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Date: 8/30/2023
HUNTINGTON — Gateway Superintendent Kristen Smidy is “really excited” to start the new school year. The administrative team has been meeting throughout the summer, new staff are in place, and the team is stronger than last year, she said.
“The teachers have been working their butts off all summer. Their excitement is evident.” Smidy said a lot of grants have come in that will set them up for success in instructional and materials programming. “We’re going in the right direction,” she added.
A big part of the reason for Smidy’s excitement is Gateway’s selection as one of eight schools in New England to participate in the Barr Foundation’s grant program for education.
Grants from the Boston-based Barr Foundation are highly competitive, Smidy said. According to Barr’s website, its goal in education is to “catalyze models through support for teams of educators to create a new vision for high school, plan for change, and implement new school designs.”
“We got a private grant from the Barr Foundation which supports innovative and engaging opportunities,” Smidy said. The initial grant of $100,000 will allow Gateway to study its system plan, “to make sure we’re engaging every single student.”
She explained that from July to November, Gateway will collect information from every stakeholder through surveys. She said while this effort focuses on the high school, surveys will also reach the middle school and elementary schools. The grant will allow Gateway to utilize student interns, and incentivize people to become involved.
“This is big,” Smidy said. From November to March, in what is called the “dream” phase, the foundation will fund travel to different high schools throughout the country on a national tour of innovative schools.
From March to June, Gateway will fill out a proposal on how to meet students’ needs.
“We cannot be solution-oriented until March,” she said, adding that administrators don’t want to bring preconceptions to the process. “If they like it, they’re going to fund it. All of us are doing this process together,” Smidy said.
She said they want to create a whole new world for students at Gateway, to answer the question: What if Gateway were able to do this for me? “Barr is giving us the opportunity to dream big for this community,” Smidy said.
This summer, she went to a Barr grant meeting with Superintendent Sheila Hoffman of Agawam, which also received a Barr grant. Smidy said Gateway is by far the smallest school to receive one. She said other superintendents are calling to ask her how Gateway got the grant.
“We capitalized on the momentum we’ve had here. We capitalized on it, and people are excited about it,” she said.
Smidy has two major goals for next year: “To make sure we’re operating in a way that every student [believes] it’s the place to be, and every staff [member] is set up to succeed, which lines up with Barr nicely.” She said Barr asked Gateway to look at what it needs to make sure kids thrive.
“My second goal is good teaching and learning through high quality instructional material, professional development and good support for our educators. Really empowering teachers, the experts in the classroom. Before, they were working hard to create their own materials,” Smidy said. She said they will be focusing on the best strategies to engage kids and make sure they’re learning.
Gateway will still teach all of the curriculum and standards, and spend the required 990 hours on learning, Smidy said.
In the past couple of years — Smidy is entering her third year as superintendent — she said it felt like the work was typically “doing the best with what we have.”
She also spent a lot of time advocating in partnership with Gateway member towns for increased rural school aid, involving students who gave testimony to state Sen. Paul Mark at local events and to legislators in Boston. This year, rural school aid increased from $10 million to $15 million in the state budget, doubling the prior year’s $7.5 million, largely due to Gateway’s testimony and advocacy, according to Smidy.
“I’ve spent a ton of time advocating for rural aid. I’m happy that I did,” she said. Now, with the potential of funding from Barr, “more of everyone’s time can be spent on creating amazing experiences for students.”
“The opportunity here is so unique and amazing, if we can figure out the high school experience we need,” Smidy said. “I’m wicked excited. Only 3% of educators get the opportunity to redesign and reimagine what school will look like.”