviewer:
I first want to thank you for allowing me to do this interview. I assume their are not many who get the privilege of speaking to you in this type of setting.
Dr. Haselton:
”Well, most of the time when the people we have go into administration, we try to make time and share with them what are experiences are, and it pays off.”
Interviewer:
You and I have talked before, and I remember that you taught biology in the past. What are your administrative experiences?
Dr. Haselton:
“When I first started, I came in at the middle of the year as a biology teacher at Oldham County High for a person that had left the job. The school had been using substitutes up to that point. I had five Biology I classes, just one prep. The following summer at Western Kentucky were I was taking classes, the principal at the time came down and asked me if I would come back, and also asked if I would coach track and cross-country. When I mentioned that, yes I would like to do that, he also asked if I would be Athletic Director on a temporary basis. I wasn’t married at the time and had no immediate family in the area, so that is what I did. So for the next the two years, I thought three classes a day and had athletic director responsibilities the rest of the day. The fourth year, I was allowed to do athletic work all day. This particular year had a lot of movement with facilities, colors being redone, and new coaches hired. The following year however, my position was eliminated because I didn’t have an administration degree. Two assistant principals split the athletic job the next year, and then they went back to having a full time AD. I then realized, I never wanted to be in a position of not being able to get a job due to my lack of certification. So I went back to WKU on a G. I. Bill. In about a year and a half I was certified in nearly every position possible in a school system including counselor, principal, director of people personal, and superintendent. I then came back to Oldham County as a counselor.”
Interviewer:
Did you then become a principal?
Dr. Haselton:
”I was counselor for two years, then went to director of guidance for two years, over to the board for director of people personal for four, then to the county high school as principal for seven. I have now been the superintendent for thirteen years. I have been in that position longer than any other.”
Interviewer:
Why did you decide to become an administrator?
Dr. Haselton:
“I felt like I had some talents in that area. I also wanted to impact more kids. When I was guidance counselor, I had three hundred kids. As director of people personal, I was over four different areas which handled attendance, guidance, health services, and judicial (which was the alternative school). Again, it is just the satisfaction of making a difference in those areas. When I then went back to Oldham County High School, I could impact a whole school. Now as superintendent I am in charge of thirteen.”
“I first got that type of satisfaction in coaching, you have to be able to motivate kids in a non-classroom seating and deal with parents. Then, as athletic director, it was coordinating programs and resources. As counselor, it was getting information to people and giving them guidance with they need it. I get a lot of satisfaction out of helping people, and the higher you go, the more potential you have for impact. I heard an analogy that I think is pretty accurate:
As a principal you are making 20 decisions a day that last an hour or a day, or a week. As superintendent you may make one decision a month that will last for years.”
Interviewer:
One of the major concerns I have always had is that I will miss the kids. I kind of thrive off that contact. How much do you miss that daily contact of teaching the kids? How do you handle that?
Dr. Haselton:
“I have always, in every new position I have had, transitioned out. So for a while you know the kids, have quite a bit of contact, and slowly adjust to the new setting. The other thing that happened is I had my own children. They and their friends became a substitute for some of the contact I was missing at school. Another thing that happens, is you see kids you had in class go out and have some success. Then you start seeing their kids. Part of being an administrator is sacrifice, the loss of contact with the kids. The other side of that is, you are dealing with more adults, which have a direct impact on kids. Therefore you have the much more potential for making a difference by touching those adults who are going to make a difference, than trying to touch those kids directly yourself. That is how I have justified it. And again, if you are creating a culture that is built around kids, you are much more effective in an administrative role than you are in a teaching role. I have always found that to be the case. Although the class room setting was excellent, working with kids and coaches was excellent and being a guidance counselor was just wonderful. In principal ship you are dealing with kids as much as you want to. One of the best things about being a principal is being able to set your own schedule. I’ve seen principals with a variety of schedules. Some are with kids all the time, others may have hardly any direct contact with them at all. There is no best practice data that says either way is better. It really depends upon your leadership style and your beliefs.”
