My View
The Drive-By Experience
BY BRIAN G. RICCA/School Administrator, November 2021

TWENTY YEARS AGO this past May, I was in the final months of my master’s program at Fordham University in New York City. I took a year off to earn the degree and get back to the classroom as quickly as possible.

I had a 1st-grade teaching position awaiting me that I was excited to begin. It would be my first time teaching an early elementary class, and while I was nervous, the opportunity to be in the lives of 5- and 6-year-olds while they learned was exhilarating.

I struggled that year — not so much with the students or the teaching but with the leadership in the school. Typical visits from my principal included what I call “drive-bys,” or brief momentary walk-throughs, with little interaction with me or my students and plenty of scribbling on a notepad. It was 2001, after all, and there was little in the way of personal technology.

Bottom line: There was no feedback. I had no idea what was being written down, and I heard little from my immediate supervisor, positive or negative.

Yearning for Feedback

I do remember hearing something positive on the day before our winter holiday break. It was another drive-by, but on the way out of the room, the administrator paused, leaned down and said, “You have a nice rapport with your students.” I barely looked up and almost didn’t hear what was said. Though I did not go into teaching to hear praise from others, as someone in his first year of a new teaching assignment, I was yearning for any kind of feedback.

So I pursued more education in a leadership degree program, but I never thought I would end up as a superintendent. Superintendents are too far from the classroom, pushing papers and working with boards. They are totally disconnected from students. How little did I know.

With a few weeks left in the past school year, one of my teachers reached out and shared that a student had been making significant growth in school. As a part of the celebration, the teacher asked the student whom this information should be shared with. Quickly, he responded: other teachers, family members “and the guy who walks around our building and sits down to talk to us. You know the one with the tie and the spiky hair?”

I found the teacher and connected with that student. It was humbling.

Being Present

What I do know is that the last 10 years serving as a superintendent has been nothing like what the 1st-grade teacher in 2001 thought it would be like. Yes, I work with school boards. Yes, there is a lot of paperwork, especially over the past year. Yes, I am physically far away from classrooms.

Yet, I’m grateful that the school board I serve encourages and supports my time in the school building, in the classrooms, in the offices, in the spaces where the real work of our district takes place. Making time to be present to the people, both adults and students, who show up every day, even during a global health pandemic, builds the relationships that allow the full potential and possibility of education.

Twenty years ago, I had no idea what the superintendency would be like. I had one version in my head, from the only superintendent I knew as a student growing up. I never saw him, barely knew his name and can’t remember seeing him once in our school. That was just my experience.

What I know now from serving as a superintendent is that our work has to be so much more than just drive-bys.

BRIAN RICCA is superintendent of St. Johnsbury School District in St. Johnsbury, Vt. Twitter: @BGRiccaVT