Episode 26: Creative Leadership in Education with Dr. Paul Kaiser

Introduction:

Welcome to Luminate: Navigating the Unknown Through Creative Leadership. In this episode, Sarah Hempstead is joined by Dr. Paul Kaiser, Superintendent of Westfield Washington Schools. Dr. Kaiser brings over 40 years of experience in education, from being a former math teacher to leading a district of nearly 10,000 students. Together, they dive into the themes of honesty, transparency, and creative leadership in public education.

Overview:

In this episode, Dr. Kaiser reflects on his leadership journey and shares his philosophy on transparency, mentorship, and collaboration. He recounts how his experiences as a student-athlete and coach shaped his leadership style, and discusses the challenges and opportunities he faces in managing a rapidly growing school district. 

 Key Highlights:

• Mentorship and Leadership: Dr. Kaiser emphasizes the importance of mentorship, both giving and receiving, as well as peer-to-peer programs that foster leadership skills among students.
• Transparency and Trust: By sharing his personal contact information with parents, Dr. Kaiser underscores the value of open communication and transparency in building trust with the community.
• Managing Growth: Dr. Kaiser discusses the challenges of leading a rapidly growing district, balancing expansion while maintaining Westfield’s community feel.
• Creative Problem-Solving: Dr. Kaiser highlights the importance of adapting to change, launching new academic initiatives, and making tough decisions with integrity and data-driven insights.
• Diversity and Equity: The district’s efforts to create an inclusive environment that celebrates cultural diversity and supports students from all backgrounds.

Conclusion:

In this insightful episode, Dr. Paul Kaiser’s reflections offer a blueprint for creative leadership in public education. Whether you are an educator, leader, or anyone interested in navigating growth and change, Dr. Kaiser’s experiences provide valuable lessons in mentorship, transparency, and fostering academic and social success. Tune in to hear more about his ongoing efforts to build an environment of trust, excellence, and innovation in Westfield Washington Schools.

Transcript

Welcome to Luminate, navigating the unknown through creative leadership. I'm Sarah Hempstead, a creative problem solver, CEO, and principal in charge at Schmidt Associates. And today, I'm joined by Superintendent of Westfield Washington Schools, Dr. Paul Kaiser, a former basketball player from Ball State University.

In addition to being an athlete, Dr. Kaiser received his bachelor's and master's degree in secondary education, along with an administration and supervision certificate and an educational specialist in administration certification. Appreciate it. Developing a love of learning, he continued his studies at Indiana State University, receiving a doctorate in educational leadership.

With over 40 years of experience in education, Dr. Kaiser began his career as a math and business teacher at Kokomoor Howarth High School. He also taught at Monrovia High School and Eastern High School, before becoming the assistant principal at Eastern High School in Greentown, Indiana. He then became principal at Decatur High School before transitioning out of building leadership and into district operations and school budgeting, serving as assistant superintendent at Noblesville Schools.

In 2005 through 2021, Paul served as superintendent at Monroe Gregg Schools and Beach Grove City Schools before taking the helm at Westfield Washington Schools in 2021. He's also an adjunct professor for the last 12 years at Indiana State University. And in this episode, we'll discuss Dr. Kaiser's experience as a transformational leader and more about his commitments to honesty, transparency, and a strong focus on academics.

Dr. Kaiser, thanks for coming. Thank you. It's my pleasure. Now, from your resume, it seems like you always knew you want to do something with education, but is that true? Or was there an influence as to young Dr. Kaiser? It's really interesting. I think of my role models when I was young, Dan O'Malley was my Great school English teacher at Saint Andrews that ran a million foods later genius.

It was my high school basketball coach and my accounting teacher. And then Al Brown was my college assistant coach and outside of my mom and dad and people on the way. I was going to go when I went to Ball State, I was going to be a CPA. And during the first semester, I played basketball. I just said, I'd really like to coach and teach.