Interviewer:
How do you define your leadership style and how has it changed over the course of your career?
Dr. Haselton:
“Well, obviously it is de-centralized. I believe it is very important to attract quality people and empower them to get the job done. That is kind of how we keep score around here. We try to spend our time on what counts and expect it to get results. If it doesn’t, then we are probably not spending our time on the right things. It’s not really as much of a participatory style as it is a de-centralized empowerment style. Although we have seven different elementary schools all with pretty much the same expectations as far as performance, we distribute the resources and say to them, go out and use your talents to get results. We don’t have what some have, as in little organizational charts that say what people are doing. I’m not really concerned with what you are doing. I’m concerned with what your results are.”
Interviewer:
I have often mentioned that I am surrounded by great teachers. Everywhere I go in this district I am amazed by the number and quality of great teachers we have in this system. How do you promote and maintain that type of quality with such a shortage of teachers and resources?
Dr. Haselton:
“Well we don’t spend a lot of time worrying about seniority or experience per se. That goes for administrators as well as teachers. We are more concerned with what kind of services teachers are providing. We try to build internal transit for when people, like you, want to do more they have opportunities to grow and develop. Where as other people want to stay in the same periods, the same classes, the same amount of time, there is no pressure on them to do anything differently, as long as they are getting results in that area. I think we attract people to our district, then once here, they realize they are not dealing with the same type of political influences other districts deal with. You know the type of ego trips some people get on. We are concerned with results and continuous improvement.”
Interviewer:
I realize that education is continually changing. What issues do you see as most important currently and in the near future?
Dr. Haselton:
“I think that time management is a big issue right know. We know what we need to do and how to get it done. It’s just how do we get it done in time we are given in schools today? How do we get everything done? I think long term, the demographics are a lot different than they have ever been. The expectation that schools serve all students and that all students perform at a high level is a real challenge in the future. We are looking at kids going to school now that ten years ago would not have even been alive. We are looking at percentages of ESL students, immigrants which are coming into our school systems and expected to achieve at the same rate as all of the other students with little in the form of transition to get there. There is something to be said for hard work and what a person achieves in a certain period of time and what the research says about that. But trying to get there with more and more difficulties and less resources is a struggle. I think attracting and retaining quality teachers is going to be a challenge in the future, especially women. Twenty to twenty-five years ago you had women graduating college and basically going into one of three areas. They were going into teaching, nursing, or home economics. You might find some of them going into business, but not as and executive. They were assistants or secretaries. Now we are competing for the best of the best with medical schools, law schools, and pharmacy schools. You find that most of these schools have more women going into them than men. Twenty years ago women were not encouraged to do that in our society. While we now have a lot more women in the work force, we have less quality women going into the teaching field. If you look at the female teachers that have taught for twenty plus years, they are pretty sharp individuals. Although we are fortunate that our district has some really sharp young women teachers, as I look around I don’t see that happening across the state. I also think that producing quality requires money. And looking around at the colleges and other jobs, we are competing for the sake of dollars, and their winning.”
Interviewer:
What is a typical day like for you as a superintendent?
Dr. Haselton:
“Well it depends on the day. Mondays are always pretty much open in the mornings, because you are trying to get a good idea of what happened over the weekend. I try to come in every morning and get set up for the day. Get every thing that I need for the day ready and lined up.”
Interviewer:
I have read that this starts pretty early for you.
