Well, good afternoon everybody. My name is Scott Friedman, associate director with the Association of Washington School Principals, and I am extremely excited to have with us this afternoon, doctor Heather Hastie, re the proud principal of Davis High School in Yakima School District. Heather, thank you so much for joining us today. We could not be happier to have you share your leadership experiences and tell us about this awesome journey that you’ve had at Davis High School, and kind of the ways that you’ve been preparing for the role that you currently have right now.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:00:46]
Great. Thank you. I appreciate being here.

Scott Friedman [00:00:49]
Good, good. Well, we hope that stays the same at the end of all this. Okay. So we hope it’s still still the feeling that you have right now. And I know I just shared shared the you know as you being the the proud principal at at Davis High School and what. Just describe Davis for us real quickly, please. Do we have a context of what you’re leading in and what it’s all about?

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:01:09]
Okay, well, Davis High School in a nutshell, we are a little over 2000 students, and we are in Yakima, Washington. So, Eastern Washington and we have, population wise, demographic wise, we’re over 82% free and reduced. And then we have a very large population of bilingual students. That’s about 25% of our population. And then, we also have a large population of migrant students. Some are the same as our bilingual students and, primarily Hispanic. And we also serve Native American students and, whites and, Like Pacific Islander students as well.

That’s sort of the makeup where we’re inside Yakima as a city, too. So it’s it’s rather urban, actually. And so, it’s kind of like being in a city school and but in the middle of eastern Washington.

Scott Friedman [00:02:16]
Yeah, yeah. And how much fun is it to be amongst such a diverse student environment?

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:02:21]
Absolutely.

Scott Friedman [00:02:23]
Oh, it makes me.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:02:24]
I love it every day.

Scott Friedman [00:02:26]
Yeah. Every day, I’m sure. And I know, I’ve. I’ve been around you for a little bit of time, and I’m recalling moments when, when I say Davis High School or Cher, just say that, like Davis High School, I automatically see you smile every single time. And I just find that to be so cool. And my wonder is, why do you smile when you hear Davis High School? What makes why why smile?

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:02:53]
Well, I love that question. The reason there are so many reasons to smile. Davis is just. It’s a home. It’s a home for for our kids. It’s a home for us as staff. It’s a home for our community. It’s not just the school. And so our just the the culture, the climate, the everything that’s happening all the time, it’s it’s exciting. I mean, everything from amazing instruction, different programs to sports, music, all kinds of things. I mean, we’re hopping from 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. and so there’s always something and always a place for all of us to be and go and be together like a family.

Scott Friedman [00:03:38]
Wow, wow. And you know, what I really appreciate about that is, number one, I can hear the excitement and the happiness in your voice when you describe like Davis High School is is is all it. We believe you belong at Davis and working extremely hard to create a culture that embraces that.

As you think about, like, your leadership journey and pieces along the way. What has resonated with you in terms of why creating that culture, which is criteria number one of our leadership framework. But but why is establishing and creating that culture so important to you as, as, as a leader in the work that you do?

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:04:19]
Well, for me, it’s, it’s the foundation, it’s the basis. It’s the foundation for our kids, for our staff to actually then make the work happen. So we’ve done some different work leadership wise, that maybe we’ll get into a little more in a while around, authentic carino. And it starts with the familial carino side, and that’s the, you know, caring about one another as people, you know, as humans and understanding that the students care about each other. Adults. We care about our students, and students care about us and our families, you know. And it’s not just the kids. It’s everybody. Everybody we’re related to. And then that also works into the community as well. But that’s important because it lays the groundwork for the intellectual work that you do with the kids and their success.

Scott Friedman [00:05:17]
Yeah. Yeah. And you see that? Do you see that take precedent and prevalence every single day, I’m sure.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:05:23]
Yes, absolutely. And we we really center around, like if you walk around our building and stuff, not only will you see the posters that say we are family and you know, that describes what we mean by that. Like we do second chances, we’re dedicated to one another, but we live it. So it’s not just a poster on a wall, but, living that every day so that then we’re providing the right environment for learning to happen.