And so very easily transitioned over to be a business teacher. But I went there to. To be CPA and fell in love with accounting in high school. And I wasn't a great math student, which is ironic, but did well at Ball State and I always knew I could go back and fall back on that if I wanted to, but, I'm starting my 45th year, something must have clicked. It feels like it's stuck. Yes, I think so. So now why Ball State? Was basketball the big driver? Yeah I had accommodations. I had, probably about eight offers to go, Louisville probably being the largest one Ball State being close to home, Butler, Evansville, Tulane, some other schools, and but I wanted to go someplace close to home.

And it was just a good fit to people. I liked it. And it was just a great opportunity. So I have no regrets on where I chose to go to school. Probably not as but been better off from a basketball standpoint, maybe go a little bit smaller school, but education wise, experience wise, I have no regrets about being a Cardinal.

As a fellow Cardinal, we support all of our Ball State alumni. Let me ask you about the sports a little bit. So many of the leaders that I talked to learned and honed their leadership skills by playing as a part of a team and by being, learning how to be coachable. What'd you learn?

I think it really starts even back in grade school. I I proudly display the St. Andrew's chargers. 1969, 1970 CYO back to back football championships that we won, but I, and they're about the size of my thumb. Now you'd get a trophy to the ceiling, but I keep those in my office just to remind me about, the teamwork and the relationships that we had, you grew up.

I grew up in 42nd and Emerson on the Northeast side, and you have all these friends and then you go to grade school and you start playing sports and all, I play 3 different sports and you just develop the relationships and the coach ability and you watch different adult leaders and you learn from them.

But it really starts with that. And you have a goal that, you want to be successful and, my goal when I was a coach, I wanted to win a state championship and. Yeah. Decided that wasn't the direction I really wanted to go. When I had some opportunities presented, but it's about that working together toward a goal.

And I think that's true of your organization and the great people you have here just along with all the schools that have been fortunate enough to Be a small part of, so you're a historian of IHSAA sports. So what's your goal for Westfield sports? What do you want that program to be and teach?

It's really interesting. I have three daughters and two that were very involved in sports and and they both played division three sports. They played two different sports at both Anderson and Franklin college. And my message to them very early on was. Play hard and have fun and enjoy it.

And, after we played a basketball, I played travel volleyball and I never discussed afterwards wins or losses. And it was all about, did you have fun? Did you enjoy it? And did you do your best? And I think that's what's life is all about, whether it's career or your family, you work hard at it.

But I think it teaches a foundation of dedication and I think that's it. I, you have to work hard at it and I don't claim to be.

But I was on the all academic team at Ball State they got a scoring average of two points a game. Maybe I tell people, I'm Larry Bird and I combined for 30 in college. He had 28 and I had to but in all seriousness, from the standpoint of I really learned, you got to work hard at it and you can never give up at it, but it's got it.

You have to enjoy the journey. I think that's a. Maybe not as common an attitude as it used to be when it comes to competitive sports. I'm very fortunate. The places I've been as a principal and a superintendent when I talked to a head coach, I'd never talk about winning and losing, cause that's, when that's all said and done, yeah, it's great to win championships and things like that.

But you remember the journey with the kids one of our, one of Parents of our at Westfield, her son is 1 of the senior leaders, and there's 35 seniors at Westfield high school. They're going away next week to a senior leadership camp up in Michigan. Just the seniors and for those 30 plus kids what they learn about leadership.

Is going to, it's going to last forever and we probably have the toughest one toughest schedules in the state, but we're pretty successful. But I think that's what you take away from the athletics is the hard work, the dedication and coming together as 1 and because that's what slice all about and carry that forward to the next level, whatever they do.

That's awesome. Your district is so interesting. I think the last statistics I read said Westfield is the sixth fastest growing city in the country, something crazy like that. Your district is growing proportionally, right? 10, 000 students, 1, 500 staff, and growing every day. And you have this commitment to peer mentorship, to a one on one, meeting each student where they are.

How do you balance those two things growing at such an exponential speed? I think it comes down to leadership. And that starts with our nine building principles that are great leaders for us. And what's really interesting about Westfield. Having my kids went to Westfield until I took the Monroe V.

Superintendent's job. So I was there when we had a high school 400 and now we're this year. We're probably top 3000. and what I find in my role is changing from that small school operational. How you do things. To a district that's large, putting procedures and practices in place. And, we bring I bring with me a background and continuous quality improvement, which is a Baldrige model.