Dr. Haselton:
“Well I am normally up around 4:30 to 5:00 each morning. That is my free time. I watch the news and read the papers. I also mentally think through the day. Mornings are generally pretty scheduled. Lunch is generally a meeting, school visit, or public affair. I try to multi-task as much as possible to save time. I want to always be doing more than one thing at one time. When I move from one place to another I am generally on the phone, returning phone calls. The afternoon depends upon the day of the week. For the most part I am normally engaged in some type of school based activity every day from about 1:00 to 3:30. Then at the end of the day I am trying to clear messages, make sure buses got out, and deal with problems that occurred during the day. Then from about 4:30 -5:00 you are doing correspondence. After that it is either a night time school event or home. If night time school events are taking place, you try to multi-task them as much as possible. At one school you are doing more than one event. If you are at one school for a period of time, can you get to another? Generally, Saturdays mornings are mail and calls. I’m in the office on Saturdays until about noon. Then in the afternoon there are often more school events. This past Saturday I went to the choir performance at the bank, the homecoming at OC, then worked a couple more hours back at the office. Sunday I then worked on the budget from about 1:00 to 9:00, but at my own pace. I was watching football and making a few calls. Generally I try to work one week-end day and take off the other. Prior to this past week-end, I had managed to do that three weeks in a row, but that is rare. Right now the big issue, the big time sucker, is insurance. You have to send out memos, meet with people, and the complexion changes daily. Sometimes it changes every half an hour.
Interviewer:
Speaking of the latest health care situation, how do you feel it is being handled? What is your take on the situation?
Dr. Haselton:
“The initiative we have this year is to put in one hundred dollars per month across the board. The reason for that is when you look at percentage increases it’s really a negative. You have people at the upper end of the scale, who percentage raises make a significant change in their pay scale, but these are the people who are losing the least percent of their check to insurance. Where as some one who makes less than twelve thousand a year, if you give them a one to two percent bump up, well, two percent is only $240 on twelve thousand. That won’t help much. And those are the people who are really suffering under this whole scenario of percentage. For to long we have been fooled into thinking that percentage salary increases are addressing the problems. You have to look at the package, retirement, health care benefits, and salary together and say what is your net increase or decrease. Politicians don’t want to do that because it is easier to say in Frankfort in April we are giving you a two percent raise, then come back in September when you have a contract your expected to honor, and change the insurance such that it eats up the two percent raise and then some. The big change we are having right now, and I am not sure everyone realizes it, is the change in co-insurance. If you go into the hospital and you have to pay twenty percent of the bill, what is the hospital bill? Is it five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand? People, not being able to predict that, are going to have to make some real tough choices on what plan to go with. In the past there was a set limit on what you had to pay, so you could kind of plan for that.”
Interviewer:
What advice would you give someone like me who is soon to be looking for an administrative job? What should I be doing now? How should I approach this point in my career?
Dr. Haselton:
“I would endeavor to gain exposure in areas you don’t know anything about, in administrative roles and functions. One of the things that happen to young administrators are they assume that somebody on staff is doing these things, but there is nobody on the staff named somebody. If you have never done special education, programming, . . . get out of your comfort zone and get involved in areas you don’t know any thing about. Start with observing and learn how to deal with some of this stuff. You can see how your principal, Dr. Brooks, has started to grow some people on campus by giving them other responsibilities. I have talked to many assistant principals who are confined to one or two areas such as discipline or athletics. Get some special education background, get some athletic background, and get some curriculum background. The only way you are going to do that is when something comes up, take a stab at it. The other way is to identify a problem with a solution. My big influence on getting into administration was on scheduling. When I was at Oldham County High, we were computer scheduling with fifteen hundred students, and we had twelve hundred conflicts. It all goes back to having a good master schedule. It looked good on the board, but the math didn’t work. The grade levels weren’t balanced out over six periods, and the school wasn’t balanced out. Consequently, there were problems. I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out, but I did know that when I was at Western in the arena scheduling their methodology was that if you want to close a class, you close it, and you can open another one. We ended up surveying students for the first time and asking them what they wanted to take rather than what our staff has. All too often students are told what we have. So we arena scheduled. We lost two instructional days doing it, but we had fewer problems that we have ever had before. When we went to the board of education to make that presentation, one of the first questions was--why we were spending all this money on computer scheduling. Well you have to understand the logistics of master scheduling, once we did that we got back into computer scheduling. That’s how I got into administration. The superintendent and board were impressed with that problem solved, and when a position came open, they basically said I needed to get out of counseling and move into administration. It was getting out of my comfort zone. Administration normally took care of scheduling.”