Embray Has Guided School District Through An Eventful Decade
School district superintendents often come in two distinct varieties.
There’s the behind-the- scenes, bureaucratic-types, those whose administrative skills circle the why-have-a-conversation-when-an-email-will-do ethos. And then there’s the front-facing administrator that leads the discussion, never content to be chained to a desk or an outdated policy.
Devin Embray is decidedly and distinctly among the latter.
“I enjoy the people,” said Embray, who just completed his 10th year as superintendent of the Glenwood Community School District. “The best part of my job is being able to get out of my office and go have conversations with people. Being able to get in a classroom and see kids, talk to teachers and being able to have supporting conversations with administrators or staff or whoever in the district, is kind of my favorite part.”
Don’t get him wrong, however. Embray isn’t afraid of the day-to-day required being superintendent for 2,000 students and 200 staff in a bedroom community that has seen its share of challenges in his decade-long tenure leading the Glenwood Community School District.
“The hard work, the heavy lifting has to get done. But I look at that as the work that HAS to get done. If you could do just the one thing, it would be having the conversations with people.”
It was a conversation with a headhunter group back in 2010 that first piqued Embray’s interest in a job in Glenwood – a town in a region of the state he’d never visited before.
At the time, Embray was superintendent at the Independence Community Schools, a district of 1,200 students in northeast Iowa. He’d started his teaching career in Knoxville and had bounced into administration in the West Delaware and Fort Dodge schools. But he was antsy. He’d looked at positions in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa.
Almost immediately, Glenwood intrigued him.
Dr. Stan Sibley was wrapping up a successful nine-year run as Glenwood’s superintendent. Sibley had overseen a district that had shown steady growth through tough economic times and the opening of a new $22 million high school.
Embray liked the community, the school support and the history. But he liked something else even more.
“It was mostly the stability,” he said. “The staff, the size of the school district; it appeared to be a district that didn’t yo-yo with enrollment from the outside looking in.”
Embray was one of four candidates to interview for the position. All were put through a day-long car wash of interviews with the school board and student, teacher and community groups.
Theresa Romens, president of the Glenwood School Board at the time of Embray’s hiring, knew immediately following his interview: this was their guy. She still calls her part in hiring Embray “probably the best thing I was a part of as a board member.”
“It just felt right,” she said. “The other candidates certainly had the credentials to do those kinds of things but the way he spoke about what he wanted to do for the district, how he was going to get there and his own personal goal of making us a bright star in southwest corner of Iowa. He was just a good fit.”
It too felt like a good fit to Embray. But he was cautious following the interviews. He’d felt good about interviews before that didn’t work out.
“You hold your breath a bit but you’re always excited after you’re done interviewing,” he said. “You never know how well you did or didn’t do in the interview until you get the feedback from that interview. So to get the call and the offer, it didn’t take long to accept. It just felt like a really good fit.”
Embray, 43 at the time, was formally hired as Glenwood’s superintendent April 15, 2010. He and wife, Angie, packed up their children, ranging in age from 6 to 15 at the time, and moved to Glenwood.
Not a bad gig for a one time middle school science teacher who didn’t see school administration as his future.
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“I planned to just be a teacher and a coach.”
Embray never saw himself as the administrator type.
A former tight end at Central College, the classroom was partially a conduit to coaching for Embray. He coached football, wrestling and golf – “Well, I facilitated golf, it’s a better word for what I did than coaching,” he said – at both Montezuma and Knoxville.
After five years in the classroom, and earning a master’s degree from Drake University, Embray set his sights on administration.
The re-focusing from student to teacher-based management where the classroom IS the building and there’s not exactly a lesson plan for navigating it all, was a study in learning on the job.
“You’re focused on leadership on adults at that point in time,” he said of his first administrative position as middle school assistant principal in Fort Dodge. “There’s a lot of different personalities and methodologies in how people see things and do things. So being able to understand that early on was a good learning experience.”
He admits now, the transition wasn’t perfect and never easy.
“You obviously make mistakes along the way where you want to be authoritative and you’re more authoritarian in management issues and you try and walk that road one way or another to get where you need to be. It’s different just in terms of being able to support adults versus supporting students directly.”
After two years at Fort Dodge, Embray made his way back to eastern Iowa. He spent the next five years as a middle school principal and then assistant superintendent/curriculum director at West Delaware. He took over as Independence’s superintendent in 2003.
The transition to superintendent was no less difficult from college graduate to teacher to assistant principal. The scope, he said, was the difference.
“When I led a building I had the staff and myself together working as a unit,” he said. “Going from that to superintendent, you have MULTIPLE buildings all pulling in the same direction. The difficulty in that is managing initiatives and making sure that we can accomplish what we want to accomplish in the same direction. It’s about creating systems that support that.”
It’s exactly that culture and consensus building that brought Embray to Glenwood.
Turns out, he’d need it.
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Glenwood Community School District voters said “No” to an Instructional Support Levy in 2008 and again in 2010.
The Instructional Support Levy (ISL) is an alternative revenue stream that allows school districts to levy up to 10 percent of its budget to improve its instructional programs through curriculum and technology purchases. The prospect of raising taxes and a confusing financing structure – the money would come from a fixed state appropriation, but the majority would come from a ratio of property taxes and income surtaxes – didn’t connect with voters.
