Speaker 0 00:00:00 Welcome to the PBL Simplified podcast for administrators brought to you by Magnify Learning your customized PBL partner. From over a decade of experience with you in the trenches, we are bringing you this top rated educational podcast designed for visionary school administrators seeking to transform their schools with project-based learning. Launch your vision, live your why, and lead inspired. Here's your host, Ryan Sawyer.
Speaker 1 00:00:30 Welcome to the PBL Simplified Podcast for administrators. If you're a building leader, if you're CTE, director, assistant, or superintendent, you're in the right place. We're talking about transforming education, and today is a leadership episode, so it's not a solo, we're not looking at a specific topic here. We've got somebody who's boots on the ground doing the work. So you get to hear right from the people that are doing the work. So you're in the right place. Uh, today we've got Jeremy Quals on the podcast. Uh, he's a rocking educator from Tennessee, and you're gonna love the model that they're a part of. You're gonna love the work that he's doing. We're gonna talk about it. So there's a lot of chatter right now about workforce readiness right now. And I say chatter 'cause people like to talk about things, but then there's a whole group that are doing something about it that see the true need for our students that yes, they do need to be workforce ready, but, but how do we do that? That's where we start to separate, uh, different programs. So our question is, is what if we rethought? What if we rework that high school experience? What would that look like? So we've got Jeremy on today, director of the Entrepreneur and Innovation Center in Williamson County, and there's already some changes going on with that that he's gonna talk about. He's in the building, the, the new building. Exciting work. Jeremy, thanks for being on today.
Speaker 2 00:01:47 So glad to be here, Ryan. Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to a conversation, and I love the fact that it is geared towards the administrators because we always need, we need some, we need some help. We need the ideas. And the best thing in education are usually stolen anyway, so it goes still away.
Speaker 1 00:02:00 That's right. And there's a, and there are amazing things happen. You've been doing this work for, for a long time now, uh, eight years with the Entrepreneur center, uh, innovation center's new, uh, I'm gonna get you riled up here right at the beginning and say like, as you're talking to people, they likely don't really know what you do, right? So they're asking questions like, doesn't really sound like traditional education. And then they say, oh, you're a vo-tech program. What, what, how, how do you respond to that? And I know our listeners are innovative and say, VO-tech, hold on. We're doing more. So run with that. For me,
Speaker 2 00:02:32 It's, it's a fantastic segue. I mean, you, you start thinking about vocational education and Right, and I go back on my experience in high school. I've been in public education for 25 years now, and you go back, uh, graduated high school 30 years ago, and you think dark, dank and dirty and non-college going. And it could not be further from the truth these days. It has to be a technical, uh, very highly, uh, technical with aptitudes around those technical skills. And it, it, and this building behind me is proof of that. If we had built it on the 30-year-old model, I can't get students to enroll mm-hmm . So we have to kind of trick it into this, this new age, uh, of vocational training. And it, and it's, it's, it's, uh, you have your, your sponsors and your workforce development corporations in tow with you.
Speaker 2 00:03:22 Uh, they have their DNA on the program. It's fluid, it's fast, it's flexible, and it, it delivers skill sets that, that, that put kids, uh, give kids a leg up. Really, honestly, in the, in the for workforce, I think COVID really opened the eyes of traditional public ed. Right? Uh, can it be done differently? Of course, it can be, can it be done faster? Of course, it can be, can it be done non-traditionally and in hybrid async methods? Of course, it can, can skill development, not so much. You still have to have those boots on the ground training. So things have changed, but at the same time, it hasn't fully changed to the point that it's just autonomous. So, uh, uh, you know, it was this building behind, I can't wait to talk a little bit about it and how we've developed it, but it's exactly what the question that you just asked. Uh, with that in mind,
Speaker 1 00:04:08 Yeah. And when I ask that question, I obviously, we love CTE programs. Like we work with CT directors all the time. And that span now is really interesting. And where people are at and what they mean by vocational tech at this point. We love the hands on nature. We love the workforce readiness skills. We love that kids are leaving high school and making 80 grand a year like as 18, 19 year olds. You know, it's, it's amazing work. And as we're talking today, can you talk us a little bit about, like, you have not abandoned CTE to do something different, right? So talk to us about that spectrum of what that looks like for you all. Uh, you kind from CTE to this innovation center. Give us kind of a big picture though.
Speaker 2 00:04:48 So I have an unbelievable team. Even none of this is possible with, without our team, really. And so I've got, I've got three assistant directors, captains, as we call 'em. Uh, we have roughly 140 teachers across 10 high schools. Our total, uh, K 12, uh, population is, uh, north of 40,000, right? At 41,000 in change. And at the high school level, we're looking at between 10 and 12,000 across 10 high schools. So we have 140 CTE teachers that we are responsible for with about 34 programs of study. I have one assistant director that is, that's his total mission. And, and that's what he is doing, uh, doing day to day. And then I have two other, uh, assistant director, one for the entrepreneurship center, which houses 280 students from all 10 high schools. They have to give up a, a period of, of transportation to get there.