Scott Friedman [00:05:53]
Right? Right. You know, and when you say living it every day, that that really strikes a chord with me. And I’m sure many people that are listening to this right now, it strikes a chord with them in terms of when we live something every single day and it becomes repetitive, it becomes who we are. And, and and it really begins to take shape in the actions that we see happening all around us. Right. Right. I can only imagine walking down the hallway, your school, and seeing kids arm in arm, or seeing somebody sitting in a corner all alone, and all of a sudden somebody walks over and sits down next to them and asks them how their day is going, or whatever that might look like. What I’m what I’m really wondering is, and you said this about the familial and the language that’s used between adults and students and and forgive me. Corinna or carino?

What’s the definition of that? One more time for those.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:06:46]
So carino is It’s like. It’s like love and caring wrapped into one, in a word.

That’s at least what my native Spanish speakers tell me. Who are on staff and my kids.

And yes, of course, there’s a book that goes all through that. But when when you ask, you know, you just ask somebody, they’ll be like, well, it’s love, but it’s not quite love. It’s caring too. And it kind of melts the two together. But it’s caring about all aspects of a person, not just not just, oh, I like you, you know? So I care about your education. I care about your well-being. Multiple pieces.

Scott Friedman [00:07:26]
Right? Right. And as you’re as you’re describing that, I think about that love and caring. I mean, I know there’s people in my life that I love. But there’s very few people, and I shouldn’t say very few. There’s there’s a number of people in my life that I not only love, but that if I was asked to care for, not asked for, but I just go out of my way to care for them.

It’s like that love extends further and I don’t know if there’s different aspects of that. I’m getting way too deep right now even for me. So I’m just going to pause. Right.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:07:54]
Well it’s got I appreciate you bringing it up because one of the things like in the theory behind the theory behind the authentic kernel piece, there’s networks of care. So that’s something that’s super important that that we think about as we have worked with staff and as we’ve worked with students about the different types of care. So if you don’t mind for just a minute, we’ve got we’ve got the caring about, peers. We’ve got the caring about education, how we learn, the caring about family, our systems. And that seems odd, but it’s about caring about our systems and how they either produce or don’t produce the excellence that they need to. And that’s from students and from staff, and then also caring about health and adults in the system. So there’s multiple different facets of it. And so, you know, it it is interesting because we, we work a lot on okay, I might care about this other adult or this student this way, but do I care about them in these other ways? So how do we establish a caring for other individuals within our school system in all of those ways? And what are we providing?

Scott Friedman [00:09:20]
Yeah, yeah. And I’m going to come back to systems here in a second.

Because I think that’s, what you’re describing there is, is something that we might not necessarily think about a lot of times in terms of how do our systems really intentionally and inherently and truly support students at all aspects of their of their well-being? It’s it’s not just the fact that they’re showing up every single day. But it’s more than that. It’s like when I think about criterion two, which is which is safety, you know, school safety. And so often we think about we I mean, we think about school safety is okay. Did you do your fire drill? You do your lockdown drill. Did you do your tsunami drill if you’re on the coast or something like the earthquake drill, you know, and in Spokane where I am, you know, kind of like, did you do the fire drill? So we, you know, we don’t suck in all the gas or the smoke from the HVAC system or anyway, but this, this notion of, of safety and I know in, in the, in the framework and criterion two, it talks about this personal safety and, and the emotional social and social emotional safety. And I’m wondering if you can touch on for a second, how you track that maybe in your building or how do you get a, get an understanding of what that is, because you said something earlier that I really caught and and I want others to hear it again as well, is like when, when students feel safe, when they know that that they belong, when they when they comfortable walking into a classroom and they see themselves represented and they’re their automatically accepted and known and heard and felt valued. They’re going to engage academically and intellectually in a manner that that supports their learning. And and they’re going to they’re going to come closer to realizing their potential than they would have before. Right.

