A Former Band Director Strikes a Note

Profile

IN WHAT WE CONSIDER NORMAL TIMES, good communication skills are essential for superintendents to build trust and rapport. Knowing this, Kenny Rodrequez had spent three years at the Grandview C-4 School District in Missouri overhauling the district’s communications and crafting stronger relationships with parents and community members. That work became a lifeline in 2020.

Having earned face and name recognition, Rodrequez was uniquely positioned to address his community needs and worries when the COVID-19 pandemic struck with fury. He took to Facebook Live chats regularly. Then, in late summer, as Missouri’s coronavirus cases spread rapidly, Grandview was forced to shift gears abruptly and delay the start of school.

“If I hadn’t already built those relationships, we wouldn’t have been able to take that approach,” Rodrequez says, adding, “I had to give some semblance of hope, even if they became sick of hearing from me.”

During his two years as assistant superintendent before taking the top post in 2016, Rodrequez says he gained invaluable insight into the 4,300-student district outside Kansas City and its culture, but he ordered a communications audit to identify where his team could improve.

“We did a lot of things really well, but we didn’t have a lot of two-way communication, and we hardly communicated with anyone outside parents,” says Rodrequez, who set a goal of reaching the large populations of older adults without school-aged children and families in private schools. He sought strategic improvements to social media and video chats as well as in-person community meetings. Grandview board president Leonard Greene noted Rodrequez even tweets with students.

“Everything is built on relationships, and Kenny is a personification of relationships,” Greene says. “When you build those relationships and that kind of community, no matter what the resources are, anything is possible.”

Those efforts earned Rodrequez the 2020 Communication Technology Award for Superintendents from the National School Public Relations Association.

Before the pandemic struck, Rodrequez introduced a new professional development program to instill cultural competency into classrooms. Well before the racial injustice protests last summer, he saw a need for meaningful, ongoing dialogue on race relations. Everyone, from the superintendent to teachers and maintenance staff, participates in comprehensive training.

Also, mental health and social-emotional learning have become fixtures in the district, owing to partnerships with community agencies that address LGBTQ issues and suicide prevention. Using grant funding, Grandview started mental health screenings at critical grade levels, then expanded them to pre-K-12.

Ironically, Rodrequez almost did not become a superintendent because he so loved his first job in education: directing student bands in two small school districts in Oklahoma and Missouri over six years. But with his move to Tulsa and a rapid move into the administrative ranks, he discovered “the chaos and craziness” of band directing has been invaluable, no more so than in his current role.

“I learned a lot — you had to have two-way communications, you are constantly interacting with parents, you have to differentiate instruction and build relationships with kids,” he says. “When I became an assistant principal, I was shocked at how much that pre-pared me for school administration.”