Education Week - February 22, 2017 - 46

LESSONS FROM
A LEADER

Keep It Simple
Have a clear, wellunderstood vision for
students and stick to it.

Leverage Key
Partners
Actively engage students,
parents, nonprofits,
businesses, industry, and
the community
in partnerships that
support learning.

Focus on the
Future
Equip students with
essential skills that will
transfer across all jobs
and professions, including
interpersonal skills, strong
work ethics, and how to be
continuous learners.

He started his career as a coach and teacher at
Starr-Iva Middle School in nearby Anderson, S.C.,
and later became a high school principal. He followed in the footsteps of his father, William Royster, who was a schools superintendent in North
Carolina.
His father's schooling experience has had a deep
impact on Royster's leadership and where he places
his priorities as schools chief in Greenville County,
where nearly 60 percent of students are eligible
for free and reduced-price meals. In 2016, nearly
80 percent of graduating seniors said they were
planning to go to college, while 21 percent said they
intended to enter the military or the workforce.
Royster's father came from a family of 12 and
was the only one who earned a college education-
a situation not dissimilar to many of Greenville
County's students. Royster says his father credited
a teacher named Lee Dobbins for taking an interest in his education and showing him college was
possible.
As superintendent, Royster sees his role as
creating the conditions and opportunities to allow
principals and teachers to be "Lee Dobbins" for
their students.
Royster also draws from his father's experience
as a schools chief, especially when he must make
tough or unpopular decisions and stick to them.
"Certainly you want to listen to people, you want
to make sure you consider their viewpoints, but, at
some point, it is your decision to make ...," he says.
"Then you have to say 'this is what we are going
to do, this is the right thing to do, this is the best
thing to do.'"

Middle School Focus
OnTrack Greenville began several years ago in a
conversation Royster had with local United Way
leaders, who were already pursuing efforts to break
multigenerational cycles of poverty in the community. Those conversations, he explains, led to a
tightly coordinated effort between the district, the
United Way of Greenville County, and other community partners to tackle poor attendance, raise
academic achievement, and boost graduation rates
in the White Horse Road community, a section
of the county with the highest concentrations of
poverty.
Focused on students who attend three middle
schools and a special, early-college program for

low-income students, the early-warning systems
give educators in those schools major clues to
behavior or attendance problems that could derail
students from moving toward high school, and
later, on-time graduation.
In the color-coded system, green means a student is on track, with no signs to signal a bigger
problem. Students flagged either as orange or red
for getting failing grades, racking up too many
absences, or being disruptive at school-trigger
interventions. Outside partners with different expertise and services-the Greenville Health System,
Building Educated Leaders for Life, Communities in
Schools, and Public Education Partners-are central to the services that OnTrack students receive.
Fueling the OnTrack work-now in its second year-is $3 million that the United Way of
Greenville County secured in 2014 from the federal
Social Innovation Grant Fund, as well as additional
financial support from local philanthropies.

Motivating Students
Royster is also pushing for deeper student
engagement across all grades and schools in the
800 square-mile district, revamping a number of
programs to ensure students are motivated to come
to school, graduate, and be prepared for college and
work.
Part of that momentum is driven by the explosion
of high-tech and manufacturing jobs in the area in
the last decade or so as Fortune 500 companies such
as BMW Manufacturing Co., General Electric, and Michelin moved to or expanded operations in Greenville
and adjacent Spartanburg County. The jobs at those
companies are not traditional manufacturing jobs, and
new district course offerings such as engineering and
mechatronics-a blend of mechanical engineering,
electrical engineering, computer control, and information technology-aim to prepare students for those
high-skilled areas.
New focused areas include business, marketing
and management; arts, communication, and information; environmental and agricultural systems;
health science; human resources and services; and
industrial manufacturing and engineering systems.
Royster is not limiting new, specialized programs
to secondary students. The district is starting to
expose students earlier to some of these pathways,
beginning in middle school.
Another key part of his push is Graduation Plus,

We do a much better job of what we do when
we work in partnership," Royster says.

Education Week Leaders To Learn From 2017

Education Week - February 22, 2017

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