Tappe shares community-based strategies to help students

By Robert Williams

Editor

Making positive changes in a school district is not always something that is blatantly apparent at monthly school board meetings. However, behind the scenes, the Frazee-Vergas School District has been employing the successful efforts of a continuous improvement plan created by the Staples-Motley School District and their superintendent Shane Tappe, a Frazee native.

“We did this process back in 2019,” Tappe said.

When Tappe was hired as the superintendent, one of the major priorities established by the school board in Staples was to develop a strategic or continuous improvement plan.

After weighing several available options, Tappe and his team, which includes middle school and high school principal Debbie Ferdon and communications and marketing director Loren Walz, wanted to come up with something that was specific to their district.

“We wanted a homegrown process and we wanted to make sure we engage our stakeholders through that process to make sure they feel valued as part of the school district because that community to school district connection was an area that needed to be focused on,” said Tappe.

That issue will sound familiar to almost any school district and community members and going to the community is part of the successful model Tappe and his team are using.

With support from models created by the Minnesota Department of Education, the group created their own continuous improvement plan in Staples and it caught the eye of Frazee-Vergas superintendent Terry Karger, who promoted the idea of collaborating with Tappe to the school board last summer.

“I will give the board and Terry a lot of credit for taking the leap and putting this transparent process out there to engage people and be a part of solutions,” Tappe said. “Everybody wants to look at problems and focus on problems but if you really, truly want to look at—how do you become the catalyst for improvement—it’s focusing on what do we need to do to get better.”

A key element to the plan is a lot of feedback and input from all over the community. Over the past few months, small groups have been meeting to outline priorities, goals, issues that need to be addressed, and ways to bring success to the Frazee-Vergas school district. 

To do that, those groups of stakeholders have consisted of a large assortment of people, not just from the school. Besides the school board, elementary and high school staff, custodial staff, different members of the community and the student body were all in attendance together at a special meeting Wednesday, Feb. 1, at the high school media center.

Four separate groups were formed with each having at least one student, a community member and school and district officials. Together they did a thorough overview of all the data they have collected from the smaller groups as a means to come up with goals moving forward, core values, the district’s mission and fundamental purpose and vision.

“It needs to meet the needs of the district,” said Tappe. “If you start getting stakeholders in the room like this and start having real, critical conversations about how do we focus on getting better? That’s the key. This is some high-level work that not only the board should be doing, but involvement with staff, community members and students. I’m glad to see students here. That’s awesome.”

Tappe emphasized the need to focus on the positives while his group guided the process of challenging everyone from students to the superintendent to think critically and creatively with the kids at the forefront as top priority.

“This is really your road map for decision making,” Tappe said. 

The continuous improvement plan is used to create one path to move forward, according to Ferdon. 

“It’s important to understand our reality,” she said. “That’s what we’ve done with all these conversations. What our values are? What our current world has been like and what the perceptions are out there. That can help us determine how to get even better.”

The final plan will be used to spearhead specific action items. Tappe his team in Staples have real world experience on how they used their plan to negotiate tough decisions. 

“It anchored us during COVID-19; it helped us make some big decisions different from some of our neighbors during that season,” said Ferdon.

“We really focused on thinking about all the learners that we serve,” said Walz. 

Walz noted the many different needs of an entire student body and how different they can be from a senior preparing to graduate to a kindergartner just being able to go to the classroom after the pandemic. 

She emphasized focusing on big and little successes and determining what those are at a district level and how to have a positive impact on each student.

“I think it’s meeting the kids where they’re at and I think making sure that you have the focus of growth in mind, that’s the key,” said Tappe. “Parents entrust us with their most prized possessions, their kids, and we want to make sure that we’re having a positive influence on getting them better. That’s really what it comes down to. This gives you the road map to do that. It helps with decision-making; it helps with long-term planning and day-to-day operations.”

At the conclusion of the meeting, the stakeholder groups submitted a mission, vision, core values list and focus areas that will allow the board to create a draft document and begin to enact a continuous improvement plan specific to the Frazee-Vergas School District.