If you're in the business world. And so I work my role so different than my other superintendency is setting that foundation. And in leading my assistant principals, or my assistant soups. And my directors have been lead. Along with meeting principles, so I think the biggest thing coming in is getting the systems in place on how to make decisions and what we do and setting up the rubrics for that.

And we purposely have not done strategic planning. Because I wanted more time to get our systems in place, and we've done some work over the last 2 years, but this fall, we'll finalize. What those are and we focus on some very simple areas careers. We want our rocks to be life ready. I can evaluate that I can do that.

We focus on the academics we focus on careers. And then just the whole social side of relationships and responsibilities. And that's something we've evolved to based on the great work. That our high school had been doing, we've taken that in a corporate into our district model. And so I think it's setting the foundations of how you make decisions and where the district's going.

And and having that background, what do you make the decisions on? And, whether you stay at 1 high school, you go to a 2nd high school, which is a question I get asked a lot. But, we're, we'll look at data and make those decisions and reach out to the community.

Somewhere down the road right now, we're as we're building a couple elementary schools, transportation, new middle school. So we're busy right now. You got a few things going on. Yeah. You got to find a place to put all those bodies. Yes. So I love what you're talking about, which is in terms of creating a process that people can understand and the foundational structure That people can walk through when they need to make good decisions.

The other side of that is growing the people so that they know how to walk through that process and that, that kind of goes to mentorship. Can you talk about how you mentor your leaders and then what you've learned from your mentors too? Yeah. I think I, I look back on the mentors. I had it before Dan Amalia Genius and Al Brown.

They were all relationship people. And when I came in. Three years ago, I didn't come in and say, we're going to do all these things. I said, we're going to focus on the vertical and horizontal alignment, and that's pretty huge and comprehensive. And in my role I don't not only mentor my three assistant soups who have a lot of experience, but my principals.

And then in turn, at our high school level, we have a lot of we have a senior freshman mentoring program, which is really important that was in place long before I got here. Stacy McGuire and her team put that in place, John, my assistant superintendent of curriculum instruction. His dad was a longtime administrator in central grew up there, taught there the gyms named after him.

And John will talk about his dad says that everybody needs a coach and everybody needs to be coaching. And I think that's the philosophy that I've always done, I want to, even coming to Westfield, I feel like I'm being mentored because it's a whole new environment compared to where I was before.

Sure. And so I think the philosophy of. We all need a coach. We all need to be coaching somebody. I'm mentoring 2 different aspiring superintendents. And then I'm mentoring another person who's in his 1st year as superintendent. And that's kind of part of the association school superintendents I'm involved with, but I just think it's part of what we do.

And it's formal. It's informal. And you It's a day to day and it's casual and sometimes more, more targeted. I love the idea of seniors mentoring freshmen too. I think that's really neat and good on both sides of it. So they learn how to be as freshmen and learn how to be as adults as they're become seniors.

Absolutely. Does every freshman get a mentor? Yes, they do. Wow. That's really impressive. Does every senior get to mentor? I can't answer that question to be honest with you. I think the opportunity is there if they want to, some may choose not to because of their own personality, but we really try to align that to the best of our ability.

I'm not involved in the day to day, but we have an assistant principal. That's what they do. Sure. And in fact, our former football coach who left to go to Wabash, that was part of his responsibility setting up the whole mentoring. And we just do a lot with our kids, especially at the high school and really at all grade levels to try to create those leaderships.

So even our elementary schools by Having different mentors and different opportunities, for example, Shamrock Springs, I went to their end of the year program. They're a group of 4th graders, which is the highest and that they led the whole convocation. They do 4 student convocations and the student leadership team for the elementary does it all.

They lead it all with a staff sponsor. And I think we need to start teaching leadership as early as. As kindergarten, and continue that forward to help for the future. And the little wins and the success, successful games and practices and convocations lead to bigger ones. Something I think is really interesting about you is that you shared your mobile number with parents when you started at Westfield. That's pretty brave. Not every superintendent does that. I did that at my previous district, but then it was my, I have two cell phones at Westfield at my previous school.

