Pilot Point ISD Superintendent Dr. Shannon Fuller talked about restructuring an organization and the work that has gone into doing so at the school district during the PointBank Business Breakfast on Jan. 15.
Her update on her work in the first semester revolved around a pair of ideologies, first that of ‘teaming’ and then of the district’s new tenet acronym.
“It’s a new team that has all new leadership except for one,” Fuller said. “That’s a monumental task. It requires a lot of planning, com- munication, calibration, and we’re spend a lot of time ‘teaming.’” She followed with a diagram breaking the idea down into four stages: forming, storming, norming and performing.
“You can go in and out of these stages as you bring new members in, as members leave and as things happen,” Fuller said. “As a leader, you have to show up differently. You support the group differently in storming than you might performing. I bring that up because we have lived in the first three pretty well right now.”
She expanded.
“You can feel everyone starting to hit their stride right now,” Fuller said. “They’re starting to feel good about it. When we’re taking about norming, we’re talking about, ‘how do we do our work,’ and we introduced the concept of Bearcat BEST because we want to talk about what’s important to us.”
The four letters in BEST make up an acronym outlining the foundational tenets for district staff.
“’Begins with me,’ is the first one and that is, ‘what do I bring as an individual to the team,’” Fuller said. “For excellence [the second letter], I like Aristotle’s thinking around excellence in that it’s a habit, the things you do over and over to achieve excellence.”
The third and fourth tenets, systems thinking and teamwork.
“This is all about the organization, what do I do and how does it impact the district, my classroom and my community,” Fuller said of the third tenet before moving onto the fourth. “I’m a big believer in not doing things in isolation, many hands make light work.”
This culminates in a district scorecard she and the administration are working on.
“We’ve created goals, the board adopted them at the beginning of the year,” Fuller said. “We’re drafting a scorecard with strategies so that everyone in the district knows our goals and how we get there.”
She opened with some celebrations the district has had in the time she’s been at its head, including finishing out the 2021 bond updates, success in the athletic department as new director Chad Worrell gets his feet under him, success in academic UIL competitions and the beginning of the esports team.
“It draws in different students who are interested in that and gives them a place and a space,” Fuller said. “That’s something new we hope to develop.”
The esports team is one among several ways in which she and the district are looking to expand the avenues they offer to students.
“What we really want to do is listen to our kids, look at our economy and look at what’s coming to help prepare our students for that,” she said. “We want to make sure we continue to expand on our offerings, our coursework and our extracurriculars, so we make sure all our kids can find a place in Pilot Point that they’re happy with.”
Fuller later spoke about the district’s growth and how it’s preparing for it with an upcoming bond in November and ensuring the campuses can maintain the growing student load.
“We expect to bring in anywhere between 200-300 students each year,” Fuller said. “When we look at that, we look at each of our existing campuses. We did an analysis called the Functional Capacity Analysis, which is the total amount of students you can put [at a campus] and still function well.
“You can see that at the end of next year our elementary school hits above its functional capacity,” she said. “In 2027, you’ve got the middle school. Then by 2033, you’ve got the high school. We’re not going to fix all those problems now, but it helps us see.”
