What Eagle County School District’s 2 superintendent candidates say they will bring to the district
School board likely to select new superintendent Wednesday evening
Zoe Goldstein/Vail Daily
The Eagle County School District Board of Education held two forums Monday evening with the two candidates for superintendent to share with district staff and community members about themselves and their plans for the district if selected.
The school board looks likely to select the district’s next superintendent during its meeting Wednesday evening.
The two structured forums — one for district staff and one for the general public — included each candidate answering the same five questions, which were specifically drafted for each forum based on feedback from the community.
About the candidates
Dr. Nicole Regan is currently the superintendent of schools in Gering, Nebraska, a role she has held since 2021. She said she has worked in education for 32 years after starting her career as an elementary special education teacher.
In Gering, Regan oversees just over 2,000 students that live in the bedroom community with an agriculture and manufacturing-based industries.
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At her current district, Regan said, she has faced and tackled many of the same challenges currently facing the Eagle County School District — declining enrollment, budget cuts and a lack of early child care options.
“In the last four and a half years, I’ve been faced with a significant budget deficit, a community crisis in child care, and we’re losing student enrollment,” Regan said. “Through deep collaboration and community partnerships, we’ve been able to stabilize enrollment, stabilize the budget, and expand early childhood programs in our communities so that we could impact the workforce, even in our own district.”
Dr. KC Somers is currently the superintendent of Peoria Unified School District, a district of 35,000 students located in Glendale, Arizona.
“What I know is that you all put forward so much passion into this work. And this work is really hard,” Somers said to district staff. “Not just in this space, but in public education right now.”
Somers said he grew up in and attended public school in Colorado Springs, with a mother who was a middle school math teacher. His first job in education was also in Colorado Springs, as a counselor and social worker.
“If we’re going to be in a long-term relationship, if you will, this is something that involves every part of me. And this feels like a community that I really could do that for the long term,” Somers said.
Teacher retention and attraction
When it comes to attracting and retaining teachers, Somers acknowledged that the compensation gap and housing costs will continue to be an issue. “There is probably no magic wand that we can wave,” he said.
To promote trust amongst staff and students, he said he plans to be present in the classroom and rooted in the community. He plans to hold employee conversations and hold district leaders accountable. “Retention improves in our system when things are predictable, supportive, and worthy of your commitment,” he said.
In other districts, Regan said, she has implemented grow your own educator programs, built a teacher leader pipeline, updated recruitment styles to match the new generation of future teachers and added child care for teachers to attract and retain teachers.
“For Eagle County, it’s really understanding your culture and what works for your community and then designing and being innovative about recruitment practices that we can do that work here rather than any other school district,” Regan said.
Leading staff with integrity
The candidates both shared how they would lead district staff toward a mission with integrity and ethics.
“When I started my superintendency, I was the third superintendent in three years. So there were a lot of silos, and every school and every program did something different,” Regan said. “Knowing teachers, they want to do their best. Staff, they want to do their best. And our administrators wanted to do their best. It wasn’t that they were doing anything wrong. We just needed to get on the same page and really be intentional on our systems going forward.”
“To me, (integrity and ethics) means is you mean what you say and you do what you’ve said,” Regan said. “Following through in regard to some hard decisions … really effective communication and making sure that the community feels and the school community feels that they’re getting the answers that they need and clarity that they need.”
“When I think about integrity and ethics, really what I perceive or I believe you’re probably asking for is fairness, consistency, transparency and trust,” Somers said. “That’s especially important when decisions are difficult and at times unpopular. So to me, integrity is not truly about words or just what we intend. It’s really about patterns and behavior over time.”
Somers said he would lead staff toward “a small number of clearly defined district priorities,” alongside data and evidence to set benchmarks for improvement.
Standards-based grading
When the district moved to district-wide standards-based grading in fall 2022, it provoked some pushback from the community. During the forum, the candidates were asked about how they might handle the grading practice.
Regan said she would hold stakeholder groups to get a better idea of what students, parents and district staff think about how standards-based grading is going in the district before making any changes to the current practice.
Somers said he would start with careful listening before crafting a thoughtful response to questions and concerns about standards-based grading.
“I do think anytime we’re working on any initiative, our parents and families deserve to understand what we are intending, why we’re doing this … how does it support student learning and progress?” Somers said. “If a practice is confusing for some reason or it’s inconsistently being applied, then we do need to surface that.”
School safety and security
When it comes to school safety, both candidates said they plan to ensure students are both physically and emotionally safe when they go to school so they can focus on learning.
School safety is “our fundamental top priority,” Somers said. “Safety is not a single program, nor is it a product. It’s a system.”
Somers’ plan for school safety is based around prevention (knowing students well), preparedness without fear (practicing for emergencies) and coordinated systems and continuous improvement.
Regan said she was familiar with the district’s safety frameworks after implementing a similar structure at her current district.
Avoiding political agendas, celebrating diversity
Another question asked about how the candidates planned to celebrate the district’s diversity while avoiding bringing extremist politics into the classroom.
“Sometimes the storms that are happening out in the political arenas can come into our schools,” Regan said. “Starting my superintendency in 2021, it was mask mandates.”
Regan said she utilized a communication plan to soothe political tensions in her district.
Regan said it was important to her to celebrate diversity in the district, recognize differences between students and educate teachers on how to address diverse needs in the classroom.
“Being sensitive to the nature of what’s going on as well as protecting that instructional time and the care for our students is really important,” Regan said.
Somers said he would protect instructional neutrality and uphold both the law and school board policy.
“Families want to know that when you send your students to our schools, that they are places for learning, that they’re not platforms for political agendas, and that our leadership and our responsibility is to be steady, fair, and respectful of a wide range of beliefs and perspectives,” he said.
“We don’t teach students what to think, but we support them in being critical thinkers and how they can think,” Somers said.
The school board held private interviews with both candidates Tuesday.
The school board is expected to make its decision on the district’s next superintendent during its meeting on Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the Red Canyon High School West campus in Gypsum.