I had one cell phone. It was my personal. I gave it to him because what the heck they want to call me. And I Westfield, I have two, but I don't really get a lot of calls except for during COVID. But it's we send out a, We're going to be doing a shamrock blast every Thursday. It's right on the bottom.

Here's Dr. Kaiser's cell number if you want to call. And I just think that direct communication is important. Early on, had a lot more calls when there were different controversies going on, but we worked really hard to Establish that relationship, but they can call me anytime they want to.

I prefer between eight and eight. I may listen to it after eight o'clock. I may not call you back after that. But I think it's important to be available in my role. You're talking about a level of transparency that is I think builds trust. Absolutely. We've done that in our construction project process try to be as transparent as possible.

Because of the impact it has on the community. How do you think that the transparency relates to community pride? I think it's interesting with Westfield because we're in that transitional stage. You've got the, again, living in Westfield I lived in village farms, which was, one of the newer neighborhoods.

And I moved in 2008 from there to go to Monrovia. The community has just exploded. And as I drive around, I said, Oh, there's a green pipe. That means an addition is going in there. And we've been that way since day one. And I think our previous superintendents and leadership role were too, but it's so critical that.

We're up front and we're communicating what we're doing. I've got a list of what I call key communicators. My previous district, it was a page and a half and it's about 5 pages. Now, if anybody I meet that. I would consider, hey, I may need to reach out to this person. I write down who they are, their phone number and what they do and keep that to communicate.

But, I don't have Facebook, at least not personally. I don't respond to Facebook, but I don't necessarily mind calling someone to put something on Facebook. That's not accurate. And just being up for it and say, hey, I heard you did this on social media, but. This is what's really taking place.

You want to come in and talk about it. And I think that's really important and you can't you can't answer everything on social media, but when there's things that are really not factual. It's 1 thing. They don't like the superintendent. I don't worry about that. But when they make statements that are inaccurate that affect the district in the community, but that growing from a small district, a large district.

It's in a large, small town to a larger town has been interesting and challenging for the. The previous mayor and our current mayor, because some people don't like change. I joke all the time. The only person that doesn't like change is a baby with a wet diaper. You want to, you want to take care of that, but most people don't like change.

No, it's really hard on them. And and I have a philosophy, I call it my 80, 20 philosophy that's developed recently. You have 10 percent in this direction, you have 10%. And the 80 percent is not usually the loudest of those percentages. No I keep on telling my team as we talk, we just went through some rebranding and I told her team, most people don't really care about that.

They don't care that we have a new W or that we reworked our rocks logo just a little bit, but they care about is that their kid gets a great education, gets They're involved in whatever activities I want to be involved in, and they're very happy and positive about school. And that needs to be our major focus.

Just what can we do to make those kids successful starting in from preschool up through the high school, which is harder in a large district. I think it is too. And, as you think about your district, I know academic excellence has been a huge focus of yours as well as workforce readiness being trained for careers in the future.

So where do you go? Where do you look for? The best in how to teach what to teach, how to change the district as times change. I've got a great assistant superintendent, John Atha, Dr. Atha who was the president of Guerin Catholic, who was principal at Chouttard and we worked together at Noblesville 2000, 2005.

And so we hired in and our foundation was so strong by what the. High school was doing with the core 40 work with advanced placement, the number of kids that are achieving at that level. I don't really have to worry about this level of these kids and this academically rigor it's in place, but, what can we do to enhance that?

We're building a university center attached to the YMCA attached to our own auditorium. In conjunction with the YMCA, so we can start offering more bringing colleges in during the day. We're our CNA program for nursing is exploded. So we're expanding space to take care of that.

For me, the academics are really strong, but how can we provide more opportunities for example, we need to offer different foreign languages. We're pretty traditional on that standpoint. And so we're working on that. We have a huge global student population that most people don't have a clue that we have just walk in our buildings and look around at the global diversity that's developed in Westfield.

And how do we meet the cultural needs of those kids and those parents and things like that? But I think just the career opportunities for kids. They're out there in partnership with we're working with IUK, we're working with a Riverview and other places and just really getting our kids ready for that.

