Conversation #70 with Dighton-Rehoboth Regional School District Superintendent Bill Runey was incredible and shows how a collaborative strategy and a vision for innovative technology can shift district performance! Thank you Leo Brehm for making the connection.

"When I started in this role, I inherited professional learning satisfaction scores that were incredibly disappointing, but motivated me to embrace change. The progress we have made began with a simple principle: 'We all want to be treated like professionals, and we all draw inspiration from being in community with our colleagues who are doing similar roles, facing similar challenges.'

Now our teachers digitally sign up for the professional learning sessions they most want through Vector Solutions. We work with food providers to offer lunch, snacks, and coffee during sessions. Although professional learning occurs in our regular high school building, it is a completely different vibe. Since we can’t send our entire staff to a conference, we try to bring that energy, professionalism, and fun to life in our district. We bring in keynote speakers, work with vendors for swag, and turn parts of our day into game show environments with spinning wheels and prizes.

But the real work on those days happens in our 90-minute curriculum-building blocks. Teams spread out across our high school classrooms for vertical planning. Our next phase is deeper cross-curricular, horizontal planning that builds consistency of student and staff experience. We have established strong common assessments; now we are taking those conversations deeper.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become one of our district’s secret weapons, helping us build more efficiencies in different departments. Gamma revolutionized School Committee presentations, which happen every 2 weeks. I start with bullet points and get drafts for professional slideshows with our district logos and color schemes that I can then refine and ask for targeted feedback from colleagues, saving my leadership team valuable time wordsmithing and preparing slide decks. Napkin creates good, simple data visualizations for presentations and data meetings. Spark Mail's advanced sorting features help busy administrators achieve ‘inbox zero’ while integrating our email client and calendar, prompting us with reminders to record meeting notes, and improving our follow-through and communication.

Most exciting is our burgeoning partnership with a startup edtech platform that we anticipate will provide a district-exclusive ChatGPT environment, customized to our local context. We will be able to upload our strategic plan, Portrait of a Graduate, policies, handbooks, and assessments. There are so many possibilities this could open up: helping provide evaluation language tied to state rubrics, capturing photos of exemplary student work during walkthroughs, assisting with behavior policy responses, identifying sentence starters for family communications, and even generating ideas for notes for special recognitions.

The goal isn't replacing human connection – it's amplifying it by streamlining administrative tasks so that we can focus on what matters most: building relationships and supporting our educators and students."