On July 1, Parkway School District welcomed a new staff member to their leadership board. A Colorado native and a globally ranked female triathlete, Dr. Melissa Schneider took up the role of district superintendent after Dr. Keith Marty, former superintendent, retired on June 30.

Schneider has a combined 27 years of experience working in education. She started her career as an elementary school teacher in the Byers School District. Before coming to Parkway, she was the assistant superintendent in the Thompson School District in Loveland, CO. Additionally, she is the first female superintendent in Parkway history.

To further learn about the new administrator’s plan and vision for the school district, student journalists from the four Parkway High Schools gathered and conducted a press conference with Schneider on Sept. 17. Below are some notable questions asked in the conference; transcript is edited and condensed for clarity purposes.

Student Journalists:

From Parkway Central: Esther Wang, Andrew House, Ceci Tremont (Photographer)

From Parkway South: Scout Creech, Jack Caratenuto, Hannah Truesdell

From Parkway West: Ruthvi Tadakamalla, Payton Dean

From Parkway North: Allison Brady, Noel White

AH: What does a day as a superintendent look like? Are you traveling to schools, in meetings all day or are you behind a desk? 

So, thank you for that question because all three yes, yes, and yes. Some days I am here all day long in various meetings. Many times I am out of the building all day long. Other times I’m in a mix of things. So any of the three scenarios are happening every day of the week for me. 

AH: How did you hear about this job opening and what led you to move from your job in Colorado all the way over here to St. Louis? 

Oh, I love this one because I have a great story for this. So, my husband and I were trying to move here, and it is very difficult to juggle a double career move. He beat me to it and he was here about a year in advance of this job being posted. I had already been visiting this area to come and visit him. One time my flight had been delayed. When I got to our home he was already asleep, and I was just exhausted but also still kind of wired from all of the travel delays. This was last October, so almost one year ago. I said to myself, it’s a little too early for superintendent postings to be posted right now, but I do wonder if there’s anything here. And that very day at midnight, I saw that Parkway had been posted. I am literally sitting on a couch in this school district and this opening is right here. The rest is history. 

AH: What are your plans as superintendent of Parkway? What are you going to introduce / inquire for the district? 

I’m going to answer that in a couple of ways. The first way I’ll answer that is I have an entry plan, which outlines ways in which I am going to do a little detective work in the district. I want to survey our internal and external stakeholders for how they’re feeling about Parkway – what are the things that they would like us to do differently and what are the things they love so much that they don’t want to change. I’m recording those things and finding themes in those things. I’m [also] doing a deep dive into our internal infrastructure; that means our budget, the way that we collect and analyze student data and have it inform what we do at schools, our curriculum, the way that we do operations and take care of our facilities. Those are also part of my entry plan to be able to find things that either are strengths or weaknesses or opportunities or threats to the school district. 

The other thing that I will be doing is I’ve outlined some superintendent goals for myself. One of them is to continue the amazing curriculum and instruction work as well as a study of all of our buildings and facilities. The second one is to convene a budget task force to study Parkway’s budget – the opportunities and threats to the budget short and long term [and] make recommendations to our board. 

AH: A big part of being a superintendent is interacting with the kids. Do you have a plan on how you’re going to interact more with students?

My plan is to get things on my calendar as much as possible. For example, being with you all and being in this class with you all is very special to me. I will be frequently seen out in buildings, and I like to interact with kids when I’m in a building. I have all the sports schedules and the fine arts schedules on athletics and activities schedules on my calendar so that when I’m available, I can get to them. 

EW: I want to ask you to clarify your responsibility as a superintendent. What exactly do you do and what exactly is your mission? 

Thank you so much. The wall behind me is our vision: to have curious, capable, confident learners in the Parkway School District. Now my job as the superintendent is to make sure that everything in the district is working to fulfill our vision and our strategic plan. 

