The Shawnee Dispatch / Johnson era to begin in district

Archive for Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Shawnee Mission School District

June 24, 2008

Dr. Gene Johnson

Shawnee Mission’s new superintendent Gene Johnson was planning to retire from the school district this year, until he realized he had more work to do.

“There was just a point in time of the process of the selection of the superintendent when I felt like I still had a tremendous amount to contribute, and I decided to pursue that,” he said.

Johnson, 61, next week officially takes over for Marjorie Kaplan as the head of the second-largest school district in the state. Kaplan retired after 16 years with the district.

When selecting Johnson, the board chose a successor who had worked for the Shawnee Mission school district for 21 years. Most recently, Johnson was associate superintendent for secondary administrative services.

Though he was planning to retire from the district, he wasn’t retiring from education. Johnson was going to be a full-time lecturer at Kansas University.

“I would have worked with doctoral students in the head leadership department there,” he said. “I knew I wasn’t ready to give up education and go to some other thing.”

But becoming a superintendent was one of Johnson’s professional goals, so he decided to go for it instead of teaching full time at KU.

“It would have been something that I would have been interested in, but you know there is a lot of work to be done in this district and a lot of great things going on, and so it just kind of seemed natural to pursue it,” he said.

One of the largest challenges to the Shawnee Mission school district is declining enrollment. In the past few years, elementary schools have been consolidated to address the issue, as was done with Merriam and South Park, which is now Merriam Park. At a budget workshop last month, district administrators estimated it would lose 337 students next year.

Johnson said adjusting to declining enrollment is about planning accordingly.

“From one year to another, we project what our decline is going to be and then we budget accordingly,” he said. “Our projections are always real close.”

Along with declining enrollment comes the need for fewer teachers. Deputy superintendent Bob DiPierro last month said the district would have to look at readjusting its staffing to reflect the fewer students, and therefore fewer dollars from the state.

But Johnson said the district has had a plan for that.

“One of the things we’ve done is we’ve tried to staff as liberally as we can and keep our pupil to teacher ratio as low as we can,” he said. “Then if we have to come back at a later date and tighten our belt on staffing, we can do it. We’ve been very fortunate in our district that we’ve never had to rift teacher, you know, reduce our force, because we’ve had enough teachers who retire or leave every year that we are able to compensate for that.”

Although enrollment continues to decline, Johnson said he doesn’t predict any major school attendance boundary shifts within the district.

“Every once in a while we are going to move a housing development from one place to another or something like that, but to say we are going to change the boundaries of our high schools, there are no plans to do that,” he said.

What’s next?

In April 2004, patrons approved a $184 million bond referendum authorizing more than 150 capital projects throughout the district. Johnson said the final projects included in that authorization will be finishing up in the next two years, but the district is starting to look to the future.

“The big question is what’s next in Shawnee Mission?” Johnson said. “That is going to be part of the five-year plan, and we’ll start a facilities study this year to start thinking about OK where are we next? Do we have elementary schools that need to be consolidated like we had to do with Oak Park and Carpenter? Are there some schools that simply need to be demolished and rebuilt?”

Johnson said if major projects were planned, another bond resolution would be needed. He predicted the community would likely pass such a bond resolution. But such a scenario could be several years out, he said.

“By the time we get around to the next bond project, we are going to be in the next era of technology,” Johnson said.

Federal mandate

When his appointment as superintendent was announced in March, Johnson cited one of his biggest challenges as the federal No Child Left Behind law. The law was pushed through Congress by the Bush administration, but Johnson wouldn’t project whether it would be around after President Bush’s term expires.

“There is a lot of dissatisfaction with No Child Left Behind but there are also a lot of supporters of No Child Left Behind, so that is just going to have to go through the political process,” Johnson said.

In the meantime, Shawnee Mission will play by the rules and make Adequate Yearly Progress, the measurement taken for No Child Left Behind, Johnson said.

“If you look at our district, we have done a fabulous job with that,” he said. “There have been some bumps in the road in our district. When we have a school that has some issues, we provide them the additional support they need and work with them. Nieman is a good example of that. Nieman is going to make AYP this year.”

Johnson said he understands both the criticism and the support for No Child Left Behind.

“But to say the whole program is a disaster, I can’t say that because we have a lot of students who have been provided maybe some support that maybe previously they may not have received.”

More locally, Shawnee Mission, along with other Johnson County school districts, will have to deal with the expiration of the quarter-cent countywide sales tax that had been designated to schools.

“We’ve known about it,” Johnson said. “It hasn’t been a secret to us. There are some other ways that we can compensate for that, but can we do it forever? No. The next year in the Legislature is going to be huge.”