Speaker 2 00:05:35 Uh, we have a wait list to even get in the building between three and 500 to even get in mm-hmm . We have an application interview, uh, process to even get into the entrepreneurial center. And then we have this building behind us. Uh, this building that I'm sitting in currently will house starting in August of 2026, will house 525 students with five different programs. Um, and we can discuss those at any time you'd like for me to. But those programs, uh, we were really hoping for about 50% application process, uh, application and interviews coming into it. We have superseded every single 525 seats. So we're gonna start at capacity whether we like it or not. Whether it's gonna go well or not, we don't know. Yeah. But, uh, it, it, it really is showing, improving the fact that our fluency rating is very high. Our a CT average score is 26 and a half.
Speaker 2 00:06:25 Now. You think about that 26 and a half. And that's the highest, I think outside of, uh, Miami-Dade County, I think is what I was told. I might need to be fact checked on that. But it's one of the highest acts in, uh, the Southeast United States. So you've got 82, 80 5% college going high a CT, high fluency, who cares about ct? Who knows what CTE is, right? At one point in time when I'm asking students about CTE, they think that's the concussion, uh, injury that you get playing football. So we really had to retool what is CTE in a high fluency area, right? And really what we did was we educated the students that it really as building a portfolio for colleges to get into your X, y, Z dream school, fill in the blank that these portfolios that you build, NCTE doesn't only enhance it, it gives you a leg up.
Speaker 2 00:07:16 Mm-hmm . And so as we started reeducating students on that, as the entrepreneurship center, as a pro proof of concept, kids are getting into their dream schools. Matter of fact, one of our, our, our, our National Pitch Champion, we are the back to back reigning national pitch champions in the incubator EDU space. And that's held in Chicago. Every July $25,000 is up for grab. We're the reigning back to back. And we think, and we hope back to, back to back champions. Our reigning champion is a, a is a, uh, a female at one of our high schools who, uh, started a company called Spiky. It's a spike drink detection key chain spiky app.com. And, um, uh, she got into Wharton Business School, and if you know anything about getting into up n Ivy League, less than 0.001, and she's gonna be a five year CTE concentrator.
Speaker 2 00:08:05 Mm-hmm. And, and if you ask her to this day, how did you get in? Was it your unbelievable high a CT score? Was it your out of the roof, GPA? She says, no, if I didn't have the entrepreneurship center, I don't get in. We started seeing this trend happening with some of our local college and universities in Nashville, Belmont Private exclusive four year school in Nashville. And they, we asked the question, once kid gets past the threshold of A A CT and GPA, what are you looking for? And they're saying, yeah, we are now putting in CTE as a heavy weight factor. And did you go through a CT program? Did you do community service according to that? Did you do some industry credentials? All those things are taken to advance. So the game has changed. Yeah. And we're trying to evolve at that speed.
Speaker 1 00:08:45 So I'm gonna amazing, uh, amazing, uh, student story already. And I wanna pull us back though, 'cause you've got a wait list for your program. Right. And I've talked to superintendents often, and when they go to build a building, what keeps them up at night would be an empty building. Right. Or a makerspace that's empty. 'cause teachers don't know how to use it. Parents and, and students don't know what it means. So talk to me a little bit about how you change community perception where they're like, my kid's gotta get in here. Right. In fact, we're gonna get on the wait list. Like, that's a big deal.
Speaker 2 00:09:23 We call it the Apple Store effect. We want them to wait in line and they don't even know what they're waiting in line for. They just don't wanna miss out. Right. So we, yeah. We say, how do we con how, how do we create the Apple Store effect? Now, the question that you just asked, how, how's it happened, how's it changed? I'll tell you, you open the doors. What do you mean by open the doors? Well, we open the doors to the community. We have 150 built in mentors that come once a month that help guide these, these entrepreneurial students at the ec. Once you get past the securities and regs of, of a background check, et cetera, they become a tier three volunteer here in, in, in Williamson County. Once we open the doors, those level three and level four students that are entrepreneurs, we don't even set the meetings.
Speaker 2 00:10:08 They are communicating the meetings between the adults and themselves. And then they, they, we, we, we treat the entrepreneurial center. Once you get past level two, right? Say you're a third year kid, there, it is a co-work space mm-hmm . And that has changed game for us tremendously. Why? Because word of mouth in the community gets out through the adults. The adults then want to come in. The adults want to see the adults want to work in this space. Adults want to have a meeting in the space. And then what happens is, it's the tip of the spear. I, it's hard to get an industry professional to go to one of our 10 high schools for a specific CTE program. But for whatever reason, this entrepreneurial center, they come in. So then once the relation is, uh, the relationship is, is founded, we can then say, Hey, Ryan, I see you have an expertise in fill in the blank CTE programming.
Speaker 2 00:10:59 Oh yeah. That's my business. Great. Would you be willing to go out to one of our high schools and talk to them? Yeah, I'd be great. That'd be, it'd be glad. So it's kind of the tip. As I say, the big part of the funnel is the EIC, the entrepreneurship innovation campus. This is gonna be part of that now, which, you know, with the EC and the IC together, once those business professionals get into this facility, they can touch a lot of lies from all 10 high schools in one place. But then we can start filtering out, uh, strategically into those 140 teachers that we have in the buildings.
