New CASD superintendent Chris Bigger aims to be relatable, go back to basics: Q&A

Chambersburg Area School District's new superintendent is no stranger to the district.

The school board hired Chris Bigger for the district's top job more than a year after the previous superintendent abruptly resigned three years in.

Bigger previously spent about eight years in CASD as the director of curriculum and instruction. He left in 2015 to lead Littlestown Area School District in Adams County. With about 7,000 more students and over a dozen more schools, CASD is a big step up.

Bigger reflected on that and more in a Q&A with the Public Opinion. The conversation below was lightly edited for clarity and brevity, and some questions were removed due to length.

How are you feeling about being back in CASD, and did you ever think you would come back?

It’s a really interesting question. I think it’s exciting to come back and it’s exciting reconnecting with people. That’s the best part, just reconnecting with a great place. There are a lot of wonderful people that work here and I’m looking forward to trying to help solve any of the concerns they have or worries and continue to support and promote public education across the board.

Did I think I’d come back? No, I don’t think I ever really looked that far. It was always what’s an opportunity, how can I serve, how can I help. I think this was an opportunity to see if I can help more people, more kids, and that was the draw. I felt like I helped achieve something in Littlestown where I’d been for nine years. I’m like, OK, that’s a smaller school, I’m gonna come back to a larger school and help. So it’s more of an internal drive for me to just help kids, so I’m hoping I can do that but I think there’s more need here than there was in Littlestown and so I’m here to serve.

What was your first actual task on Wednesday (Nov. 29, his first day)?

My first task was to walk through the building and just say “hi” to everybody. That’s the first thing I did.

Did anything stand out to you or was there something that surprised you?

Mostly memories, it was a walk down memory lane with the people that I knew. And then I went into a couple buildings already. And they’re just catching me up on what’s different, what’s the same since I was here before. So yeah mostly just a walk down memory lane, which is wonderful. It’s nice to have those connections here where I’m not starting fresh to get to know everybody.

The school year got off to a rough start due to the ransomware attack. Schools were closed for a few days and the computer systems were down and it came out that some data was compromised. What is your approach to cybersecurity going forward and do you think this incident will have any kind of ongoing impact?

I know it’s a matter of time for most places to have a cyber breach. It’s unfortunate there are lots of bad actors in the world that are constantly looking for this. Schools are catching up, I think, to the security more so than anything else. We’re fortunate to be on the front end — I’m gonna be an optimist here — saying now we have a lot more security in place. So I think it’ll lock down our system much more, it’ll be a little harder and won’t be as convenient to log in for employees. We’ll have a lot more security in place so two-factored authentications, a lot more verifications, a lot more closed systems. And that’s gonna be the natural course of things. And then a lot more on the backend with firewall security. So I think for a while — education always goes through this, “Hey, let’s open and let everybody use it” and then we close it down because there’s a violation or a problem and then we tighten it up. There’s a cycle, a roller coaster. I think we’re going to be on this really tight for a while. I also think it will reduce our reliance on technology so much, especially in the classroom. I think we all had a reality check, and I wasn’t here to experience it but we all felt it. So can we operate and function with paper and pencil? We certainly can.

And that was something a lot of people brought up at the time.

Yeah, there was a sense of OK, it’s OK to do paper and pencil, it’s OK to open a book, it’s OK to write, it’s OK to use a copy machine. And so, well I don't think anybody stopped using the copy machine, it’s just the volume. There’s I think an opportunity in everything that happens and this is one of those opportunities. I just hope the people are patient and it's not just a blame game. When the bad actors do things wrong, people tend to blame anybody for not solving it ahead of time, but I’m just focused on the bad actors for a while. Nobody did anything wrong, there wasn't anything short-sighted here in any way shape or form.

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What kind of relationship do you want to build with students, the faculty and staff and the community?

I’m a people person. Coming from a small school where everybody knows everybody by name, I hope I can replicate some of that in a big system. It’s much more challenging with 17 schools — how do you do that, what ways do you do that — so I think we have to make it a very humanistic approach to how we do our business. You do that by connections with people. You have a purposeful connection, so if you haven’t been to a place or a building, you put it in your schedule and get out there. You make intentional time for people and you treat people face to face and by phone, not necessarily so much by email and texting. So if you do that … you’ll have a more humanistic organization. So I hope, after a period of time here, there’s a humanistic side to the school district. I think a lot of people look at schools and don't remember there are lots of humans on the other side. We're not a factory, we are not product-driven. We have humans, we have kids. There are 12,000 people here that we work with every day and so every concern, complaint, action or ask, there’s a human on the other side so we just have to keep them in mind.

What are some of your top priorities in terms of students and education?

