Interview with Dan Pappas of the Michigan Institute for Educational Management
Announcer: Welcome to Inside Michigan Education. A weekly show featuring interviews with community leaders, school administrators, school business officials and individuals who are passionate about the future of Michigan Education. And now, here is your host for Inside Michigan Education, Rob Huisingh.
Rob Huisingh: Welcome to Inside Michigan Education, this week we are joined in the Foxbright Podcast studio by Dan Pappas. Dan is the Executive Director of the Michigan Institute for Educational Management, also known as MIEM. He is also the Associate Director for the Michigan Association of School Administrators, which is also known as MASA. Welcome Dan, it's a pleasure to have you on our show.
Dan Pappas: I am glad to be here Rob.
Rob Huisingh: Dan, please take a few moments to tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to be the Director of MIEM?
Dan Pappas: Well, this has been a real joy for me. I have been involved with being the Executive Director at MIEM for almost three years. I came from K-12, spending many years as a School Administrator with Waverly Community Schools, which is a district just West of the Lansing. During that time I served as Assistant Principal, Principal, Assistant Superintendent, a year as an Interim Superintendent, and Deputy Superintendent, and had a lot of involvement early in my career with working at Wayne RESA, Project Development and Curriculum Development and Presentations.
All of that experience, along with my own interest in creativity around being involved with community theater, I had this opportunity come before me to join the staff at MIEM and MASA. At the time Mike Flanagan was our Executive Director, and Mike was a great person to know and work with through the association, and when the opportunity for this position came up I applied, and was very fortunate to get it.
In some ways I feel that all the great experience that I've had over the years, I don't look back on those in a negative way, but it feels very much like I have positioned myself into the job and career that I really love, and I feel that we're helping others throughout the whole state to handle some challenges that face Michigan Education right now.
Rob Huisingh: For those of our listeners who are unfamiliar with MIEM, what is the underlying reason for the organization, and when was it founded?
Dan Pappas: Well, it has been around for 26 years. MIEM is an nonprofit corporation, and it is a company that has the parents of the School Business Officials; MSBO and MASA; the association for Superintendents in Frontline Assistance. MIEM's mission is to provide professional development activities for educational leaders in the State of Michigan and assist them in designing, planning, and implementing quality programs for all students. We define educational leaders as all people who are involved with working with our students. So, we would work with bus drivers, teachers, support staff in all ways, as well as administrators, teachers.
Rob Huisingh: Dan, as I look over-the-counter of the upcoming events, it looks to me like you have 66 scheduled between now and May of next year; topics range from the nuts and bolts of consolidation and collaboration, using data to ask all the right questions, and the business of schools; what they do and how they do it. My question to you is, how do you do it?
Dan Pappas: Well, it's an interesting juggling act, and I do it because I have a very, very professional, dedicated and committed staff, many of whom are really part-time MIEM employees. Most of our employees, except for our Registrar are actually either MSBO or MASA employees, including myself. But we sit and we strategically plan, we work on how to schedule these things so that we're not bumping into each other too much, and we really try to listen to our client base, which is a very significant client base. We have over 10,000 people that are on our list and they receive information about MIEM.
So, when we know those things that are set and scheduled that we've done one year, that we know we're going to do in the next, we lock it in, or if we have a major issue that comes up, and it seems to be of high interest to school people, then we try to schedule that. We do it through a variety of ways. We have not only the conferences, we also do drive in workshops, we have webinars. We're going to be getting into a similar kind of thing that you're doing, and that is on demand staff development through podcasting and video streaming. We also have some online courses that we do too.
So, it's a variety of ways of serving the needs of our people. We truly believe that our work in helping to support the challenges that are out there, even when those challenges are tough and times are tough financially, if we really provide a quality product and do it at a reasonable cost, then that helps to save districts, and they're willing then to invest in their own professional development.
That's one of the things that drove me to move from the K-12 setting to this setting, and that is that, we have to really be true about walking our talk and talking our walk in education. If you, and I know you do, you spend time talking with a lot of people in business, they spend a lot of time in their research and development, and professional development, and if they're not on the edge in doing the best that they can, then they lose. We in education ironically sometimes go and cut the thing that's going to keep us forward, and that doesn't rub well with me. It's the learning that I have had since moving over to more of a business kind of setting; how do we initiate, inspire, and help people to see that ongoing learning is something we need to model for our students, and more importantly, how to model so that we really make a difference.
Rob Huisingh: Looking over the Michigan Educational Landscape, what are those most pressing professional and development areas that your members are interested in?