Speaker 1 00:11:30 So talk to us about community partners a bit. And I'd love a specific example of one i I, you, you're touching a lot of people in the community. People obviously know and respect you and the work that you all are doing as a place that they can make a difference, right? I always say that the, the general public, they want to help us in education. They're just not sure how. Right? Like the CEO of a business can't show up and say, Hey, how can I help on a random day to, you know, a local high school and they don't wanna make copies. Right? They want to, to see the impact. So can you give us a community partner, uh, that's just really at a high level, interacted with your kids and, and your centers?
Speaker 2 00:12:07 I'm gonna give you two. Yep. That way nobody can say, I don't have those in my community, and I can't duplicate because you actually can, you gotta go find them. Right? And behind me as example, the brown wall, that is gonna be our new Caterpillar facility. So as I was trying to sell space and square footage in this building behind me, we started with a list of 10 vocational programs that we sent out as a survey to all of our students and, and families. And we asked them to rank 'em. We kind of put 10 that were, uh, beneficial to our community, obviously, before we even started. So as those trends started to emerge, then that, that let us snuggle. Alright, let's go find these community partners within that realm. So Caterpillar was one of the first, the Caterpillar headquarters are in Nashville, Tennessee called the, the CEO.
Speaker 2 00:12:56 Uh, I was fortunate enough to get the CEO on a Zoom call just like this. I said, Hey, here's what we're thinking. And he's within 15 minutes, he said, we're in, we want 5,000 square feet. We want it to look like a training facility. And we're building the largest training tech center in your county. So the goal is you train 'em up, uh, uh, we'll provide the, the financial and, and, um, infrastructure behind it, and then we can send them directly to work behind, uh, uh, graduation at just what you said, between 80 and a hundred thousand dollars out the job college and d uh, debt free, uh, with, with two certifications. They liked the idea so much. They said, we want heavy diesel techs, obviously, right? Mm-hmm . Yeah. For
Speaker 1 00:13:37 Machine, of course.
Speaker 2 00:13:39 And we're gonna do electrical power generation to boot on top of it. So they're the largest electrical power generation company in the world. Uh, and, and you know, you think about all the, the backup generators for hospitals now for ai, server farms, et cetera, are coming off Caterpillar. So our kids are gonna come through this facility with 1,058 seat time hours, two certifications direct to work on the backside of that. So, uh, we are very excited. So that's one end. Now, let me give you another end in our entrepreneurial center, uh, the t the CEO and president of the Tennessee Titans Burke Nihill daughter, happened to go to, uh, one of our high schools here, where the entrepreneurial center is directly sitting beside, had a mutual friend that said, Hey, you, would you like to, uh, uh, meet for me to introduce you to him?
Speaker 2 00:14:25 I said, a hundred percent. And I said, Hey, I've got a problem solution I wanna throw at you. And he's like, I don't have time today. I'll come back in a couple weeks. And I thought, I'll never get him. I know how these things work. I've been told no so many times. You, you kinda know, right? Yeah. But sure enough, two weeks he did come. He came and toured the entrepreneurial center and brought his entire VP suite. And we sat down. I said, listen, hear me very loud and clear. I wanna ask a problem that you guys have. And I want, I wanna, I wanna be, I wanna be the solution. This is not a babysitting, uh, hypothetical internship slash shadowing exercise. This is a true proof of concept. He said, you know what? Let's do it. He said, I wanna know why we don't have a generational fan base.
Speaker 2 00:15:09 I said, well, I hope you've got thick skin. Let's walk out onto the floor. And on the floor, we had a hundred high school kids, entrepreneurs working on a project. I just completely hijacked the class. I got up on stage, I grabbed the microphone, said, how many of you guys have been to a Titans game this year? Two hands go up out of a hundred. Why are you not going to games? Hands start shooting it up. They're boring. They're too long. They're too expensive. It's not Friday night in Wilco. And what that means is our Friday night football are an unbelievable experience that the kids create themself. Whether the 10 and o at O 10, they're showing up. It's themed. You get the point. Yeah. And then there's a get in the back. It would be like calling on me in high school. You know, better.
Speaker 2 00:15:50 And you did it without thinking, but then you're like, oh, no, I called on him. And he said, and I quote, the three most powerful words I've heard in 25 years of education. He said, your TikTok sucks. Now, standing beside me is the VP Surf Melendez, who was a very close friend of mine. And, and near and dear to my heart, standing beside me, he's VP of all communications, including their social. And I was embarrassed. And I said, oh, no, I can't believe he said that . And I never forget surf, touching my elbow and says, Hey, I wanna hear more about that. Can I see the microphone? So I handed him the microphone and he said, talk me through that. The kid said, you see this? And he flipped through it, Steve McNair, don't care. See this Eddie George, he went through the greatest titans of all time.
Speaker 2 00:16:36 Don't care. Don't care. You see this? It was an alligator with a football in its mouth. It's spring training. He said, this is what we wanna see. And I'll never forget, sir, turning and looking at the president saying, how come we've never asked this question before? I'm getting chill bumps telling the story, because it was a watershed moment for us. So we go back to the, we go back to the, the, the meeting space, the meeting room. We close the doors. He said, I'm gonna give you six weeks. We're gonna come back and I wanna hear their solutions. Now you think about what just happened? A billion dollar industry said, I want to hear your solutions. So we dedicated one day a week as Titans. Thursday. We sacrificed, we say sacrifice. There was no sacrifice involved because it ended up being more powerful than anything we've done.
