Internship Plan review with Dr. Ryan

I met with Dr. Robin Ryan on Monday, February 14 at Colleyville Heritage High School.  He had reviewed my intern plan and stressed again that the important piece to remember is that this is a plan I develop based on the needs identified in my assessments.  He was very supportive of my plan and did not offer a great deal of change to my plan.  I take that as an affirmation of the comprehensiveness of the plan.  The items Dr. Ryan liked about my plan included the attention given to development of the budget items.  This included addressing the elimination of block scheduling at  the high schools, the elimination or reduction of many district deployed positions and the entire process of the SEAT (Stakeholders Economic Advisory Team) committee meetings.  He also appreciated that I used the assessment data indicating I review policy to support the development of Competency I.  His feeling is that ethics and finance are the two areas that a superintendent must pay the most attention to because those are the two areas that cause concern for many superintendents.  Dr. Ryan recommended that I consider broadening my experiences to include areas out of my comfort zone.  He suggested that I attend a TASBO conference.  He believes this would help my understanding of finance and resource allocations.  I asked him if he felt I should spend more time on an elementary campus since my area of expertise is the secondary campus.  Not only did he highly recommend I consider that, but he also suggested that I expand to visit many elementary campuses.  He suggested that I not focus on one place for an entire day but that I explore as many campuses as I can to reinforce the importance of culture, leadership, and expectations.  As a result of this conversation, I am going to add attending a TASBO conference as well as visiting an elementary campus to my internship plan.  In closing, I believe Dr. Ryan is supportive of my plan.  He emphasized the importance of variety and concentration on areas where I have growth opportunity.  Spending more time at the elementary level and focusing on financial matters will be beneficial to my intern plan.