Right. So, so when I, when I think about, you know, this this how do you, how do you know if you’re meeting the mark with that.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:11:03]
You know it’s so what we’ve there’s a few different things. There’s a few different things that, that we’ve done that we’ve set up. And then student student and family voices. So let me just talk briefly about that. So one of the things that we have that we’ve done differently, is that we now have a regular advisory, and the regular advisory is, you know, we’ve we’ve got an hour of it a week. I’d love it if we had more. But, you know, we’re working towards that. But having that trusted adult who is with you all four years. And then we’re intentionally working with our teachers so that what they are working with students on and that social emotional side, because a lot of the advisory is on the social emotional side and teaching and making sure our teachers know how to teach about that, and then students feeling that and understanding that and then coming back around. So then, of course, our advisors are our teachers. So, you know, they they see all the kids as well, but they also are with the same group for four years. And that’s super helpful. But as far as the measurement side, yes, we have like the social emotional screener and, and and that sort of thing and progress monitoring on that. But, when you’re talking just like your, your street data, we do student interviews, right? We do we do our student interviews with with kids, an interesting way in which we do student interviews that seems to have resonated well with staff and seems to, from a leadership perspective, worked well, is that we do them just through audio. We don’t say the kid’s name, we don’t talk about the kid’s background. We just ask them questions about how’s your learning going? How do you learn at home? How do you learn here? What’s different, what matches, what doesn’t match, and going into that and doing or student voice circles too. So we’re doing, you know, student voice circles. We’re doing individual interviews. But again, just through the audio seems to have been the best because and it actually came from teachers themselves of, hey, I a lot of times will have a pre like a prejudgment if you say a certain name because perhaps of a behavior or something they’ve encountered with that particular student. But by doing it this way, they you know, it’s oh my gosh, I’m actually listening. And to hear that from adults to for them to acknowledge sometimes they’re not listening to the student voices. And this is what helps them to. That’s huge. And we do we do similar pieces with the families. But that’s been that’s been a big way of just at least trying to get our thumb around what is working, what isn’t working, and hearing from the kids themselves.

And yes, surveys and those types of things we do as well.

Scott Friedman [00:14:12]
Yeah. And how powerful is it when adults in the building come forward and say, let’s do this, like audio only? Anonymous, right. I don’t want to have any bias. I don’t want to have any. I just want this to be a completely blind piece. And I imagine that students feel a lot more comfortable with that as well. So they’re more transparent and or authentic in the answers that they get. Have you noticed that?

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:14:35]
Absolutely. And what I have, because we’ve been doing this work now. It’s been about four years. We’re in the fourth year. And, you know, we as leaders, we don’t always do it the best the first time. And so we keep having different iterations and keep trying to make it better based off what kids tell us, based off what adults tell us. But what what has, where I really think we have that impact is when we have an adult who the kids already know and feel comfortable with being the one to interview them, or being the one to do the voice circles with them. Because we did do the first time we tried voice circles four years ago. It was very stilted. We did it very formally, like, you know, how it’s set up and such, but the kids didn’t all know the interviewer, the people interviewing like they may have been counselors in our school, but not their specific counselor or things like that. And so we felt that, well, we know that we got, more we got more honest answers from them when it was somebody that they knew. And so, you know, that that seems to be helpful. And we have like, they’re with the same counselor all four years, the same advisor now, all four years the same administrator. So we tried to match that up better the last couple of years rather than how we did it before.

Scott Friedman [00:16:08]
And is that as you’ve analyzed and looked at the work there and you talked about the intentionality of that, is that one of the one of the systems that you had to recreate?

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:16:18]
Yeah, definitely. Yes. Just just as just a system for student voice. And to really be able to get like, even I had a principal student advisory council as well. Thinking, okay, this is it. This is great. Well, you know, 12 voices of a school of 2000. So, that, that now we have like a whole House of Representatives. It’s very much, very intentionally, made up of a cross-section of different students. Not in the same with when we do our voice circles, when we do our interviews. You you might have some who are on the ASB leadership side, and you might have some who are on the side where, well, they see you a lot in the office and there’s a reason for that. And so and then it’s like, hey, you know what? You would be good on this. And I’m curious what you think of this because the system’s not working for you. And so what do you think would make it better. And it’s crazy when they light up and like, you’re asking me. Nobody’s asked me before.

Scott Friedman [00:17:24]
Yeah. Yeah.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:17:25]
So. So that has become more systemic. Yes. The student voice aspect.