Speaker 2 00:17:21 Yeah. We took a day and during their class times, they had to come up with problem solutions. How are we gonna make this better? Six weeks later, they were the sharks on Shark Tank, if you will, the Titans. Mm-hmm . Our groups got up, all six cohorts presented their findings and their solutions. The titans liked it so much. They gave us a game in December, the Jacksonville Jaguar game. They said, it's yours. They took their entire communications department, came and worked with us every single week on Titan's. Thursday we developed the plan, a marketing plan, five days out, they gave us a thousand tickets, which our VP over ticket and said will never happen. They sold the tickets in four, eight hours. They created a student section for the kids, had to get NFL permission. And Spirit Week was born at Titan Stadium. And it's been done every, every, every year with, with our kids on problem solutions. So you can go as high as you want to go with the coolest and biggest companies, or you can go into the, as we say, like the dirt work for, for Thompson Caterpillar and everything in between. It will happen. It will work. You just gotta get in front of the right people and you gotta, you gotta find a good problem solution.
Speaker 1 00:18:32 Yeah. That's fantastic. So it makes me think of two different things though, and I'll let you choose which way we go. Uh, one, there's a flexibility, uh, with your educators, boots on the ground that are in front of these kids every day, right? You just said that you're gonna take this time, and obviously it was the right thing to do. Right? Like, somehow they're like, this is an amazing problem that we can find a solution to. Kids are engaged, it's real world, let's do it. Totally makes sense. But there are some places where educators would freak out, say, no, no, I need my time to do my things. So you've got that side. You also have, as we're listening to what you do on a daily basis, it doesn't sound like a traditional CTE director's job description. So I'd like to hear kind of how you made that shift or what some of those things are that you think are most important for your position.
Speaker 2 00:19:24 So it's taken me five to seven years, honestly, to figure out what my role is. Okay. I mean, uh, just to give you a little Hi, hi. Historical background. My father was a public educator superintendent of schools. He actually was commissioner of education in the, in the early nineties for the state of Tennessee. So I've been around public ed my whole life. My father-in-law was a CT director. My brother-in-law was a CT director, and my uncle was a CT director. I had zero CTE experience whatsoever. Before taking this job. I was a district athletic director, uh, for this, for this county prior to that. And, and then before that I was a, I was an administrator, a principal on all three levels and a, and a basketball coach and a PE teacher before that. So, just as you start to think about that, somebody asked me the same question I thought, I go back to my athletic days and being a basketball coach, if you don't change on the fly in real time, you're going to lose your job.
Speaker 2 00:20:16 There are two types of coaches, those that are gonna be fired and those that are gonna be fired. Right? So, , you got to be fluid and flexible in, in, in a, in a moment of change, in a high stress moment. So when we start developing our teams, we think that we, we hire for, we fire hire for attitude and not aptitude. So in that, in that facility, we are lucky enough that we have four educators in there that we call facilitators. We don't call 'em teachers that are not from a traditional classroom setting. And, uh, we kind of hired that strategically thinking about it. But our 140 teachers that we have to take care of as well in our traditional high schools, are not afforded, uh, the luxury of being too flexible, as you know, in a high school setting. Mm-hmm . You have to be kind of rigid.
Speaker 2 00:21:07 You have to be structured, you have to have guardrails due to the fact to bell schedules and whatnot. At the EIC, we are fortunate enough that we have the same block of time, but it's very fluid. Mm-hmm . It, like I said, it's 15,000 square feet. It's open concept and we treat it as such. We want it fluid and flexible. So you have to figure out what your goals are of your CTE programming. And when we start looking at that, this building behind me has five different programs that are run five different schedules. So it's gonna be a massive jigsaw puzzle. Some of your program,
Speaker 1 00:21:41 Because you're still trying to figure out credits, like kids have to get their credits. They still have a GPA going through this program. Right. But you find That's correct.
Speaker 2 00:21:48 Okay. And, and when, when you start looking at that and you start hiring for those people, some of these programs are gonna be a little bit more rigid than the entrepreneurial center. Right. You have to be because of skill-based things, but it doesn't mean that the leader of those programs cannot be fluid and flexible through it. Right? Yep. There go and think about those real time scenarios. So that's what we're having to do. 'cause you have to, we we're, we're looking at this program behind me 1,058 hours. You've got to have the student in the seats in the class time. They have to have a three hour block of time. So it's relegated to seniors only. So they're spending half their time here. So there have to be some prep work in the first three years of your high school career to get ready to do this. There's a lot of moving pieces, but it still doesn't substitute that the professional that are over those worlds and those domains are, are, don't have to be as rigid. They just need to be fluid and flexible. And that's something that we live by. That's our cred.
Speaker 1 00:22:42 Yeah. I think that's great for the leaders that are listening. You know, if you're a superintendent, you're like, yep, I wanna bring this to my district and we're helping a, a district in, in Indianapolis do this. Uh, who are you looking at for your director? Like, what are the key qualities? Like flex, flexible and fluid. Right? Like it, that makes a lot of sense, right? 'cause it's gonna be so changing.
