The following are some fun extras about Chris Belcher from my interview with him Tuesday morning.
To read the published version of the story, click here.
Q: What was your favorite childhood book, and what was a book that influenced you as a teen? –Sarah Read, Columbia Parents for Public Schools president
A: Well, I grew up on Curious George books. Those are what I can remember. I’m not sure they shaped me, but I just remember Curious George all the time. I was, and I still am, a voracious science fiction reader, and so I was shaped by the robot series by Isaac Asimov in high school, I, Robot, and the whole situation.
Q: What is your favorite weekend activity? –Michelle Pruitt, School Board member
A: I like to bike on my bicycle. I biked last night for the first time (since moving to Columbia); I got on the Katy Trail. I found, sort of, the safest way to get there from my house, and of course the nice weather helps on that. And then I read — not when I’m biking.
Q: How many miles have you put on your bike so far this summer? –Susan McClintic, Columbia Missouri National Education Association president
A: Well, I sort of had a down time because of the move, and plus it was 95 degrees and humid the first week we were here. I did a lot this spring. I did a 150-mile trip in two days across the Katy Trail, and then I usually log about 60 miles a week when the weather’s nice. I think I did 20, 25 last night, which is only about an hour and 20 minutes if you’re biking at a decent speed. If you’re on hard surface, it’s not that much, but if you’re on soft stuff it’s a little bit tougher. The problem, of course, with my job is just the time to do it.
Q: Is there anything else that you would like to share that I, nor any of these people, asked you about?
A: Well, I’m a known blues fan. I think that has come out in other things. I’m really excited about being so close to The Blue Note. All the good shows that come to Kansas City and St. Louis pass through Columbia. I’m excited about that because, when we’re in Kansas City, I’d have to drive 35 minutes, park in the city and walk to the venue, you know, it was an outing. Here, it’s just so much more convenient. So I’m excited about that opportunity, and then their blues festival this September; I’m really excited about that.
The following is a nearly complete transcript of the approximately 40-minute interview I conducted with Belcher Tuesday morning.
Q: Did you play an instrument or participate in sports in your school career? –Kim Weber, CCPTA President
A: I played football, basketball and track in high school, and I played in band until my ninth grade year, when I figured out that I wasn’t very good. I played the trumpet. The band instructor told me, “You know, Chris, not everyone is meant to be a musician,” and he was right. I love music, but I didn’t have the skills. I was the student council president my senior year, the different clubs, that kind of stuff. We had a thing called the “K” club, which was a sort of athletic club. The science club. I’m sure there are other ones as well. I was on the yearbook staff and the journalism group where we got to write the sports articles on the school sports in the paper.
Q: Do you have any sports-related experience that has helped prepare you to meet the challenges of being a superintendent? —Jim Whitt, School Board Member
A: I coached football and track when I was a teacher at Blue Springs. I had also coached for a couple years at Holden, which was where I first started teaching. I also coached basketball there. I had a 20-year involvement with track and field as an official starter, as an official there. I’ve served on a variety of committees.
I have a pretty extensive sports background. I wouldn’t say I could coach again because it’s been so long. I probably don’t even know what you should coach, but I have a pretty good feel for the relationship that exists between a coach and a parent, and a coach and an athlete. Those oftentimes are your most politically divisive issues going on in the school district. That’s just because the society gives that such a weight of importance to the extracurricular program.
Q: What book is currently on your bedside table? –Susan McClintic, Columbia Missouri National Education Association president
A: Well I had a book given to me from the Career Center, and I’m trying to think of the title of it. It’s the Art of Hospitality, or Leadership of Hospitality, and it’s about a gentleman that had worked in the food industry about how to treat people so that you’re successful. That not only works in restaurants and retail, but works in all walks of life, in a story. So that’s what I’ve been working on. I just — What is the book I just finished on vacation? Oh, it was Be Cool (laughs). That’s one of my favorite authors, Elmore Leonard. He wrote Get Shorty and Be Cool, and a bunch of other ones.
Q: What kind of value did your family place on education while you were growing up? –Kim Stonecipher-Fisher, Columbia Public Schools Foundation president
A: Both of my parents were just high school graduates. My dad worked on the Ford motor assembly line down the road, and my mom was a bookkeeper for a local, well, it was local then, it’s Ferrellgas now. It’s a large propane distributorship. I think my dad put a value that he wanted me to do something different than what he did. When they saw that I liked school and was successful, they gave me a lot of support, you know, “You need to go to college.” But it wasn’t intense. It was sort of like, “You make the decision, but you can choose the life you live.” I still remember when I started school down here, you know, I just got in the car and drove down and found my dorm and all that stuff. You know, my parent knew nothing about college. Like my daughter, I take her to the tech center, I buy her a computer, we show her where the dorm is, all that stuff. You know, my parents didn’t have a clue about any of that stuff, but they helped me and supported me to get that done.