Scott Friedman [00:17:31]
Oh. That’s wonderful. And I, I kind of smile and my head goes back to a story that I recall that James Layman, our director of student programs across the state, shares from time to time, on interviews with kids and student voice and something like that and, and student panel. And somebody was asking one of the students a question like, well, what? Like, what do you want the adults to do when you’re talking with them or sharing information? And, you know, and the student kind of looks left, looks right, looks around like, should I really say what I’m thinking? Or should I see something different? You know, and it was kind of one of those, oh, I don’t know, maybe take some notes and do something, you know.

Right. But you guys have you guys have and kids, kids, kids trusting you now, right?

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:18:14]
Yeah, absolutely. And and I recognize this isn’t a plug for James, but he is amazing and has come to our school this year.

He’s come to work with, Kids, and then he did the same activities with adults and then talk to each other about how it went with the others. And then next year, the hope is to have them do activities with us, together with some students and adults together. And it’s just been it’s been it’s been fun. But it’s also been like, okay, this is fun. And then, wow, this work is intense. It’s intense, it’s messy, and it’s the right work. And so that they can be honest with each other, obviously, and especially the students feeling like they can be honest with adults. You hit that because, you know, sometimes it’s, oh, if I say something, will anything change? Well, anything really change. And so that trust that something is going to come of what you have to say, not just, oh, that was nice. Thanks for the input. You know, from kids, it’s not just a rubber stamp for the student voice. It’s actually. What are we doing with it?

Scott Friedman [00:19:22]
Yeah. Well, and and they get to a spot where, I mean, for you to be able to rebuild the trust that they have lost. And I just always breaks my heart when I say these things or hear these things or see these things. But it’s like kids. Kids don’t necessarily automatically start distrusting. Some, yes. But by and large, the majority. No. It happens over time. Right.

And then how is this going to be different. No. You’re just like the other person that said something. How is this going to be different for me here. So when you know when I think about meeting the needs of learners and, and, you know, how are we going to close the gap with kids if they don’t trust the adults in the building that we’re we’re all in this together trying to do the things that are right. And then I extend that to families. You know, when we talk about connecting with community and parents in, in in criterion seven, I’m sure you’ve seen a difference. Pre carino and post carino with families. Could you or the systems that have been in play there, could you talk about how maybe they’ve become more engaged or more present in their in their kids academic journey and pathway.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:20:27]
One specifically, specifically, when we started the work, we really focused in on our migrant students, and then we kind of broadened up, but with, like we we also looked at not not just this part, but also the funding pieces, you know, and how can we utilize different parts of money to make the work happen and together with our families? And that engagement is, especially with our migrant students, our migrant families. I mean, just just hiring like a migrant graduation specialist and migrant student advocate, having migrant parent nights regularly, in our building and, and sometimes just the celebration, you know, and then our students, it’s like, yes, you are seen, you are heard. We specific voice circles for our migrant students, you know, getting input. And man, we have seen I mean actually depending upon the year. I mean, depending upon the year, a couple years recently, our migrant student graduation rates higher than just the the overall graduation rate. It’s incredible. And, disciplinary weight went way down over four years with our migrant students.

We really focused into on our males, our male students because the, academic success wasn’t as high. And so, you know, when, when you see that in the families and just the sheer numbers of families who come and, you know, I, I know this is something we’ve talked about for years and years, but sometimes it is those little things like, hey, we’re having dinner, bring all the kids, bring the family. We have stuff for everybody to do. And that way parents feel like they can concentrate on what you’re talking about, but also, you know, working together with their kids. So it’s not, you know, something that’s seen as separate. It’s, you know, we’re all together as we talked about, like the networks of care. Right. So, yeah, we’ve we’ve seen a lot, a lot of great things coming from that. And then just our work as we go forward, it’s like, wow, this is this is what we’re seeing. So how do we take that and grow that with other populations? And I mean, our last last year, graduation rate overall was over 90%. So we’ve got I mean that’s for us. That’s huge.

Scott Friedman [00:22:58]
So yeah.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:22:59]
Yeah. You know it’s there’s a lot of different different respects that we’ve seen growth. And then just having families come in on campus and wanting to and trusting trusting us and each other. Yeah. Wanting to make it make things better and being just kind of that in the middle of the city. People are coming, you know.