Speaker 2 00:23:03 Well, when we we're trying to develop kids to, to to, to get ready for jobs that are not even created yet. A lot of people are, have a lot of angst about ai. AI's gonna take my job. AI is gonna take my job. There's three things that AI are not gonna take. It's the SDL principle. Rashad Tabba Walla talks about all the time in his book. He's an author outta Chicago. And the S stands for skills. If you can learn a new skill, are you coachable to learn a new skill? Right? That's the first part. The second part is that drive. What kind of drive do you have? You gotta bring your own energy. You gotta, as we say in this building, you gotta bring your own juice, right? Yeah. You shouldn't have to, that's your own responsibility. That's something you control. And last is your likability. Hmm. If you're gonna be a leader, are you likable enough to be the leader? If you're not likable enough, nobody's gonna lay down the road for you. So those three things, AI can't track. So when you start looking at your teachers or your, uh, assistant directors or your directors, that SDLP principal has to drive it. Those three things are pretty universal across everything I've been saying. And I can't take credit for that because he actually came up with that. But it really is trans, you know, it's transcending across any employable opportunity. Opportunity.
Speaker 1 00:24:09 Yeah. Right. If we, if we want the kids to embody those ideas, then the adults have to as well. Correct.
Speaker 2 00:24:15 Correct.
Speaker 1 00:24:15 Right. So you might be changing, I assume you're changing hiring practices compared to maybe the traditional district model in some form. Is that right?
Speaker 2 00:24:24 Well, we do and, and we, we start looking at, first off, obviously we still have to go to the traditional resume. You know, do you fit in the, the Tennessee guidelines that, that are our teachers? If not sure. Are there ways around that? Because if you're a great enough candidate and you don't necessarily have the full qualifications, but you're dedicated to that SDL principle and you can learn new skills, we'll find a place for you.
Speaker 1 00:24:47 That's what I think I'm trying to get at Jeremy, is the, and you mentioned goals, like your goal is so clear for what needs to happen. Let's say you find the right candidate, they don't really have the right qualifications yet, you know, formally, but they would be great in this role. How do we figure out how to get them there? And that's just one example, right? Because then it's like, well, the titans have this thing for us. How do we figure out how to change our schedule so we can take advantage of this great opportunity? There's something about that goal driving the, the methods to get there.
Speaker 2 00:25:20 I I, I tell you, I go back to my father, uh, my father's teachings, and he always said, it's not what you know, it's who you know. And when you know those people, how do you treat those people? So let, lemme go back to my, my Titans example. If it was not relationally foundational, if we did not have a good relationship, and I was an authoritarian, and I went in and said, we're gonna sacrifice this day, and you're gonna do this Titans project. I don't care what you think. Do you think that's gonna pass or fail? It's gonna fail. Yep. So when we have relationships in place, and you start hiring these people, now I inherited a staff at the entrepreneurial center, and after year one, I told those people when coming in, they were a little apprehensive about me coming in. I was like, I'm not changing anything.
Speaker 2 00:26:03 I'm here to listen and I'm here to learn. Well, I promised them by I would take a year to do so. Well, about six months my A DHD kicked in. I was like, okay, what if we just started having service questions? What if, what if we changed this? I don't like that. What if we did this? I don't know if it's gonna work. What if, well, by the end of the year, three of those people had left 'cause they could see the writing on the wall. I never even once told 'em we were changing anything. I was just asking what if statements. So then we rebuilt it with three new people and I just said, what if the Titans came into this? They're like, that's incredible. Can you do it? I was like, we're gonna, let's get it done. What if, what if, you know, so when you start asking those, what if questions, because the mission of our jobs as teachers, educators, and as our pirate ship team is not about our egos. It's about what's best for those kids and how can we best put the best scenarios, partnerships, fill in the blank. How can we put those in front of those kids and take advantage of it problems?
Speaker 1 00:27:07 Yeah. So good. Uh, so let's go to, I don't, I don't know if pe pedagogy is the right word, or just the teaching process. I think that's right. That allows for the flexibility of this. I mean, you talked about some of the mindset of teachers. Uh, give us a great example of what that could look like. How do we get started? Like let, let's say we're talking to a leader right now who's like, this is what I want. I wanna move in this direction. What are the first kinda small steps they can take?
Speaker 2 00:27:34 I'm glad you asked that. I've, I've done some consultancy on, on that side of the house. And superintendents would call and say, Hey, come in and look at this. When you start building the pedagogy and, and, and the, the correct culture as you will, let's just say culture for the moment, there
Speaker 1 00:27:49 We go.
Speaker 2 00:27:50 That, that, that, that leader has to be like what we just said. The leader has to be, uh, the person that, that, that falls on the sword for their team. And by doing so, by developing those relationships, the rest is so easy. Once that happens, those relationships going. But I'm gonna give you a little background of where I got from a cultural perspective. Hmm. So, as I was a principal of a middle school, we had 420 kids, about 41, 42 staff in a very, very low poor socioeconomic scenario. In year one, when I got the job, the superintendent came to me and I said, alright, what is your goals for me? He said, well, as long as we don't get calls at the central office and keep it between the ditches handed me the keys. I'm like, well, that's not a very good, that's not a very good handoff.
