Assuring the community that the Colchester School District is spending money wisely—and carefully—has been one of Superintendent Amy Minor‘s top priorities from the day she took office. Before she became superintendent of the district just north of Burlington, Vermont, its budgets would often be voted down multiple times each year by voters.
But now, Colchester is one of the lowest-spending districts in its county and its educators are producing strong academic outcomes that rival the region’s wealthier school systems. Colchester’s administrators are careful about adding new positions as they budget to meet district needs, explains Minor, Vermot’s 2022 superintendent of the year.
Booster clubs have been instrumental in supporting the district’s music and athletics departments, which aren’t fully funded by the district. “We have pride in our spending—we know the taxpayers want to make sure we are keeping an eye on the bottom line,” she continues. “When I became superintendent, my goal was to tell our story with the community because I don’t think we did a good job of sharing what was going in the schools.”
A whopping 80% of the district’s residents do not have children who attend Colchester’s schools. To support the annual spending plan, Minor now sends out an eight-page color report outlining the district’s strengths and weaknesses. She also mails out a two-page budget spread that details what the community is voting on, what expenses are being cut and how much the spending plan will cost residents.
“Every year for the past seven years, our budgets have passed and they have passed by a nice margin,” she adds. “I feel that’s one of my biggest accomplishments that I’m really proud of.”
Amy Minor’s next big priorities
Minor joined the Colchester School District in 1999 as a substitute teacher and then worked as a paraeducator and teacher. After stints as a department head and assistant principal, she served as the high school’s principal for a decade (winning Vermont’s principal of the year award in 2013) before being named superintendent seven years ago.
While those first seven years were focused on curriculum, instruction and assessment, Minor says she will work in the coming years to build support for a major facilities construction bond. Central to the effort will be gathering community input on whether to build a new middle school or renovate the current building. Administrators will also have to determine if parents want to consolidate two smaller preK-2 community schools into a more modern, centrally located facility. “Folks are going to have strong opinions,” she says. “So we are going to have to be really proactive to understand what model does the community want.”
Still, Minor calls the growing enrollment and development in the community that are putting pressure on district facilities a “great problem to have.”
Also imperative in the coming school year is expanding services that support the physical and mental health of students and teachers. Students are exhibiting mental health challenges as they transition out of COVID. “When you look at schools 15 years ago, you might have had two counselors but now we have full departments with many layers of adults whom students can access—and we’re still not able to meet that need,” she says.
Social media and the screen time it requires are having a negative impact on students’ mental health as they are more attached than ever to their devices. Students are getting caught up in “comparison pressures” caused by obsessing over how other people look or dress on social media. And “a whole new category” of high school students are also increasingly comparing themselves academically—including by tracking the colleges to which their peers have been accepted, she points out.
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Educators and parents need to help students realize most people only post good news on social media. “It’s generating anxiety and stress that shouldn’t be there,” Minor says. “We’re seeing a decrease in the number of coping skills that students have when not they’re not successful.”
Minor also plans to limit the number of initiatives that teachers are tasked with implementing as they also move past the pandemic. “In order for our students to have access to strong instruction they have to have access to employees who are well and ready to help move the district forward and do the work,” she explains. “I don’t want to overtax or overburden them.”
‘No job is too small’
As a leader, Minor’s belief that “no job is too small for me” means that she spends as much time in Colchester’s school buildings as possible. “If a kid’s struggling in the hallway and I’m there, I’m on it,” she says. “If there’s trash in the hallway, I pick that up. I like bus duty and recess duty. I love doing those types of things and being in buildings because I can see what’s happening in real-time.”
With the pandemic in the rear-view mirror, she plans to invite larger groups of community members back into Colchester’s school buildings and to hold more events where she can connect with residents. She hopes to build support for the facilities bond by, among other activities, taking residents on Saturday morning tours of the district’s buildings.
“There are so many community members who haven’t been in our buildings since they had students in them and they remember that building as it was,” she concludes. “But a quick tour through a couple of bathrooms and a couple of classrooms and maybe a science lab at the middle school and they’re going to really see, wow, these buildings were really built in the ’60s.”