At the time of Embray’s hiring, the district faced a gap of more than $1 million between anticipated revenues and expenditures. Glenwood was one of just 16 districts in the state that did not have an ISL.
A third – and rumored final attempt – to pass the ISL came in February 2011, just over six months into Embray’s first year on the job. The third time turned out to be the charm: the measure passed by a narrow 51-49 percent margin.
Embray played no small part in that victory. Leading up to the vote, as his predecessor did, Embray spearheaded a series of informational meetings designed to educate the public on the need of the ISL and its economic impact.
Romens, the former board president, said Embray’s leadership on the ISL was perhaps the biggest factor in getting it passed.
“It had failed twice and he came and he regrouped everybody and he made the value of it understood to people and that made a big difference,” she said. “He talked in specifics and showed people this is going to be used for this and that, for computers and instruction and it put it over the top. Sometimes you get a new perspective and I think that’s what he brought to the district.”
It’s the kind of leadership Romens said she first saw in Embray’s initial interview. The kind that favored innovation over status quo. It’s also typical of Embray’s style: heavily influenced by the sort of lean management you find in the business world.
Since taking over in Glenwood, Embray’s constantly looked for ways to streamline and improve management structures, cherry picking methods from business and education that rely on collaborative team efforts to improve performance by systematically removing waste and reducing variation.
Metrics is a favorite word of Embray’s.
He admits it’s mostly a business world word, but “It’s not a scary word anymore because it’s asking what are the measurable acts that you’re doing to get to where you want to be.”
It fits his hands-on style of refining, measuring and evolving.
“If you can incorporate non-traditional management systems into an educational system without losing the perspective of our widget – a human person with a brain that needs stimulation and the whole child – and you can navigate that road and integrate that practice within the system while still being focused on the human being, then I think you have the best of both worlds.”
It’s what encouraged Embray to plan a retreat this summer bringing a cross section of staff together to devise a district-wide decision making model designed to help guide the school going forward.
The melding of business methods and school management isn’t new nor is it perfect. But when applied pragmatically, where no program or practice is instituted that doesn’t take into account the whole child, it can work, Embray said.
“It’s not like we can up our profit margin or get a different ROI (return on investment) on our product because we aren’t funded that way,” Embray said. “So to become more efficient and more effective we think about those things in terms of student achievement, mental health, accessibility – all of them go into the process of what our ‘product’ is. We want to make sure we have all those covered anytime we talk about management or a business practice or model that would help us.”
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Six years.
That’s the average tenure of an Iowa public school superintendent according to a 2011 Drake University study.
Embray is 10 years in.
And he shows no signs of slowing down or the type of burnout that can accompany the job that is as laborious as it is thankless.
Not that it hasn’t been an EVENTFUL decade. Embray looks back on the decade, the things he helped facilitate, the handful of controversies and the current and former challenges under his watch, and he sees a long, diverse list. Although he shies away from taking credit for the successes, quickly acknowledging the team effort that made them possible, he’s proud of his work in Glenwood.
There’s the passing of the ISL and the Revenue Purpose Statement – the revenue stream that established the Advanced Vision for Education (SAVE) fund that allowed the district to build the $4 million high school gym addition and the sparkling $7 million Glenwood Activities Complex.
But let’s not forget the new bus barn, a busing transfer point to consolidate student transportation, the early-out Wednesday for teacher professional development, a more competitive certified staff salary structure, ahead-of-its time security measures at school buildings, financial stability while navigating enrollment dips, the addition of mental health/social emotional liaisons in schools, a partnership with the city on an outdoor aquatic center and the addition of a “super board” gathering the school board, city council and board of supervisors every three months – all implemented under Embray’s watch.
And that doesn’t include facing down the challenges of the current COVID-19 public health crisis that has schools struggling to come up with plans for how they can simply open safely this fall or the two devastating floods, in 2011 and again last year, that rocked the region and left hundreds displaced.
“We’ve had a decade of some really great things happening and some in times of tragedy,” he said. “We’ve had tragedies along the way but we’ve always come through.”
Embray’s vision is never far from the future. The present may have most of his attention but he always has an eye down the road. When asked about what that vision looks like, he talks about standards based grading, rubrics and improving assessment and staff training. A new elementary school and raising the district’s public profile aren’t far behind.
It’s his job to leave the district better than he found it – and he has no intention of leaving any time soon. Too much work is left to do in a job he still enjoys and a district he loves.
“I want to be here as long as I possibly can and as long as I’m effective at what I do,” he said. “And that’s just who I am.”
When he does retire, Embray and his wife plan to remain in their adopted hometown. All four of their children have or will graduate from Glenwood. They’ve dug roots and established themselves in the community and they want to be a part of that stability that so intrigued him a decade ago.
“Glenwood has been such a huge part of our lives,” Embray said. “Obviously it’s the longest our family has been in one place in their lifetimes growing up. It definitely feels like home. I’ll always be an outsider because I didn’t grow up in Glenwood but there’s so many positive people in this community.
“Whether you’re from Glenwood or not you’re here and there are so many people who want to make a difference and want to make it better and grow and that’s what I’ve been part of. That’s a great thing to be a part of.”