I want to build a shared vision with the community, the school and the board. I have some preconceived ideas but I want to make sure I’m solving and helping within the current context in Chambersburg. I don’t want to assume I have all the answers. Let’s come, let’s talk, let's find out what all the worries, concerns are but also what’s going really well. Too often we take a negative approach to improvement. Why don’t we focus on what we’re doing well first and why we are doing it well and what are the key ingredients of what we’re doing well and try to replicate that, rather than just what we are doing wrong and go fix that. And so I think we have to find out what we’re doing really well and encourage it and enhance it. And then also look at areas of struggle and find out what we can do. But I want to do that as a group.

But in general, there are some cornerstones for me, like reading by third grade is a nonnegotiable. How well are we doing by that? There’s clear research everywhere you go, we must have our students reading and comprehending by third grade. So that is definitely a target area. And then another target area would be making sure students graduate with some credentials and not just a series of credits. So whether it’s participating and passing (Advanced Placement) and (International Baccalaureate) exams, college in high school, the ROTC gives you a national certificate, the career and technical education center. And then the untapped area would be our apprenticeships and youth apprenticeships. So everyone who walks across the stage (at graduation), you shake their hand and say, "Oh, you have a national credited certificate for (career technical education) and welding," or "Oh you went through job apprenticeship so you can now be a paralegal," or, "Hey, you're college ready because you participated in college in high school or AP or IB, you’re ready to go to a two- or four-year school." So all of them lead to a credential, and I think that would serve our community very well if we can accomplish that. So those are the two bookends, there’s a really strong beginning and a really good ending then we work in the middle to solve everything in between.

What about priorities in terms of administration and how things are structured?

I’m not a shake-and-bake, move-people-around-for-the-sake-of-moving-people-around-because-I’m-new person. I think in the next six months we’ll figure out the direction we want to go and then organize around that based on strengths and people. Again back to the comment earlier, if your concerns are negative-based, you know, that doesn't get you anywhere. What are people really good at, find out what their strengths are and align them with goals and direction of the district, and let’s go for it. I think you have a lot of stability in the administrators here and leadership here. There's a lot of historical knowledge in the district. Sometimes that hurts, sometimes people look back too much rather than looking forward, so hopefully we can focus moving forward. I'm very much a problem solver; I grew up blue-collar. I like to solve problems. I don't like to pontificate about them too long. Let's get to the solution approach and do things in a sustainable way.

I’ve heard stories from people talking at school board meetings, on social media and sometimes by email about bullying and behavior problems in schools, particularly at CASHS. What is your approach to handling bullying and misbehavior?

I will go back to what I said earlier about humanistic. If there’s relationships built that are strong between students, staff and the adults in the community in the parents, generally a lot of that subsides. So the question becomes, how do we build those relationships and to what degree and can you do it in a school of 2,400 kids? And so how do we organize and make it smaller? I think that’s what I bring to the table of a small-school approach. How do we make the high school or any large school feel small, feel relational and have that connection? That would be the special sauce. There’s no special program, it really comes down to the caring of the individuals involved in the building and the parents in the community. So if there’s care and there are relationships, it will solve itself, right.

It’s been a very challenging time for schools and education in general, especially with teacher shortages and politics kind of seeping into everything. Are there any big issues you think are affecting the district now and going forward the next few years, and do you have any ideas on how they could be addressed?

So employment shortages, I don’t think it’s just a teacher shortage, I think it’s just employment across the board, so I don’t have any really big ideas there. But I would say that we’re missing some of our greatest assets, which would be our juniors and seniors. So if we have a shortage in employment, why don’t we start them out early in their junior and senior year under apprenticeships? If we have students that want to become teachers, why don't we start them in their junior or senior year to train them to become a teacher here, and then they go out maybe for two more years, get their teaching degree and come work for us? Why wait to see where they go, what they do and come back, why not recruit right away from them? I think we can do that in a lot of our open opportunities in the schools. So how do we get employees that want to come work here? Create great working conditions and recruit from within. I think every school that I’ve been listening to, talking to, myself included, wants to hire the people that are here because they’re gonna stay.

You know if you have to have someone coming from an hour or two hours away, they're not gonna stay for that long. So how do you recruit, retain and keep your most valuable assets, which are your employees? So I think starting with recruiting your graduating juniors and seniors would be a great start. Then also promoting the school district in a very humanistic way. Again, if they come in and feel like they would be a family they're gonna want to come and stay. Those are the working conditions that we have to create which are a challenge and, again, it's a very big system, very busy and you feel like sometimes you’re a number and not a name. So how do we treat you more like a name and not a number. That’ll be a good litmus test for us in a couple years.