Dan Pappas: Well, you mentioned right at the beginning we have nuts and bolts of consolidation, workshop right now, and I looked on the way over we'll have over 150 people this coming Monday coming to that. People are really working hard to try and provide the best service they can and doing it creatively for as little cost as possible. It's not just in the facility areas, we're going to have a presentation there by an outstanding Superintendent, Cindy Ruble from Battle Creek, Lakeview, who has worked on this in regards to instruction.
So, we really have to think about how do we work together collaboratively, how do we do it effectively, and how do we do cost wise. That's a major issue right now for our people out in State. The demands of what's happening in the economy, the demands about school finance, force us to look at that.
But I also have to say, I am really proud of our educational community, because when we put on conferences and we ask for what are the issues that need to be dealt with, I'm proud to say that teaching and learning comes to the forefront, and the wanting to know what educational leaders can do, not delegate off, what they can do to enhance student achievement, to narrow achievement gaps, to make sure that students are going to be prepared digitally for the world that they face, are topics that are really topics that we are being requested to put on and finding resources.
It is extremely exciting for me to be in a room of 300, 400, 500 educators that are Principal, Assistant Superintendents and Superintendents that are enthralled and taken by a Doug Reeves, who is a well-known author, a nationally known author, that is talking about what do we do to ensure that our students are learning.
Another thing that I am finding because of those too that more educators now are interested in professional learning communities, and MIEM is involved with a number of organizations to develop a professional learning community statewide around the use of one tool, and it's a seed, but it's a start; the Audio Journal Executive Summary that Superintendents will receive. We already have 100 plus districts represented that will receive this monthly 90-minute Audio Journal about key highlights, key speakers, talking about major issues that they can then have educational conversations with their administrators around these topics, agreeing, disagreeing, reflecting on, and making a difference. Our hope is that this platform will cause that kind of conversation and come back to us to say we're excited about these kinds of things, now help us to provide resources to make a difference back in our schools.
Rob Huisingh: Do you have a large conference or an expo that's coming up that you would like to call to our listeners' attention?
Dan Pappas: We do have three MIEM sponsored conferences. The first one is our Facilities Conference that will be taking place the first week of October. These will be the focused areas on those people that are involved with the brick and mortar and all the things that don't move, expect buses they do, those kinds of things, and that would be taking place.
My favorite all-time conference over the last couples of years I have worked here is our Support Conference that will be taking place right here in Grand Rapids. We draw usually between 350-400 support staff, Secretaries primarily, and for those of you that haven't worked in the educational field, I can tell you from my experience they make the world go round. Without a good support staff person in your building or at your central office, you're just not going to get anywhere. They are dedicated, committed people, and when they come together, this is the one time during the year where someone is basically helping to serve them. They are so appreciative, they are so open to ideas and to working with each other, I enjoy that conference a great deal.
The third one we will be doing in the Dearborn area is in late January, and that's a technology Conference. This year our focus would be bringing Technology Coordinators and Curriculum Directors together to learn each others language so that they have a better understanding of what's needed to again, provide instructions for students, and we're excited about that. We hope to have about 300 people for that one.
Rob Huisingh: Speaking of exceptional and dedicated people, I understand that you're calling for nominations for the Crystal Award?
Dan Pappas: Right, and that's a part Rob of our Support Staff Conference, that is an award that is sponsored by Office Depot. We have a call out for nominations, and we hope that we get large number of nominations in the support staff area. The last few years we've had a range -- last year was a person who was from the Southeast region of the State who was a peer professional, special educator that had a tremendous application put together by that nominating district. We've had central office, clerical support people, we've had building level of support people and again, we can't praise the work of these people enough.
I am fortunate to be on the selection committee, one of the people that reads all the applications and the dedication, the efficient work, and the time that they've put into, not only their job, but their communities is outstanding. So, I appreciate the opportunity to put a call out there to say that if you know of someone out there in our Podcast world that you believe deserves recognition, the Crystal Award nomination application can be found on our website, which is www.gomiem.org.
Rob Huisingh: Well Dan, I want to thank you for taking the time to be with us today and sharing information about the Michigan Institute for Educational Management, and I just appreciate you coming out.
Dan Pappas: Well, thank you very much, and we write back at you, we're made aware of your work, and part of my excitement of coming over and being a part of it today was reviewing those that you sent me. Inside Michigan Education is a quality way of finding out more about what's going on in our State, so thank you very much.
Rob Huisingh: If you would like to contact Dan Pappas, he can be reached by telephone at (517) 327-9267, again that's (517) 327-9267. To read more about the Michigan Institute for Educational Management online, you can go to www.gomiem.org, again the URL is www.gomiem.org, until next week, this is Rob Huisingh with Inside Michigan Education.
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