Scott Friedman [00:23:22]
Yeah, yeah. Well, and I’m sitting here listening and and I’m kind of smiling. Well, I am smiling as well, like, because the, the intentionality of the work and what you’ve seen take place in the fruits of the labor and what’s transpired.

But with that becomes an enormous responsibility. Right.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:23:40]
Yeah, definitely.

Scott Friedman [00:23:42]
Like, like, you know, we always we say this quite often, like we continue to arrive. We want to arrive someday, but we never will. Right. No. And now, now that you, you and your team and your school and and kids have built this.

Now comes that responsibility to keep it in place for, for generations. You know. Yes. So I don’t know could you. Not to make you feel as if your shoulders are heavier than they already are with this work.

But like how is that? You know, we talk about distributed leadership and, you know, the shared responsibility. And you, you know, in the framework, when you get to distinguished at any criterion, it always talks about like if the principle was to leave, would this work still happen and be as impactful? You know, I mean that’s the general gist of distinguished. So like discuss the like how you feel in terms of that responsibility to keep this moving because it’s it’s impacting lives in such huge ways.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:24:45]
Absolutely. And you hit it because you can’t take your foot off the gas. You have to keep going and keep the work going. And it also like, I’ll be perfectly honest in the beginning of, okay, I think this is something that could work. This seems like, you know, and a system doesn’t work with just an eye. Right. So so then and and I’m I am blessed enough and with so many, with so many children. And I’m blessed that way. I also get to have a staff of four assistant principals, so that is really nice. I have an instructional leadership team of 17 people, 17 teachers in my building, an instructional facilitator. So along with the sheer numbers of students also comes numbers of resources. And that has been and being able to say as a leader, you’re not going to do it all, otherwise it won’t continue. And and so that distributed leadership and figuring out what people’s strengths are on a team and talking to them, through through the this is my fifth year as the lead principal there. And so, the strength of the four assistant principals that I have right now and saying, okay, this person is going to be I have like one person who migrant really leads that charge with migrants and another with, multilingual learners. A third with parent and community involvement and partnerships. And then the fourth, who does, you know, the the athletics and some other pieces and which is also, as you know, huge in communities.

Scott Friedman [00:26:32]
So yeah.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:26:33]
That for me learning that it’s okay to distribute. But you also need to make sure that you’re guiding so you, you know, you’re keeping the vision you’re guiding and you’re not moving away from it, while also, recognizing that all these strengths exist already in your building and utilizing that. And then with our and then it took, it took a while because like in an instructional leadership team, we now have our instructional leadership team of teachers leading the staff in our building around, around strategies on multilingual for multilingual learners in the classroom and on authentic learning experiences. So being able to say that doesn’t have to be a principal or assistant principals. And in fact, the teachers who are practicing every day and our instructional facilitator and they’re amazing at this work, and of course they are. But it is hard as a leader sometimes to be like, oh, if I give this, to give it to somebody else, what if and you know what? It’s okay because we’re all going to do things different. But that vision needs to remain the same.

Scott Friedman [00:27:47]
Right, right. Well, and and as you’re describing that, I’m recalling a couple situations like early in my career as a, as a leader. Well, I say early because I’m pretty sure it happened late in my career too. But I say early, you know, there where, you, you, you put a person in a position or somebody in a place where you think they like. That’s what they wanted. But deep. But, but but deep down inside you’re thinking to yourself, like managing resources. Okay, so I got to put people in the place where they can be successful, right? Criterion six that’s what has to happen. And and sometimes we fall into the trap as a leader of putting somebody in a place where that person wants to be. But in our heart, we know that’s not going to be the place for them to be successful. Right.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:28:34]
Right.

Scott Friedman [00:28:34]
And it’s like I’m there’s 3 or 4 people in, in, in my mind right now that, that I just made that decision with.

