PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. — “Every school year brings new hope, that’s the great thing about being an educator is you have this new excitement every single year. I want our students to be excited about coming back to school, our teachers to be excited,” said Pinellas County Superintendent Kevin Hendrick.
With the first day of classes starting this week, Hendrick is looking over his first year as the county's leader in education.
“One of my goals was just to keep the momentum going. You know, things aren’t broken, making improvements where you see them but also keep that momentum. Make sure our employees, our parents, our students know what to expect,” said Hendrick.
He saw success during his first year, as the school district achieved top statewide academic scores.
“We always compare ourselves to the large districts across the state; we kind of have those 10 large urban districts. We finished at the top in mathematics performance and third in English Language Arts performance,” said Hendrick.
Now going into his second year as superintendent, Hendrick told ABC Action News that he wants to continue the academic trajectory but also has a renewed focus this year on what students experience outside of the traditional classroom setting.
“We do want to see that sort of extracurricular educational enrichment experience continue to get better for our students. From kindergarten all the way to the senior year. So, for example, in high school, we continue to push our college career centers where every student has sort of a personalized plan. Some of that involves our local technical college. Some of its partnerships with our community colleges, state colleges,” said Hendrick.
Heading into the school year, the district is also facing some challenges— like many across the nation. That includes an ongoing affordable housing shortage.
“One of the challenges with any employee group in Pinellas County is, of course, we’re landlocked. We’re built out, so housing is only going up. We’re not one of our nearby counties where you can just move farther out,” said Hendrick.
The district is working on creating affordable housing opportunities to help keep current employees but also recruit new ones.
“We’ve got to make sure we pay our employees the best we possibly can, and then the conditions need to be so good that they don’t want to leave to go somewhere else. So we’re kind of working on both of those,” said Hendrick.
Pinellas is still short about 120 teachers ahead of the new school year.
“Across 128 schools, that’s not a lot. We’ve got plans to support each one of those, pushing in people from other parts of the district to make sure everything is covered,” said Hendrick.
“So many teachers nationally leave between year three and year five, and we’ve put a big emphasis on how do we support teachers to keep them. You can continue to look for how do you grow teachers within the district? How do you build up from within?” he added.
Hendrick told ABC Action News that the district will continue making improvements for the upcoming school year but that they’re ready for students to return.
“We did a lot of enrichment programs, summer camps this summer. More than we’ve ever done to keep kids learning throughout the summer,” said Hendrick.
In these final days of summer break, Hendrick said families should have fun but also take time to prepare for the year ahead.
“For our parents, make sure our students are ready to go when they come back to school, of course, the nutrition and then getting the sleep. Dialing down on some of that device time,” said Hendrick.