Q: What ideas do you have to help close the achievement gap? —Kathy Ritter, Rock Bridge High School principal
A: I just came back from a conference on the minority children achievement network in Detroit, which was a good conference. If I had the answer, we all would, and the achievement gap would be closed. So there’s not an answer, but I have some strong beliefs.
No. 1 is, the quickest and most powerful thing we can do to close the minority achievement gap and the income achievement gap — there are several gaps — is to increase pre-K through second grade vocabulary development, because here’s what has happened: We’ve got a low-income family or some families of culture that don’t have the same white, middle-class language that we have.
They don’t come to school with the same language. It would be like you and I going to a school where they spoke mainly French. We’re just as smart as everyone else, but we can’t understand what they’re saying, or we pick up just bits and pieces of it. So we seem to be slower, delayed, and then that tends to get translated by teachers and staff into, “Well, this child’s not quite as on the mark,” and it has all sorts of ramifications that are just untrue.
The problem is, how do you get to the pre-K vocabulary development when we don’t have the students? But the literature is very clearly that, and I can’t give you exact numbers, but kids from upper-income environments or certain cultures come to school sometimes with five times the vocabulary of other students.
Now remember, vocabulary is not a sign of intelligence; it’s a sign of experience. If your parents talk to you more, you have more language, and just anybody. My vocabulary started later in life when I started “real” life because my parents worked a lot, and I don’t think I was around adults as much. My daughter is an only child; she’s been around two college-educated people her whole life. We just talk to her; her vocabulary is much more advanced at an early age than mine was. So it’s an issue of experience.
I think we have to identify the most important words that all kids should know at certain grade levels, and there’s all sorts of research out there on that, and we need to just bust everything we can to get all kids to have those vocabularies. Some will have to learn more words. Some will already have it. But if you want to level the playing field and give everyone equal opportunity and access, we have to start with vocabulary. A lot of that is that preschool aspect that’s tough to conquer.
I think another good thing about Columbia is this MAC Scholars program. It is a program that encourages and pushes minority students to enroll in advanced placement courses and to prepare for college. They have early college experiences so they can get on a college campus, which is great in Columbia, and see what it’s like, and talk to people like themselves that talk about how they got there, so that they can truly believe that college is for them. Then they get support and are mentored through a variety of programs. They (the program) have had great success in getting minority students involved in advanced placement courses and preparing for college. So I’d want to continue to push that real hard.
The third thing that’s really difficult to get at, I’m trying to figure out how to say this, schools run under the rules of white, middle-class people. That’s what they were developed by. That’s 80 percent of our population. The teachers in schools are white, middle-class females. They have hidden rules, and if you grew up white and middle-class, you sort of understand the rules because, you’re not stating these rules, you just know you’re supposed to behave this way or do this.
If you didn’t grow up that way, you come into an environment where all of a sudden the rules are different, and your behavior, which was maybe normal at home, now is seen as being disruptive or aggressive or whatever in that school environment.
The same thing can be said of males in elementary schools. The majority of discipline is for males. Why? Well, elementary schools are run by females who tend to think “sit down and be quiet” is more of a norm, whereas boys need more space and more room because of their developmental issues.
So how do you get to the teachers, the white, middle-class teachers, and to get in them an understanding of the cultural differences of behavior and expression?
We know we’re classifying more black males in special ed. We’re classifying more black males for discipline, and we know that that can’t be true. Somehow, the perception we’re getting is causing that to happen. It’s not because they’re more problematic; it’s just that their behavior sticks out because it doesn’t fit the norm of that culture …
So I think the first thing we do is very concrete: the vocabulary. The second thing is, you really support the currently successful programs, the MAC Scholars, the other things that are working to bring a collaborative sense to the school. The third thing is, you’ve got to start having some courageous discussions about that there are differences. We are treating students of color differently, probably. We are probably treating males and females differently in certain situations, and we have to become aware of that before we can even think about providing an environment that is more equal …
The academic side of this coin is my forte, and the thing that excited me about Columbia was, I want to close the achievement gap. It’s not been done very many places. I love a challenge. I want to end my career feeling like I’ve done something valuable.
