- Everything was a challenge in the pandemic.

From staffing, to online learning, to student attendance.

So, you know, we had to shift to try to meet the needs of our families, our students and our staff.

And we've done that.

So, you know what gets me up every day is the opportunity to give our students what they deserve, which is an outstanding public school quality education.

And I didn't feel like we were able to do that because of the challenges of the pandemic.

And now, we're starting to turn a corner.

We had to balance our budget next year without Covid funding, the reality of losing 2,000 students.

But I think the positive is that DPS in the past really had difficulties doing these kind of things.

And now we're able to do this.

I mean, we've had some challenges and some tensions in the school district, but our budget is balanced going into next year, I feel like we have not undermined our commitment to student achievement.

We've protected the classroom, we're not laying off teachers, we're not cutting our music program.

We're refining some things.

We're refining some personnel positions.

But we're moving into next year, I think with the intentionality to continue to raise student achievement and build on the kind of academic success we had before the pandemic.

- What do students need the most right now in Detroit, in the district?

- One thing they need is stability and consistency.

And I think as superintendent and as a School Board, I think we've done that.

And when you have consistency in superintendent and school board leadership, you have consistency with central office staff.

You have consistency with your principals and that trickles down to your teachers.

- I was gonna say, - And we've been nearly fully staffed now for the last two to three years.

And that means consistency for children in the classroom.

And so that's when I talk about our district being normal.

That's what that means, is that you can go to school every year and anticipate to see the same teacher, the same principal.

It will always be changes here and there, but for the most part it's consistency that I think our students need, especially after the pandemic.

You know, we can talk about more mental health support, having nurses in schools and all that's important, but it's the relationship, between the students and the personnel that they work with every day.

And that has certainly been improved over the years and will continue to improve.

- And so how is teacher retention?

I know you're getting ready to end this year, start a new one.

Are you gonna have enough teachers in the classrooms to do the work that these students need?

- Absolutely.

And I feel that has been a definitive sign of progress and improvement.

When we started six years ago, we had 400 teacher vacancies and no plan to recruit and retain teachers.

And so now the past really two years, we've had fully staffed with teachers.

We've put money in a budget to increase salaries again next year.

The average teacher salary has improved by $15,000.

We're gonna make another investment next year.

And so I'm not concerned that we're going to be fully staffed come fall.

There might be a couple of schools that have one or two vacancies.

But knowing that we hire 3,000 teachers in a hundred schools, that's definitive progress.

And I think that's competitive with any suburban school district in Michigan.