And, and it wasn’t good for either of us you know. And then having to go back and have a conversation and move them to the spot where they could be successful, then all of a sudden they feel great I feel great, the world’s great. All is good right. How do you as, as the as the lead learner of the learning organization? I mean, that’s you. And you said that like I got I even though I’m facilitating all of this stuff and people are doing the work underneath me. I like the. I don’t want to say you’re the puppet master, but you’re the keeper of the vision. You know. Right. You’re the person that’s trumpeting the, like, the charge. So, how did how did you go about, how did you go about determining or understanding where to place people? Like, how did they what was it about their individual context that you learned that allowed you to say, you’d be good at this, you’d be good at this, you’d be good at this, you’d be good at this, you’d be good at that.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:29:35]
You know, I’ll be honest, it probably goes a long way back to reading the book from good to great. Yeah. So where it’s kind of like you’re putting the right people in the right spaces for the work to happen.

Scott Friedman [00:29:49]
Oh, you you read my book?

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:29:51]
No.

Scott Friedman [00:29:53]
But I should have wrote that. Put people in the right places. The right spaces, you know?

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:29:59]
Well, and just, you know, you talk about it’s it’s not a burden, but it’s not. The work doesn’t stop, but you need to take the time to talk to individual people and have the conversations with them. And, you know, I’ll spend time with the assistant principals, with leadership team members saying, and what is important to you and what’s the work that resonates with you? What got you into this business? Where do you want to be? I have, you know, some people who want just want to be doing what they’re doing but want to do better. And how can they help the system? How can they help our kids? I have others who, you know, may want to be a superintendent someday. Okay, great. Let’s talk about this. What are the strengths? And asking them what do you feel your strengths are? What do you feel are the things that you want to engage in. And then, you know, obviously two different personalities connect in different fashions and you need all of them. So you know, you don’t want too many people the same type doing, you know, all going together, on one thing. But it truly is God. I truly feel it’s taking the time to listen to people and then think about what what it is you’re trying to do is, you know, your vision as a leader and going, okay, so where then would this person fit best? Where would this person fit or lead best, you know, and then getting those teams together, it’s a.

Scott Friedman [00:31:32]
Lot. I wish I could hit rewind and go back to those questions that you just shared. How important is that? And I wish I would have heard this early on because those questions you just like, what are your strengths? Where do you see yourself being successful in this school?

What is your greatest gift in in working with students, you know, and then just listening, right. Just listening and then knowing when you’re putting this big, giant jigsaw puzzle together and and people and places and things and all of that stuff and working with others, that. Okay. Oh, I remember the conversation I had with so-and-so. They said their strength was da da da da da da. Let’s, let’s let’s plug them there.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:32:18]
Absolutely.

Scott Friedman [00:32:19]
And and look what’s happened 4 or 5 years later after listening to people and how far you’ve come when you, when you think about this journey at Davis High School, like from where you were when you first took over. Okay. To where to to to now. Okay. Like, can you think of one move? And it’s hard to quantify this. I get that, but one action or one decision or one thing that was like a tipping point moment. That or a staff thing that just kind of okay, now the momentum that now we tipped and now we’re running.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:33:01]
That’s a great question.

Because there’s I feel like there’s some different things and some different pieces. I mean, I do think that after the first couple of years of really working on the, that familial piece, that cranial piece and then the intellectual and not just not just saying it’s enough to care about a kid as a kid, but as a learner, the intellectual side. So when we popped into because we worked a lot on that familial side of the kernel, and then when we popped into doing the work on the intellectual side, that to me is where we really started to see that combined with student voice. And then we also also in all of this work, we basically recharged professional learning teams.

Scott Friedman [00:34:00]
Yeah.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:34:01]
Yeah. And so that that was huge, too, because we’re we also work to have, to have the right teachers where we felt their, their strengths were best too. So for example, like, okay, who do we feel would be the, who has a passion for ninth grade students, for example, and ninth grade Ela team and then biology because our ninth graders take that and, working together, that and the intellectual side of that was because we did have I mean, we did have some of that co-president mentality of like, man, I really care about you and love you as a kid, but do I have the highest expectations that I could academically of you? So I feel like that tipping point was when we really started diving into the intellectual side of the casino and marrying those to the familial. The intellectual. Into. Yeah. Hey. High expectations and high caring.