Speaker 2 00:28:34 And that's what he told in front of the entire staff. Well, here you go. Here's . We had a lot of good applicants, but he's, he's the best. I was going, well, thanks for that glowing endorsement, . So what I didn't understand at the time was that we had been on the, the bad list as a state goes from a, uh, uh, an accountability standpoint. So year four means you get a state appointed person in the building helping oversee and work things. And I never forget walking in the building. Wasn't even told to me that that was gonna happen. Uh, uh, that when I walked in and he said, let's sit down and, and talk about goals. And I said, it's pretty easy. I've got one goal. He said, what's that for you not to be in this building by the end of the year? And he looked at me kind of funny, and he's like, what do you mean?
Speaker 2 00:29:16 I said, well, if I've done my job, you won't be here. So I started watching, I started observing. I started listening. I, how do we reach this student population who sometimes their parents may not have an eighth grade education? So we started looking at discipline first. We completely blew up our discipline program. We had over a thousand referrals for, for 420 kids. By the end of year one, we cut it in half. By the end of year two, we were at 200. By the end of year three, we had 52. Hmm. Why? Because our, our our, and then we started looking at the academic ways that we could change things academically was a lot of our foundational disciplinary problems. I don't know if you've seen this before, but when you start, when, when I'm, when I'm sending a kid to the office. 'cause I didn't do definitions.
Speaker 2 00:30:02 Number one, why are we doing definitions? What is the pego behind definitions? Sure. Right. And I don't even wanna go down that rat trail. So we, we blew up our entire grading systems, our homework systems. We started looking at mastery. We were doing PBL 15 years ago. We didn't know what PBL was. Right? So we started looking at all those things and once we made that shift, there was some wailing and gnashing of the teeth by teachers. But once the, the first year of first round of accountability came out and some of our teachers went from a level one to a level five effectiveness rating, it was over. So really I've kind of accidentally fell into it because I had to become a student of the game. And what was the game? The game was how do we develop educational pedagogy that is conducive, that's learning, that's real world that's applicable and finds and discovers the kids why? That's where we did Once that happened, I just, I just fell forward with that in mind. All the way through it.
Speaker 1 00:30:58 Yeah. I love that idea. I love that you took us to stu school culture as well. I think culture's a big deal. Like we see that when the culture changes, a lot of things change. Like you said, it could be academics, discipline, they all domino together. There's also this idea of intentionality. I think that's in that story you just told Right? Is we're gonna be intentional about looking at discipline and saying, why are we here? Like, well, 'cause the kid didn't do definitions five times in a row. Why is the kid doing definitions? Right? ? Like, so the kid might be right in refusing to do that. So, you know, let's start pushing up against some of these things intentionally. So what's, uh, yeah, speak about the intentionality just a little bit that that happens and then the outcomes of that.
Speaker 2 00:31:42 Well, I had to overcome it too. Remember I was coming in as a, as a head boys basketball coach for years. I was an athletic director outta high school and assistant principal at a high school. So I already had this stigma that he's the athletics guy. Sure. So I literally turned the athletics to the assistant principal and said, I'm not doing a single, you're making all decisions. I'm not doing a single thing. So I, I started pouring myself into research and reading books and watching, observing, and thinking, how do we fix this? And the commonality was, it's very simple. Our culture wasn't right. Our relationships were not right. They're not going to perform for you if they don't, if they think you don't care about them. I had fallen this into this trap as a first year head basketball coach, where I thought I was the smartest in the room and the greatest basketball coach ever, ever, uh, guy I ever made.
Speaker 2 00:32:28 But you know what? Kids didn't care about that. Kids are like, what are you doing for me? Right? What are you putting me into as a point of success? I was using them as chess pieces. And until I failed miserably and figured out what the failure was, I I wouldn't have been able to come into the, the administration side of building a, an accountable high-end cultural, uh, academic institution that we built. Mm-hmm. Uh, after year two. And, you know, as we started looking at that, then I started diving into our state accountability measure, which is called the 10, uh, the tcap. And when I started looking at the TCAP data of a three year, three year trend of kid, I saw where they were high performing at one time, and then they took a massive dip and then they went back up. And I really wanted to know why, why was it two years ago you were failing and then a year ago you had a massive spike?
Speaker 2 00:33:19 So I started interviewing kids, Hey, tell me about two years ago a lot of trends started happening. Tell me about this, this teacher that you had when you went up, they could tell you their name in a heartbeat, boom. Mm-hmm . Right? What about those that would, at your lowest point, they could tell you those names in a heartbeat because they hated them and they loved them. Yeah. Right. Hate and love. So how did we figure out where that is? And then we started looking at the dips. Why were you dipping? Well, I didn't like the teacher, or there was a personal thing that happened that nobody acted like they cared about. I couldn't get any help at school. So I said, okay, look at this. How do we make sure that the kids are getting what they want from a personal standpoint? How do we help them?
Speaker 2 00:34:00 Uh, hey, maybe one day we just have to feed them. They may be low. You know, it it, it literally came down to kids not living in, in a home that we think of that may be living in a pallet home with a tarp covering true story right now. How are we gonna make those kids? How are we gonna make those kids do your homework? Number one And number two, how are they gonna learn? And, and it translated into tcap Well, we failed again by changing some things in classroom that still wasn't getting to their level of what they liked to do. Mm-hmm . Once we figured that part out, we slayed the giant and it was no looking back. We had kids performing at levels they had never performed at. They would've been level one kids the whole time. And they had bumped to level two and then they bumped to level three. And, you know, it all goes back to relational driven. If they don't, if you don't know the why, you never can get the, the the, the end result.
