West Ada’s new leader talks priorities for school year, COVID-19 and critical race theory
The West Ada School District welcomed a new superintendent last month.
Derek Bub, whose appointment was announced earlier this year, is stepping into the role at a time when the district is dealing with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on learning and making decisions about how to keep students and teachers safe amid a surge of coronavirus cases.
Schools across Idaho are also facing scrutiny from some public officials raising concerns about critical race theory and making claims of indoctrination happening in Idaho schools.
Bub has been an educator for more than 20 years and previously worked as the principal at Centennial High School. He replaced Mary Ann Ranells, who announced her resignation earlier this year due to “personal reasons.” Bub was one of several finalists for the role, before the board ultimately chose him as the next superintendent, according to IdahoEdNews.
Over the next year, Bub said one of his key priorities is to retain the community engagement that marked the past year during the pandemic.
“What I want to do is walk through the grocery store one day and people say, if your kid’s going to get an amazing education, it’s going to be through the West Ada School District,” he told the Idaho Statesman in a video interview.
“I think that we just need to make sure that we are always challenging ourselves, not to compare ourselves to just here internally in Idaho, but to compare ourselves to other top renowned school districts.”
Here is what else Bub said about his priorities for the upcoming year, the pandemic and critical race theory.
On priorities for the upcoming year
Bub said some of his main priorities for the upcoming year include engaging the community and getting people involved in the educational process. That doesn’t mean just sending out surveys, he said.
“Engagement really means going out and having some of those intentional conversations to make sure we get feedback and we can act on it,” he said.
Throughout the pandemic, hundreds of parents reached out to the district’s board and attended board meetings to fight for different safety protocols. Bub said he wants to transfer some of the passion the district saw over the past year during the pandemic into other challenges, such as “improving student achievement and giving our kids great opportunities.”
His goal is to make the West Ada School District stand out not just in Idaho, but to become a “notable district” in the region and across the country.
“I think that as a district, we are set to be one of the best school districts around,” he said. “But I think it’s an opportunity for us to really look beyond just Idaho and say, ‘Hey, how do we compare to districts outside of Idaho?’ ”
That process will involve being critical about where the district is now, he said. He wants to make a strong push to make math more accessible to students, he said.
“That’s a statewide area of struggle,” he said. “It’s really easy to fall into the trap of we’re better than a lot of places. I think that this is an opportunity for us to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to support our kids, K through 12, to make sure that they graduate with competencies to be successful.’ ”
Another priority, he said, is to make sure when students graduate high school, they are prepared for their next steps, whether that is going onto college, post-secondary training, the military or another path.
“We honor all of those options,” he said, “but we want to be able to make sure that when kids leave our school district that they are prepared for all those challenges.”
On learning loss stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic
Over the past year, students and teachers in West Ada had to quickly adapt to remote and hybrid learning models during the pandemic as officials made difficult decisions to try to keep the community safe. Now, as students head back to the classroom for the new school year, teachers and school districts will have to figure out where students experienced gaps in their learning and how they can fill them.
The Idaho Reading Indicator showed 77.5% of students in grades K-3 in the West Ada School District were reading at grade level, higher than the state average of 65.1%, but slightly lower than the share of students reading at grade level at the end of 2019. According to results from the Idaho Standards Achievement Test, 67.3% of students this year scored as proficient or advanced on the English language arts section, down from 67.9% in 2019, and 53.4% of students scored as at least proficient on the math portion, down from 58.8%.
“It was a challenging year from that standpoint,” Bub said, “but one of the things that we noticed is from student achievement scores and pieces like that, we haven’t seen a huge dip in learning.
“There’s some areas that we’re going to focus on, areas that we know that we can grow a little bit, we can get a little bit better. But we haven’t seen this giant dip in learning.”
Bub said when students return, the district will be able to address some of those concerns.
“We’re really looking at a systematic approach to identify kids that need extra assistance, to identify classes where we can help those kids out,” he said. “And really putting some systems in place with the use of ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) funds and things like that, to make sure all of our students are supported, and we get everybody right up to speed.”
Some of the strategies the district is looking at include math instructional coaches and online tutoring options, Bub said. The district is also looking into mental health services, he said.
“There’s a lot of different pieces that we’re investigating and making sure that our students are supported,” he said, “really with the focus of educating the whole child.”
On critical race theory
Critical race theory has become a target of some public officials over the last several months. The Legislature passed a bill earlier this year, House Bill 377, sparked by worries of critical race theory discussions in schools. The bill prohibits funding to schools that direct students to “affirm, adopt or adhere” to the idea that any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin is “inherently superior or inferior” or that people of a certain race or identity are “inherently responsible for actions committed in the past.”
Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin then created a task force, which met for the first time in May, looking into critical race theory and claims of indoctrination in Idaho schools. Teachers told the Idaho Statesman last month the conversations surrounding indoctrination were fostering a climate of fear in the classroom and creating a distraction from the real issues at hand.
Bub said critical race theory is not taught in the district’s schools.
“It’s not part of any of our curriculum. … The state mandates the standards that we teach, and we stay very close to that,” he said. “What we teach in the classroom, how we teach it, our policy is, as it currently stands, that we will teach both sides of controversial subjects. And my goal for our teachers is when they walk out of the classroom, that students don’t know what side of the controversial subject they stand on.”
It’s not the job of a teacher in the classroom to tell students how they should feel about a particular issue, he said.
“It’s really an opportunity to teach our kids to critically think and to analyze some controversial subjects,” he said. “We recognize that it’s sometimes important to address controversial subjects. But, it really should be on both sides equally.”
The school district’s board is discussing revising its policy on teaching controversial issues, which reads: “Teachers shall present multiple sides of controversial/political issues in an objective manner using valid and reliable resources.”
Bub said for any policy, it’s important to be able to provide teachers with clear guidance.
“We review policy all the time,” he said. “As we review policy, we picked up that there probably wasn’t great guidance on that, so we want to be able to provide our teachers with that.”
When asked if the policy revision was spurred at all by recent discussions of critical race theory, he reiterated the district did not teach the theory in schools.
“But anytime we do address controversial issues … we think that’s an important part of (the) education system, we want kids to be able to critically analyze, and be able to look at topics from a variety of different stances,” he said. “And we want our teachers to be able to teach that without bias. And that’s really important.”
On the district’s reopening plans
West Ada’s Board of Trustees passed a reopening plan in June that made masks optional and gave Bub the “authority to make operational decisions,” which could include putting into place a mask mandate, “if necessary, to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.” On Tuesday, the board passed a new plan, mandating masks across the district, but giving parents the option to opt out their kids.
The new plan came just days before the start of the school year and followed weeks of pushback from parents on both sides of the issue: those who wanted a mask mandate and those fighting for a mask-optional policy.
Bub had previously said he didn’t expect to implement a districtwide mask mandate. Since the district spans such a wide geographic area, he said it made sense to put protocols into place on a school-by-school basis.
“I would love to do it school by school,” he said last week. “I can’t speak for the board. I can speak for myself. I think school-by-school protocols is effective. We found that out last year.”
On Tuesday, he said he thought the option to implement a mandate but also give parents a choice made sense.
The board also passed an updated quarantine policy that makes it so if a person is exposed to the virus in the classroom, but is wearing a mask and/or vaccinated, that person will still be able to participate in school and work-related activities. They would have to wear a mask for the next 10 days and monitor for symptoms. They could also complete a negative test after five days.
“One of the things that we look at is how do we get kids to wear masks because they want to prevent from either being quarantined or prevent getting COVID,” Bub said last week. “So looking at some policies to help promote that I think is really important for us as we move forward.”
Bub said he consults with public health experts, including the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, Central District Health and local physicians for guidance. On Tuesday, the board also heard from two experts from St. Luke’s Health System, who highlighted the surge in COVID-19 cases in the state and recommended the district start its year with a mandate if leaders want the best chance of keeping kids in school, in person, every day.
On improving the go-on rate
Bub said improving the district’s go-on rate is a “huge priority,” but that doesn’t just mean increasing the share of students who go to a university.
“I firmly believe the go-on rate is, are kids being able to go on to some type of post-secondary training and that they’re well prepared for that post-secondary training, not necessarily every kid has to go to a four-year university right off the bat,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of opportunities.”
He said he’s proud of the district and some of its career and technical education programs.
“We’d love to extend that beyond and start to promote some of our internship availabilities for our kids and things like that,” he said. “That will be a focus.”
College awareness is also a big piece in making sure kids — from early on in high school — start thinking about what their future could include.
“Making sure that our kids, even from eighth grade, freshman year in high school, are really starting to think about what that looks like after high school, what their life looks like after high school and providing them the opportunities while they’re in high school to be able to start planning toward that,” he said.
“And that doesn’t mean that plan is concrete when they’re freshmen. When I was a freshman in high school, I didn’t know that one day I was going to be a superintendent, right? But I think being able to give our kids career paths and training toward those career paths is really, really important.”
That could be a number of things, he said, but it’s a priority to make sure students have identified areas of interest after school.
His goal is that the district continues to give students “opportunities that will allow them to contribute to the Idaho community and keep them local here so they can continue to build this tremendous community.”
This story was originally published August 24, 2021 at 11:16 AM.
