Skaneateles Central School District: Past the Loudest Voices
- District: Skaneateles Central School District
- Leader: Eric Knuth, Superintendent
50% reduction
in leadership analysis time to interpret engagement results
5,000 students
across specialized programs served through evidence-based decision-making“Most organizations fail not because they lack information, but because they misinterpret weak signals.”
Moving Beyond Assumption-Driven Leadership
Skaneateles Central School District sits on one of the Finger Lakes in central New York, in a community where some of the lakefront residences belong to billionaires whose children attend school elsewhere. Eric Knuth arrived as superintendent in 2020, the year nothing ran the way the calendar said it would. The community had a long memory and a confident sense of itself, and what reached the new superintendent's desk in those first months was, by his own description, often not what most of Skaneateles actually believed.
“The community, like most communities, has its loudest voices, but they're not necessarily the representative voices. I don't know necessarily if what we're hearing is representative of what people actually think and feel.”
New York's instruments for taking the temperature of a district are not designed to settle that question. NYSED's accountability arc, the DCIP and SCEP cycles, the Grades 3-8 state assessments, and the Regents examinations all do necessary work in places they were built to do it. The APPR years, before that system was repeatedly revised, taught a generation of New York teachers that what mattered most was the children's scores on the tests. What none of those instruments could show was where the community's actual judgment lived, beyond the loudest claimants. In year one, Knuth went looking for that.
What the first cycle showed
Working with Kevin McGowan, superintendent at Brighton Central School District and Jason Andrews, superintendent at Windsor Central School District, Knuth ran his first ThoughtExchange engagement as part of their Blueprint for Excellence strategic-planning effort with the Skaneateles community. The exchange dispelled much of what district leadership had assumed people believed but also reaffirmed the core of what this community believes in and what makes the school district special. Out of it came what is now the three-word identity of the district: relationships, connections, and learning.
"That's the core of what I believe about public education. The relationships and connections piece can be often overlooked in schools like mine, where the community can become so performance-oriented that they're willing to overlook the relationship stuff. They don't always realize that is the magic. That is what causes the performance.”
Five years later, the exchanges run across decision domains the strategic plan did not anticipate: scheduling, athletics, culture and climate, and the work that has taken most of Knuth's attention, grading practices.
What ThoughtExchange partners are saying
The grading work
Grading has been a focus over the past two years, and where the discipline of slow consultation has produced the clearest list of decisions. Knuth has worked with Thomas Guskey and other thinkers in the assessment field, and he is direct that the most important step is not the policy change but the belief excavation that precedes it. Teachers were asked, at scale, what they thought grades should do and what they should not do. What came back was a portrait of practices the field has documented for years and that teachers had not been asked to examine.
The changes that followed were specific. Departments stopped scheduling tests on the same day; testing calendars now coordinate. Homework over holidays and tests on the days following holidays were ended, in recognition that for some students school is the only non-volatile place they have, and that the holiday brought into Monday's exam was not, for those families, a holiday. The use of a true zero, which mathematically terminates a student's prospects in a course, was reexamined; several departments adopted a 50-point floor. Retake policies were made consistent within departments, by department choice. Long writing assignments were replaced, where appropriate, by shorter and more frequent ones, on the principle that the purpose of grading is to support learning rather than to produce volume.
"I could have just asked them to do that and they probably would have complied. But to do it the way we did, now there's a belief system behind it. We have people retiring who have twenty-five and thirty years of experience here. They are basically writing the rule book for the next generation. What do you want them to know? What do you want them to believe?”
What holds
A meaningful share of Skaneateles's teaching staff has more than twenty-five years of experience, and the cohort is now beginning to turn over. The work of recent cycles has, in effect, written the rule book the next generation of teachers will inherit. The institutional memory that lived in those long tenures now also lives in the exchange records and the policy revisions they produced.
There is, in the background, scar tissue Knuth has been careful with. Under the APPR years, New York teachers were repeatedly told that the children's scores were what counted most.
"We were told for ten years that the only thing that mattered was the kids' scores on these tests. That's tragic. It's not what I believe, but it was very real here."
The grading work, the testing-calendar work, and the holiday-policy work are, taken together, a slow correction of that period. They do not announce themselves as such. They are the decisions a district makes once it has built the capacity to hear itself.
Advice for New York district leaders
Knuth mentors incoming New York superintendents through NYSCOSS networks and through the leadership development course he teaches for teachers entering administration. He recently coached John Lawrence, his outgoing elementary principal, who becomes superintendent at Southern Cayuga, another Finger Lakes district, this summer. His advice across those conversations has been consistent.
Run the first engagement cycle inside the first three months. The honeymoon period in a superintendency is short, and the inheritance attaches to the new leader quickly. A baseline exchange in that window establishes what the community actually believes before the new superintendent owns the inheritance.
Keep the strategic engagement work separate from the state-required cycles. The DCIP and SCEP calendars, federal reporting, and the residue of the APPR years all have their own gravity. The state instruments produce the reporting; the engagement work produces decisions that hold.
Most of all, resist the reflex to tell the community what is so.
“It's not the things we don't know that'll get us into trouble. It's the things we know for sure that just ain't true.- Mark Twain Don't tell me what is. Let's find out what is, and we'll find out together.”
For a new superintendent in another Finger Lakes district, in another Monroe County district, or anywhere in New York where the loudest voice has been mistaken for the representative one, that is what Knuth puts first.
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