We always talk about the day after graduation, are they ready for the next step in their life? And I think that's our focus. So talk a little bit about the diversity that's in Westfield. Cause I do think that's many people might not expect that as a district. How do you think about accommodating all the kids that are coming from this.

This diverse group of families. Our kids are coming from all over the world. We are truly a melting pot. If you drive through some of our neighborhoods on a, an early Saturday morning or a nice late summer night, you just want to say, wow, this is not the Westfield of, of 1975, we're not the 400 person high school a little different.

And so I think it's honoring the cultural diversity of our kiddos. And our high school has done a really good job with cultural affairs and different things like that. Something as simple as having all the flags of our kids hanging in the hallway. It may not sound a lot to people on the outside, but for that kid, having their country's flag of origin up there is pretty important.

We're continuing to grow that. We really want to expand our the traditional foreign exchange program. Bring in more kids because I think the best way to teach global diversity is bringing kids from throughout the world. We've enhanced that quite a bit. We still have our goal is to have 20 to 25 kids coming from all over the world and then immerse themselves.

And we had a group of Japanese students spend a week and a half with is, and this summer we're sending kids over there. So I think those type of things will help getting our parents. That have a diverse background from different countries, having them get even get more involved and things like that will make a big difference.

But we're just at the, we're like the picture. We got the iceberg and you got this huge underwater. Yeah, we may see this, but it's all this other. focus that we have to put on it. Oh, what great student experiences to be able to get to know kids from all over the world at a high school level and develop that kind of curiosity and empathy.

When you think about moving up to higher levels of leadership for all your kids later on those skills really can't be Can't be high enough. And we want those kids to come live with our parents, live with our families, get involved in our different athletic choir programs. The last couple of years, we've had a group of those kids come speak to our board so they see that how important it is to have programs like this in place.

That's really cool. So let's talk about Kind of the downside of being a leader in a complex organization. Sometimes there are unpopular decisions that need to be made. I've said, I'm not going to talk about COVID anymore. Cause I'm sick of it, but that's a great example of one. How do you, as a leader think about making the unpopular decision and getting, if not buy in, then at least understanding I think it starts with your core beliefs.

And, we're going to focus on, the academics, we're going to focus on careers. We're going to focus on that social growth, and there's a lot of stuff out there floating around about, this book or that book, we'll work with any parent on any topic related to their kid because the kids are born to them, not us.

But I think you have to go back to your own guiding principles and your own beliefs. Here's an example before I left. We have a parent that wants to transfer into to Westfield because they have a job here. Unfortunately, we have a policy that you got to live in Westfield to come to school here.

And I had to tell the secretary, just tell the parent. No, I'm sorry. And I know they have a job here, but they live in Carmel. Carmel has great schools. Your kid's going to have to go there. I think there are certain. Policies, for example, we've, we're going through updating all our board policies. You start with that.

And then there's sometimes human decision you have to make, especially when it comes to students is that best for the kid and things like that. But I think you just have to. Gather all the information and make those decisions and don't overreact. But I'm going to go back to my 8020 or my 80, my 10, 80, 10 theory.

It's got to be decision down the middle. We had a discussion about allowing transfer kids and I just left. Are you kidding? We can't house all the Westfield kids we have right now. So that was a simple discussion. But so I just think you have to look at all the information, the data.

And then make the decision things best. And, I tell people I've done this a lot of years. I'm like a big I don't know. I'll use the word callous, when it comes to, you just, you can't let things get to you and bother you. But at the same time you have to have a big heart and you've got to think about.

What's best for kids, but you also have to be as, as consistent as possible. And something as simple as saying, yes, you can move here and not move here. We have board policies that follow that. And if you start making exceptions, you open up the floodgates on things, but you got to make those decisions based on past practices and follow your heart.

So that goes back to what you were saying at the beginning with taking enough time to make sure that your policies follow your ethos, policies, follow your ethics, and then by virtue of following them you're being equitable. Which do too many one offs and you run the risk of that. We're talking about enough space for your current students.

