C-Falls principal in the running for supt. job

Dave Wick, the affable principal of the Columbia Falls Junior High School for more than 20 years, could be the new superintendent of School District 6.

Current Superintendent Steve Bradshaw is retiring at the end of the school year. The board, in turn, advertised the position internally.

Wick was the lone applicant, in a move that wasn’t unexpected.

On Monday, the School District 6 board formally interviewed Wick, who told the board his people and hiring skills were his main strengths.

Currently Wick is on sabbatical until the end of the school year and has been traveling the country as the president of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, an advocacy group with about 16,000 members across the United States.

Wick highlighted his people skills as his main strength and said hiring the right staff, from bus drivers to cafeteria workers to teachers, is paramount.

He noted that the first person a child meets isn’t the teacher, it’s the bus driver, or another staffer outside of educators. He said he wants to be involved with all hires at the district.

As he’s traveled the country in his current position, he said school leaders say “hiring is the No. 1 thing people talk about.”

Having said that, Wick said he was an advocate of listening to staff and building policy from the ground up, rather than top down, a philosophy he implemented at the junior high.

“It’s always been a ‘We’ place,” he said of the junior high.

His leadership style is to let teachers with good ideas go for it.

“I gave them guardrails and told them to drive the cars as fast as they can,” he said. Teachers, in turn, learn where the bumps on the road are.

“I encourage experimenting in the classroom,” he said.

Education comes with a host of challenges, of course. Wick noted schools can always do more for top students and with the rise in trauma in youth before they even get to schools, there is plenty of work to be done there as well.

And then there are the average kids.

“We need to find ways for kids to express themselves,” he said.

The superintendent job is really about managing principals and budgets, policy and support staff, board member Michael Nicosia noted.

How would Wick address those issues?

Wick pointed to his hiring skills in finding good people and working with them. He also noted that his tour of the country has further opened his eyes to the lack of education funding.

“The board and superintendent really need to be active in advocacy,” he said. “We’re underfunded. It’s still not at the level it needs to be.”

As far as managing the upcoming building project, he said it was good that the district hired a building manager. His role would be as a good steward of the project, both with staff needs and taxpayer monies. He noted he was project manager for about six months when the junior high was built 20 years ago — a school that still looks nearly brand new today.

When Wick is finished with his sabbatical, he said he had no problem with going back to being principal at the junior high if the board decides to go in a different direction.

The board made no decision Monday night, but Wick said if he is selected, he’d like to work with Bradshaw to make the transition a smooth one. Wick isn’t on the road all the time.

In his current post, he said he’s given talks as short as a couple of minutes to as long as an hour and a half. In the past four months, the job has opened his eyes to the state of education across the U.S.

“I’m finding out how small we really are,” he said. Nashville, for example, has a district with 110,000 students.

Being small is good, he said, adding “the smaller scale is easier to manage.”

It’s also far more personable. He noted there are several school board members on the board who were there when he started his job at the junior high 23 years ago.