Parental rights has been a big topic around the country, especially since the pandemic. How much influence do you think parents should have over what’s taught in schools and the student experience?

I struggle with this only because we teach the standards. The standards are what we do. Parents have always had lots of choices and lots of influence. They have alternatives. If you want an alternative assignment, you can get that. If you want an alternative book, you can get that. If you want to know what your child is checking out in the library, call the library and ask. So I'm struggling with the newness of the (term) parental rights. They have rights now, nothing has changed, so I’m struggling with that. I think they, the parents, just need to participate with us and partner with us, and they’ll see all the choices and options they have. Ninety-nine percent of all the staff and teachers are teaching the standards. They are not outwardly teaching whatever they want. We all have standards we follow and they’re directed by the state. We take those standards and turn them into our curriculum. … If you ask a teacher what students will learn in the next month, I'm sure they will give it to you. There are syllabi out there. We’ll be happy to have you help us. I think we’ve been missing that for a long period of time, where some parents aren't helping as much at home as we’d like them to, encouraging (kids) to read and creating a homework space, asking what they're doing in school. We need more of that.

Going along with parental rights, the topic of books came up at a recent school board meeting. A parent shared a book they thought had inappropriate content in it. What’s your stance on book bans and people analyzing the books that are in schools?

Just follow the policy and process we have. It’s way blown out of proportion to the degree of the worry. We went through something similar at Littlestown, we studied it for a year, went through a process, made some changes to the policy that were protective in nature. Great, it worked out. Asking parents to sign off, you want to know what your child is reading, it is a very easy thing to do. … If you want to challenge a book, there’s a process for that. To me that seems to be more of, to get people excited about something. A lot of parents aren't necessarily as worried about it as appears to be. In my previous district, we did the sign-offs on a paper if you wanted to see what your child was selecting at the library, and less than 1% signed it, which tells you that’s not the major worry for them right now. It doesn't mean it’s not an important topic, but it’s not on their top five. But it appears from the way … it’s being talked about like it's the number one issue. Yeah, it seems to me it’s a little more politics, a little less practitioner-driven.

Virtual learning became a vital tool during the pandemic. How do you think virtual learning should evolve, or not?

So contextually, virtual learning as a replacement for education, I don’t agree with. Virtual learning to do training, I’m for. I don’t think there’s anybody in any industry that isn't going to do online training related to their job, but that’s one-way and that’s a consumption, generally, of information. … But true learning involves the interaction between students and teacher, and there is a human side to that, that’s when true learning occurs. When there’s a back and forth — "this is where I'm struggling, help me get unstuck" — you can't necessarily always do that on a computer. So I think that virtual learning is OK for some students, a very small number of students who are very motivated, very disciplined to their academics and want something different. For the average, everyday student learner, I don't think it’s the best form of education.

What would we do moving forward, again I think we can do training for students like how to be safe online, some of that can be done through video through technology but not the majority of learning. Like the FID (Flexible Instruction Days), when you have a snow day and receive instruction online, I'm not a fan of those. I don't think students get a good education that day. So I wouldn't support continuing the FID days the way we are now; we'll just call a snow day and make up the day. … And think what happens with the struggling students, your most at-risk learners can suffer the most. I think that is a really big caution so you have students with IEPs (Individualized Education Plans), students struggling to learn, they're on their own, you know that’s not helpful so they get further behind and so I really worry about the implications of that.

What are some things you want the community and students to know about who you are, your background, or anything you think is important to know about you? 

I’m human. I’m approachable. I’m just like you. I think the superintendent’s office gets put on a pedestal that it doesn't need to be. If you see me on the street, approach me and say "hi." I grew up in a blue-collar (town) and I act like that. I like Penn State football games. I like to go out to eat. I'm an avid outdoors person. I work on vehicles, I work on the house. I'm just a regular person. I think that understanding makes a big difference. I have three girls, all weren't the best perfect children in school, and so we've all struggled through school. I have three stories and three completely different examples with my kids, from the athlete to the musician to the virtual student to the struggling student, so when I go through my experiences with people, I can say I had that same experience. I recently married, Nov. 5, to Lisa. She has three boys, so we're like "The Brady Bunch." So between the six kids — they are almost all out of the house — we have a lot of experience with kids, and I think I can relate to the majority of the struggles that a parent would have and a student would have and a teacher would have. It's nice when you can relate and help and just be a sounding ear. I can't always solve your problem, but yeah I had that same struggle. I think that makes a big difference for the community.   

Amber South can be reached at asouth@publicopinionnews.com.

This article originally appeared on Chambersburg Public Opinion: Chambersburg Area School District leader Chris Bigger shares outlook