Now, do you want to touch on just a little bit, all of the things that you're doing in Westfield right now, just to fit your current students and still supply them with a top notch education? I'll go back to three years ago, coming in I was hired on May 25th. I retired from my previous position, retired in February and was hired in 25th.

Our CFO, Brian, Tom and Michael used to work for me. He recruited me out of retirement, which wasn't hard. I was pretty bored after a month. You failed retirement. I can only remodel my garage so many times, but it really started then and just we do what are called system to system meetings.

We meet with, I meet with every teacher in the school district once a year, I go in and I just, I ask them two questions. And we provide them lunch and during the prep periods, I ask him, tell me your success stories and tell me how we enhance teaching and learning. And and that's process. We do. I also invited any teacher to come and have a 1 on 1 meeting with me.

And I had about 30 people take me up on that. It started with that trying to get a feel for what's going on in the district and what are the needs. And we had a referendum to win the next fall. So we really couldn't start on the, we looked at demographic studies. We did evaluations of the building done, but it's really, how do we make the decision on what comes next and quite frankly, we spent a year and a half.

On that process to come up with, and there was no doubt from my mind right away, the less transitions. From building to building the better. So that was a decision that we collectively made so simple because we're a K for a 5, 6 building, 7, 8, 9, 9 through 12 and there's no research that supports that what the configuration is.

There is a lot on transitions and I know my, the parents in Westfield. So many of them want their 5th grader to be back in elementary. So that was an easy decision we made then where do we go from there? And so we just processed a lot. We met with all the teachers, we asked them, what do you think about this?

Different configurations. So we started with that. We had a quite a few parent meetings, which quite frankly, most parents didn't show up for, cause they're busy raising their kids, which kind of told us that they feel pretty confident that. We can make those decisions. We put that information out and again we met with a lot of the different business people and other civic groups say, this is our plan of going K 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 through 12 we had some land.

We we had to switch transportation center locations, which you Again, you guys are involved in that and so a lot of that information went on and on a just a lot of feedback and it came down to, we need a new middle school and I would contend we need to start planning our 3rd middle school.

Because the growth is not stopping and I, we've had a lot of discussion about a 2nd high school and we'll make that decision. Over the next 3 to 5 years based on data and growth and really the will of the community. We're landlocked a little bit at the high school, so we haven't made that decision.

And you can quote me on that 1, but that's out there. And we need to go on by land for that 3rd, middle school, a potential 2nd, high school, that's the direction we're going to go and our 9th and 10th elementary, this transition will take us from 6 to 8. Again, we'll go K5 buildings and Dr.

Gray and company did the early learning center, which allowed us some grace time to move some of those programs, which is attached to my office. We're expanding that building as we speak. So we just spent a lot of community time, a lot of processing time to come configuration and we're looking at numbers right now.

For when. We have one, one developer alone that's. We're tracking that on a big board in our office right now to get a feel for where the next elementary will go in the next middle school, so the community must really be doing something right. As is the school system to have that, that many bodies coming to live there.

I think it's, it comes down to quality of life and the fact that Carmel's built out and no one wants to get on 69 to get downtown. No, a combinations. I think one we're the next next, Step in that process and with 31 and the developer 31, you can get to Carmel, you can get to Indianapolis and you get pretty much any place relatively quickly.

And if you're involved in sports, you got grand park right there, you got a lot of civic things that, you know, taking place in both Carmel and Hamilton, southeastern area. It's a nice place for people to come and to live and, they feel safe. And from that standpoint, and we're just trying to predict when and how fast we need to do things and all the process we're doing right now.

We're not increasing the tax rate, which is made the community a little bit more positive about usually does. Yeah. But and we're working as we're working on our next addition to the high school right now. And then once that's done, we'll have to make some bigger decisions. Sure. You mentioned success stories asking your folks what their success stories are what's one of yours, what's one that you look back on and make it feel like this 40 some years has been worth it. I think I've impacted kids for generations. When I say me, it's not just me. It's. People I've been associated with, as a high school principal, I have people that say, Hey, you were my principal. And I said, hope I didn't mess you up. But I think it's the relationships along the way.