Speaker 1 00:34:53 Yeah. Super good. Um, so I, I love the relational piece. Of course, the culture piece is a big deal. I think, uh, you mentioned accountability. A lot of times we, we think that's a bad thing, but high flyers wanna know what the problem is and, and start working on solutions. Right. The high flyers want that, that push. And I think one of the best ways for people to get involved is, you kind of mentioned it too, just asking kids like they, that for a while there's kind of hashtag you know, follow a kid, like follow a kid through your class schedule and see what happens. You might be bored out of your mind or you might see some amazing hotspots that you can grow. I'd also love to get people at your, some of your buildings, get on your campus to go see and feel with the experience that's there. Because I, I think that's a game changer too.
Speaker 2 00:35:38 So when you talk about high flyers, I think about our entrepreneurial center. You're, you're talking about we've got, everybody's the most diverse population in all of Williamson County. When you've got 10 schools divergent into one, right? You've got, you've got a kid that you're sitting at with your table that's maybe a part of your, your project or your products that you would never otherwise talk to. You know what? They not, they may not come from the same socioeconomic zip code within this county that you think, right? Yeah. And those high fires are coming in here and they're failing. That's the part I love. Mm.
Speaker 1 00:36:11 Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:36:11 And, and our, our, one of the things that we say often is fail often and fail forward. That is one of our biggest, that's the two things that we live by in the entrepreneurial center. Because most of the entrepreneurs that come in as, as mentors, are not on their first rodeo. They're on their fifth, sixth failure. We also educate those mentors to not sugarcoat it. Our kids are our high flyers in entrepreneur center. Do not wanna spend six weeks on a failed project that was doomed from the start without an adult just saying, Hey, why did you do that? They wanna know it upfront. That's a terrible idea, and here's why. Then they can pivot. They are craving that type of granular feedback.
Speaker 1 00:36:54 That's so good. I, and I just, I'm gonna accept that. Say I've got a group that's doing, uh, in Missouri. There's a class that's doing our, my book launch right now. I've got a new book coming out on PBL l leadership launches April 17th. And they, they submitted the social media pieces and some are great, some are just missing a professional piece, which makes sense for them, right? Because they've never done a professional, you know, market value asset like this. And I had leaned towards being positive, like, Hey, you guys are doing great. Gimme some more of these so we can do it. I didn't do enough honestly of, Hey, this, this just isn't professional. Like, I wouldn't say this. I'd like you to change that. How do you get your entrepreneurs to do that? Because it's not, because I don't really know this group that well. Right? We did a couple calls. Um, so my first reaction is to put kid gloves on a little bit, but I'm not really serving those kids. Right. I know if I was in the classroom and it was my classroom, I have no problem. Right. Like bringing the hammer and 'cause I've got relationship. So how do you get community partners to, to step in and expect excellence from our kids?
Speaker 2 00:37:59 Good question. I think it's a coaching moment for our kids too. That we, we, we probably, we us here probably gloss over that we don't think because we've been doing it and it's, you really piqued my interest on how you asked that question because our kids were so demanding. Uh, Paula Chilton, our uh, assistant director, director of the EC is, uh, their mother as we say. And it is tough, tough, tough love. Mm-hmm. Yeah. There, there's a lot of things that we sugarcoat these kids in this, this, uh, district with including their parents being high fluency rating and being high college going. They don't fail it much. Right. They have a high account, they have a high accountability system, which is great until they come into this, this building, I have never seen kids struggle so much. It's like wailing and gnashing and teeth sometimes.
Speaker 2 00:38:49 And that's good. That's a great, when we have kids struggle and they're crying and they're coming in and we don't know what to do and we look at 'em and say, figure it out because welcome to the real world. Nothing we do. This is something we live by in these two facilities. Nothing we do is hypothetical ever. Right. We are doing a disservice. It's malpractice to do hypothetical, silly, busy work. Everything we do is building towards reality and real. If you fail at it, you learn something in the failure. If you launched it, so be it like Abby and Spiky, she's won $76,000, uh, to date on pitch contest alone, not including product sales. Mm-hmm . So you start thinking about that. Then the, the person before her that won the national championship is a, is a young man named Anthony Beckett. Uh, he has been out for two years now.
Speaker 2 00:39:41 He's got 12,000 customers. He has an EdTech product unlike anything has seen called fy. It's an unbelievable collaborative tool that you use in a one-to-one environment in any school in America. And he's got 12,000 users worldwide. How did he get there? He failed miserably. Let me tell you what I did. The last two months of his school, I sent him to every superintendent within two hours of driving distance that I knew and said, next time you have a staff meeting, I'm bringing this guy and giving him 30 minutes and blow it up, poke holes in it. And he learned the hard way. He, he had a preconceived notion going in, this will work. And he goes, he came back and he said, won't work there. This is what I gotta figure out. Yeah. Welcome to the real world, Anthony.
Speaker 1 00:40:22 Well, and I saw that you had him in on the, on your social media. I saw that he went to ed tech conferences. Right. He set up a booth, not only
Speaker 2 00:40:30 Ed tech conferences, he was the first high school kid to present and win at the FETC and now has a, a booth at the FETC. Yeah. So think about that. The largest ed tech conference I cut you off. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 00:40:41 No, you're spot on. That's exactly what I wanted to get to, is it's getting these kids in situations that are difficult and it's not, take the highlighted word and put it into the blank. It's, you know, a wicked problem that doesn't have a full solution.
