A super summer: How area school leaders spend their summer months

On any given day during summers in Trempealeau County, some kids are traveling the state playing baseball or other sports while some peers work hard in preparation for the county fair. 

Older students might be working part-time or joining their classmates in enjoying their time away from homework and tests.

Teachers and other staff take a break from the hustle and bustle of grading, supervision and all the other day to day nuances that are part of caring for and shaping the future of the communities they teach in.

Not everybody, though, is away from school.

Administrative staff, assistants, custodial and maintenance employees continue their work to make sure the schools are ready when students and other staff members return for school the following fall.

“We’re making sure we’re focused on what the most essential initiatives are for the district for the coming year. … lots of behind the scenes work,” Gale-Ettrick-Trempealeau School District Superintendent Michele Butler said. “It’s the stuff nobody really knows is happening, but if it weren’t getting done we would be a ship without a direction.”

The average day for Butler consists of a variety of tasks including administrative planning, student and curriculum development, scheduling, staffing and training for the following year.

A top focus is staffing, especially at a time when turnover in schools is harder to combat. Butler spends a lot of time helping to onboard new staff members and ensuring that crucial positions are filled with employees who are ready to start the next year.

“This year we were staffing positions we hadn’t been able to staff the entire year. So we had normal turnover plus we’re trying to bring in people to cover what we were never able to hire last year,” Butler said.

Maintaining the budget and financial planning is also a big piece of the summer months, and Arcadia Superintendent Lance Bagstad said part of that is staff wages and planning for the state budget.

Some days are about cleaning up emails or one-on-one meetings with administrators, and years such as 2023 when the state budget is being assembled require more number crunching.

“It’s an eclectic variety of things throughout the day,” Bagstad said.

Bagstad agreed with Butler that staffing has been a top task for summer months in recent years, as has working with the Trempealeau Valley Co-op to address such issues.

“People see when school is closed, people think everything is closed down,” Bagstad said. “But the district office is here throughout the summer and constantly working. It’s no earth-shattering thing, but it’s day to day and keeping things running.”

Auditors sometimes visit the schools to check bookkeeping and financial numbers, and projects that require empty buildings — such as a tile upgrade at G-E-T High School this summer — are completed.

“I think people assume everybody’s off in the summer, and if you come by the schools, I mean the custodians are going nonstop,” Butler said. “There’s just so much activity and projects are getting done of course as well.”

School boards continue to plan and meet throughout the summer, and the top district officials both agreed that what motivates them during the summer months is working to guarantee that both students and staff are set up to succeed when the hallways, lockers and classrooms are filled again in the fall.

“The operation of school is still going on from a district office standpoint and a building administrator standpoint, so the middle, high and elementary school principals are busy year round making sure our buildings are ready to go,” Bagstad said.

“Even though the kids are at home and a lot of staff are off during the summer, there’s still a lot of staff hard at it making sure the place is ready to roll for next year.”