In that strategic plan, it bleeds out into [managing] our resources for students, which would be facilities, our operations, our buildings, [and] the way that we provide services for kids, like transportation and busing. I want to make sure that there is stewardship of financial resources so that not only we in Parkway see how the work that we’re doing aligns to our mission and vision, but that the community also sees the work we’re doing. And so to fulfill that as a superintendent takes relationship building, demonstration of the actions that we take and connecting them directly to our strategic plan.

EW: In your previous answers, you talked a lot about what was in the budget. I think you are aware that we have a new tax policy coming out last year which is a tax freeze for senior citizens’ properties. What are we planning to do with the district to balance the budget? 

Thank you for bringing that up. We do have a tax freeze for senior citizens to freeze their assessed value [for property tax]. The more that we pull away from the year that their assessed value was frozen, the more we’re going to start to feel the loss of the property tax revenue.

Yesterday was our very first meeting with the budget task force, which is a group of internal parkway employees from all different departments who are working together to understand the implications of such legislation. I’m not going to have the answer about balancing it because I am getting their input and they have not fully given their recommendations quite yet. We’re going to come together and brainstorm. I am optimistic that we will make recommendations that will continue to further excellence in the district.

EW: Just to clarify, you’re not the one that’s setting the financial policy. It’s someone else in the district. You just oversee the process. 

I do.

EW: Currently several schools in the Parkway district have an academy system. Has the district seen an improvement in student performances with the new system and does the district plan to roll out the academy system to other schools?

I don’t have an answer for you on that yet because I haven’t done a deep enough dive in the academy system in the track record of their data, but you’ve just given me something that I can dig into. 

EW: It’s pretty obvious in Missouri and around the country there’s a bus driver shortage. We don’t have enough bus drivers and that forces central to cancel our activity school bus starting in 2022. Is the district still facing the driver shortage right now and what plans does the district have to increase drivers?

To my knowledge we are doing pretty well with filling bus driver positions. I have not heard of shortages. I know that we have shortages with custodian positions, but not necessarily with bus drivers to that extent. I also know that we’re doing better than many other districts in that regard. But it’s unfortunate that you’ve had to not have your activity bus for a couple of years. So, thanks for sharing that.

EW: Are we planning to restore the activity bus anytime soon?

I don’t know yet. 

EW: I found data from US News on our college readiness for the district. For high school, it reported that 58% of the high school students in the Parkway district are proficient in reading and 54% of the high school students are proficient in math. This is not a very good score. Do you have any plans to increase student readiness for your district? 

Right now the curriculum and learning department is actually putting an effort out there to make sure that our curriculum is implemented across the entire district with fidelity. This is something that perhaps has been more loose since the pandemic, but we have gotten curriculum materials purchased and invested in. We want to make sure that they are being used to the best of their ability in every single classroom and that every single kid is guaranteed an instructional product; no matter what school they go to, they’re going to be able to receive that instructional experience just the same as another school. We [also] want to support teachers to be able to use the curriculum materials and to be able to teach with high expectations and rigor everywhere we go. 

EW: I want to clarify on your answer. You mentioned that you want to roll out the same curriculum and resources across high schools. Are you implying that there’s an imbalance in resource distribution across the high schools?

No. We purchase curriculum materials for the entire district. For example, all of our elementary schools have the same math curriculum materials. We want to make sure that folks are aware of the richness of those materials and that they are also provided with opportunities to learn how to best use them. And it’s not necessarily like this high school or this school has these materials and this one doesn’t. And if that came up, we would certainly work to make that equitable because we believe in having equitable systems across the Parkway School District. 

RT: How are you helping Parkway schools and students adjust to the cell phone ban?

Well, I can tell you that one of the things I did on the very first week of school was I went and visited each and every school. But at middle and high school, I was really watching out for how kids were interacting with each other and if I was going to see a struggle with not being able to use cell phones. And I was pleasantly surprised as I saw kids eating lunch together and interacting in the hallways that I didn’t see really one cell phone out. That’s one thing that I like to do is be able to actually get into buildings and see how kids are actually doing with the new rule. I’ve heard from kids that it seems to be just not a huge deal. I’d love to get student voices on issues. Let us know how you’re doing with certain things.