Speaker 2 00:40:57 I love it. So then when you're sitting across from the recruiter at the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton Business School, a 0.0001 chance getting in, you unroll your portfolio of work and you get past the threshold of G-P-A-A-C-T, get it out of the way. Then they're like, alright, what separates yourself? Let me show you,
Speaker 1 00:41:17 Lemme show you my sales. Right?
Speaker 2 00:41:20 Bam. And they go, there's no way you've done this. Oh, here's my website. Would you like to purchase one? And they're like, we've, we've gotta have you in that is proof of high accountability. That's proof of pedagogy that works with particular systematic strategic approaches of mm-hmm . Of having high accountability, of having relational, of having empathetic staff members helping but not coddling. Yep. And then opening your doors to the public.
Speaker 1 00:41:48 Su super good. Super good. So we're gonna get people visiting for sure. Jeremy, uh, we've been there. We want to be there more, uh, just to hear more of these stories and to feel it. I know as soon as you walk in the building right, it just feels differently and people need to feel that and see it. When you look five years out, three, five years out, what do you see for you all and then maybe even CT in general, where do we need to go?
Speaker 2 00:42:13 Well, it's a great question. We, we, we tried this building is a, is a five-year project that we, we got funded through the state. It is fully grant funded. We're, we're super excited to buy that. And what, what we started looking at four years ago is coming to fruition. And, you know, when we built business partners that are financially in, when we ask those questions, how do you get those businesses in? We want more than a vinyl sign. When you go around to CT schools or CTE places, you have vinyl skies in the background it says Caterpillar's a partner. I was like, really? What are they doing? Well, they may have sent a, a simulator or a couple hundred bucks. No, you have to be fully embedded. Your DNA has to be on this. That's why in this program they're gonna have cat employees actually doing the teaching, actually deploying, you know, things.
Speaker 2 00:43:01 And that, that, that's huge to us. So we started retooling everything that we do. Uh, how, how do we get those businesses, uh, more than a vinyl sign? How do you come in and throw out problem solution statements to show that these kids are sharper and faster than ever? And if you don't put your, your fingerprint on 'em. Now when they go off to college, if they choose to go off to college, they're not coming back to you guys. So as a workforce development, you asked me the question a while ago, your job has evolved. What, what do you do? Well, I started off as a CT director and now I'm a workforce development director is what I'm, Hmm. I work, I mean, really is what it, it comes down to I want to showcase our student population to the workforce world and vice versa.
Speaker 2 00:43:41 And then I get out of the way of our directors. I let them do their jobs and our teacher let them do jobs. And I go out and I beat the bushes and I bring in these partners that say, I want you to look at what we're doing. Cybersecurity AI is a prime example. We have a cybersecurity AI program, right to my right, right here. It's gonna be unlike anything I've seen with five different colleges in tow because the colleges realize that we have such high quality students. So they're given, uh, yeah, dual enrollment up to 24 hours of dual enrollment credit that they can go through this program. But we have some blue chip organizations that surrounding and they're, they're gonna see if I don't go get Jeremy Quas before he graduates, these colleges are gonna take 'em and they're gonna go off elsewhere. So it's exposure and it's enrichment and it's not, uh, it's, it's trying to avoid malpractice, really. That's what it is.
Speaker 1 00:44:31 I love it. I love it. That malpractice quote's gonna make it into our social media somewhere guaranteed. I love it. . Jeremy, thanks for your time today. Uh, we're gonna put in the show notes, uh, some, some links to, you know, Marky and some of the things the kids are doing. We'll put in some, some pieces, uh, district wise, any other place that we can follow you LinkedIn, places like that to follow the
Speaker 2 00:44:51 Work. Yes. Follow me on LinkedIn at Jeremy Quas, obviously, and also on LinkedIn. We have our WCS Entrepreneurship and Innovation Campus, uh, that you can follow all things here. August the seventh, we're having our, our big official ribbon cutting for the campus. I'm looking forward to that. Uh, so if you're in the Nashville area, hey, we're about 30 minutes south of Nashville. Come see us. We're on X as well as W-C-S-C-C-T-E and W-C-S-E-I-C, uh, for that.
Speaker 1 00:45:19 Great, we'll, we'll put all those links in the show notes. So listeners just, uh, go and check out show notes or if you're on YouTube, check the details there to, to follow. Jeremy, thanks for sharing today. This has been fantastic.
Speaker 2 00:45:30 Thank you so much, Ron for having me.
Speaker 1 00:45:32 All right. PBL l simplified audience. Uh, you just got, uh, you just got the, the playbook if you will, right? Like you've seen, we're gonna set some goals. We need to be fluid, we need to be flexible. Most of all, I just want you to see that this is possible, right? That, and this has been going on for a while. It doesn't happen by accident. It takes ality. But there are people out there that you could be collaborating with to bring this to your district. And it's, it, it's the future. It's gonna be a mandate that needs to happen for our kids to, to be successful in their next step of the journey. Thanks for tuning in today. Go out lead inspired.
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