I think that's what it's about. You're going to forget your math. You're going to forget, maybe some of the physics you took in high school, but what you do remember is the relationships and I've been blessed. To work with great schools, great communities, different, from urban, I spent probably half my career in urban education where you have a poverty rate of 60, 70, 80 percent and that creates different needs and different leadership.

And so I just think I've been blessed, touch some lives and someone asked me, he said what do you want out of being an educator? I said, I want to be respected, I want people to say, hey, he worked hard and he did things the right way, but it's not about me.

It's. To organization and the people and I think you have set that role model. You have to set that example. You can't, you cannot be reactionary to any active, anything that takes place. You've got to sit back and evaluate it. And but I just think making a difference for kids, but it's it's it's been a good journey.

I got 3 more years to go. That's my plan right now. I was waiting to retire. I'll be 70. In 2000. 27. So my goal is to work through June 30th, 2027. So I got at least three more under my belt. And then I'll have a permanent fishing cottage someplace. She's going to say, I'm going to try that retirement thing again.

I've already got some consulting things lined up, I won't have to get up at five 30 in the morning. Most days. And. Try to get a workout in and then get to school. And I will tell you this, I've done this my 45th year. I have not worked a day in my life. I still go to school and that's what I feel.

I I told my daughters are both teachers that remember you're not going to work, you're going to school. And I think that's important. That's awesome. Two final questions. One just for you and one that I ask everybody. So my, my, just for you. So what's the most valuable things. You've learned as an educator over the last 41 years, if you could tell these young educators who are starting this fall, it's relationships. It's relationship, you don't have to be a great teacher. But yeah, you have to be a great, you care about people and, they need to know you care about them. And if it's the poem about Teddy if you've ever read that and the teacher that really was frustrated with this young man, cause he was disheveled and found out that his mother had just passed away.

And yeah, but it's about relationships. That's great. That's great advice. Final thing, what are you reading right now? Or what's a book you go back to again and again? It's interesting. I love biographies and autobiographies. I probably should read more educational stuff, but I asked John Ather for that.

I do read that. Don't get me wrong. In my backpack. When I take the workout, I actually, I'm reading a book about Mike and I've gained a tremendous amount of respect. For him and his role as a leader not that I didn't respect him, but, what he went through and, I knew him as a congressman and then, governor and things like I knew of him, but reading that book, I've just learned a lot about him that I've just gained a tremendous amount of respect.

I'm not done with it yet. I'm also reading a book. I have no Bobby plump pretty well. So I know about the Milan basketball story. Yeah. And I have a 86 year old friend who's best friends with Oscar Robinson, Bobby Plump. Yeah. So I've met him both. And so I've I'm reading a book about the real Indiana Hoosier story written by a gentleman out of New York that talks about Oscar Robinson and how they went through state championships.

But it is a mirror of what Bobby did at Milan, but in growing up in the farmland and going on to state championship and Oscar and the struggles that they went through some people may not know this, but when they won their 1st championship, they were not allowed to drive around the circle of Indianapolis.

They took him out to a park because they were worried about. Whatever the merit that time and so when addicts won the championship a few years ago, Oscar was at the game and he and the players got to write it on a circle, which is cool. Unfortunately, a few years later. So I'm reading. I'm reading those 2 books simultaneous right now.

The 1 about the real Indiana Hoosiers and what took pipe with Oscar, then the Mike Pence book and I've got a, I got a plethora of other books to read. They're stacked up in my office and at home. You got to get those when you get the fishing lure back out, right? I need to just get them online cause I'm driving all the time and I can listen to them and my daughter and I listened to a book, a murder mystery all across the country this summer.

And I thought, I just should get these online. Cause at least I can, I love turning a page, I guess so. Dr. Kaiser, it's been lovely to have you today. Thank you so much for coming in. I know school is starting in just mere moments. So you're a very busy man. Appreciate your time and all that you do.

And to learn more about Westfield Washington schools, Destination Westfield, and what's coming up, visit www. k12. in. And this has been Luminate navigating the unknown through creative leadership. Thank you for listening. We hope the episode has inspired you and offered valuable insights into the world of creative leadership.

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