I went to Kearney, and we took average test scores and produced some of the highest in the state. I knew we could do it, and I’m coming to Columbia hanging my hat on, we’re going to find a way to close this achievement gap, and it’s not going to come at the expense of the kids that are already achieving. It’s going to raise all chips. That’s just the way it works. When you start to raise the expectations and increase the lower-scoring population, always what follows is the upper-scoring kids even start to perform better. The whole culture changes to a more academic and intense focus.
Q: How do you plan on extending opportunities for advanced students in elementary and middle school studies? –Christine Roberson, Columbia Area Career Center Laboratory Technology Program
A: I think our gifted program is very strong. And realize I would love to expand that, but the financial realities that we deal with in Columbia are that we’re going to have to deal with the same funding that we’ve been dealing with. So I think the gifted program is a good program that’s already in place.
I think you also start to look to support the after-school clubs that are academically based. I think those probably vary from building to building, teacher to teacher with who happens to have that interest in that building. I think at the upper level we continue to expand and push the AP program. I’m a big believer in AP, in that it’s a rigorous program. I think the more kids we get in that the better.
Finally, this is a new piece, the legislature, just this year, passed a bill that allows all public high schools to offer online courses. I had the only waiver in the state. In Kearney, Mo., we offered online psychology. You had to have a waiver because the state didn’t allow it.
I think that we need to aggressively pursue online courses for the juniors and seniors that show good discipline, good GPA and good behavior, and start to give them the experiences they’re all going to have in college anyway. Online courses make you become a much more independent and responsible learner. I think that’s a way that really motivated juniors and seniors can have the opportunity to really push themselves at a different level.
For example, my vision is, say I’m a senior in high school. I’ve had a good career. I’ve done everything well. I should be rewarded. Then I’m going to take my first, second and third hour online, so I don’t come into school until 11:3o. Or I may say, “I’d like to take fifth, sixth and seventh off,” and I come after lunch. It’s a different world, and you don’t have to sit down in a chair to learn. We need to start providing opportunities.
Also, you can take the stress off the car traffic coming in. You can allow kids to develop their independence, which, the first time I had an experience with an online course was in Warrensburg. We offered a summer course in personal finance. We got a waiver. That was five years ago, and we had probably about 30 percent of the kids fail. They didn’t complete the assignments. They didn’t get online and log in like they were supposed to. It’s not for everybody, but certainly it’s for a lot of kids that don’t necessarily have to show up and have seat time and have that teacher sit there and direct them through.
We all know that success in life goes to those that are independent learners and can function on their own.
Q: What kind of planning do you think can be done to operate the salary schedule for teachers next year? —Terry Alexander, Douglass High School government teacher
A: When I look at the budget, it looks like roughly almost $3.5 million will have to be found in order to operate that salary schedule. When I say “found,” there’s not money lying around. It will have to be redirected in one way or the other. This can come from redirecting a program; maybe the state budget will come in a little stronger.
My intent is to turn over every rock and to see what we can do that doesn’t harm students or the educational program and operate that salary schedule. Two years being on a frozen salary is just unacceptable.
Q: What is the biggest challenge you think you’re going to face during next year? –Michael Corey-Yares, Hickman High School Student Council president
A: I think the economy and its impact on our budget will still be a profound issue. However, it is likely that we will be looking at bonding for a third high school in the spring. That’s certainly going to be a challenge to line up all the information and get the information public, and to get that done in the spring. Building a third high school, or actually, a fourth high school, because we have an alternative school, is a two-year cycle. It impacts the economy of Columbia; it creates lots of jobs.
My excitement about that, though, is with that new high school we will increase participation in extracurricular events by high school students by over 30 percent. There’s a lot of kids that don’t participate simply because there’s too many, and we need to get as many kids participating in extracurriculars as possible.
Q: What are your goals for your first 100 days in office? –Susan McClintic, Columbia Missouri National Education Association president
A: I think one is to start the strategic planning process and to establish strong district goals within the first 100 days. No. 2, to visit every building and talk with every staff in a face-to-face meeting.
Three is to outline a list of programs that need to be examined at a critical level because, if we’re going to look at redirecting funds, we have to look at the programs to see which ones are successful and which ones aren’t. Four, establish some strong relationships with the board of education, and we have a July 7 retreat where we’re going to start to do that.
And to become well-known in this community within 100 days. I’ll be at every event. I’ll be there whenever I can so that people know who I am, they have an understanding of my style and personality and that I’m accessible. I think this city needs a superintendent that is visible and that people feel like they know and can relate to.