And then it was like that momentum. And then and then the the teams finding the right people and the right teams and those the combinations, finding the combinations that worked well with people within the school and and then listening to the kids. I mean, as soon as those student voices came out and it was like, yeah, and we’re going to listen and do something about it. I mean, teachers, teachers were more than willing and like, yes. And how do we do it? And how do we do it with the question not, oh, we don’t want to do this. That was never, ever. I mean, again, blessed with the staff I have. But it was how how do we keep the high expectations and that academic excellence and balance it with the caring. And so that’s where we then, like our instructional leadership team, really started taking over the as the lead learners of the teachers and as teachers themselves.

Scott Friedman [00:36:06]
Well, and that’s got to be the secret sauce. I mean, when the kids feel this, like wrap around on everything, right. We are like, and I know and David, they’re you’re okay. David, you’re going to want to, I don’t know, do something with these last couple of seconds here, because Heather’s family just came back to the hotel for spring break, so she’s telling be quiet, which you saw. So we’ll go back to that last question, all right?

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:36:31]
Okay? Okay. Sorry about.

Scott Friedman [00:36:32]
That, David. Fix this. Make this look good for at least Heather. Not me, I don’t care, but but when, And we’re just about. We got like, two more minutes, probably.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:36:45]
Okay.

Scott Friedman [00:36:45]
Go ahead. Sorry. One more question. No. You’re good. We’re good now. Balloons all around. So, so I’ll go back to, to what I was, what I was kind of asking for. And it was the following. It was, as, as as you were sharing, about the familial and the carino and the and the intellectual and coming alongside with all those pieces so often students that that, find trusted adults in their life. Sometimes there’s that, that piece that’s missing. Like I trust you. Yes. And I care for you. Yes. However, I still don’t have those high expectations for you.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:37:21]
Right.

Scott Friedman [00:37:22]
And in order to get that, I would I would venture to guess that in order to get that true level of acceptance, kids needed to see and know that they were being held to the same standard as everybody else in the classroom. That didn’t look like them.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:37:37]
Yes, absolutely.

Scott Friedman [00:37:40]
And when that happened, yeah, their level of engagement just shot through the roof.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:37:47]
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s another space where having an advisory. Helps us to.

Scott Friedman [00:37:51]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, what a story. What a leadership journey.

In your smile. You know, I wish people did. It’s a podcast.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:38:03]
That’s never ending, as you said it. You just keep going.

Scott Friedman [00:38:07]
You just. You just keep going. And we’re going to keep going forever, too, I think. But no, we’re not. We’re not. I, you know, I really feel like putting you on the spot and saying, okay, what’s the biggest leadership lesson that you’ve learned that you want to share with everybody? And but also at the same time giving you the opportunity to tap out and say, Scott, I don’t know, let’s just end this.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:38:27]
No, you know what? I think it’s I’m I’m glad we’ve had the conversation we’ve had because that actually helps me to identify. I think the biggest leadership lesson is that that distributed leadership is also through our students, through our staff, and through our families. Right. It’s not just one person being a leader in a building. It’s not just administrators. It’s the whole community of leaders. And consider your students and your families as leaders, too. And your teachers.

Scott Friedman [00:39:03]
Oh, I hesitate to even try and end this, because I don’t think there was any better way to end than that right there. Heather, I can’t begin to thank you enough for taking your time to to share, the journey of Davis High School. And I know that for myself and those others that are listening to this, they will be able to really understand that this journey has happened, because of the leader that they have. And often as leaders, we and I, as I use the word that I’m going to talk about right now, we we, we celebrate the successes with everybody. But when things don’t go well, we talk about the I like I didn’t do well in this. I didn’t do well in that, and I have shared with many others like there’s a reason the work is happening in the building, and there’s a reason that great things are taking place, and there’s a reason that your graduation rate has spiked through the roof. And, and it’s it’s because of I. And when I say I, I mean, Heather, you are facilitating and leading and guiding and your actions are having a huge impact and you see it every single day. So celebrate your leadership, celebrate those around you. I thank you so much for for the time today, Heather and, continued success at Davis.

In all all the
 work that you do for the Pirates.

Heather Hastie-Ulery [00:40:30]
Oh, thank you so much. Thank you, Scott, for having me on here, I appreciate it.

Scott Friedman [00:40:35]
You’re welcome.