Kim Swift

TH: Is being more visible to students something you are trying to extend among your faculty and staff?
KS: I think it's really important that building leaders help set the climate or tone of the building. And I think that the more teachers who are available to more students at all times during the day really has a big impact on the overall operation of a building. A lot of conflicts are prevented simply by our presence. A lot of information that

Kim M. Swift Age: 49. Occupation: Principal, Dubuque Senior High School. Family: Mother of Karen Clayton, of Chicago; Richard Clayton, of Dubuque, and David Clayton, at home. Wife of the late Steve Broderick. Daughter of Ray and Elaine Swift, both deceased, of Benton, Wis. Hometown: Benton, Wis. Education: Bachelor's degree, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1977; master's degree, Univeristy of Wisconsin-Platteville; administrative endorsement, Drake University, 2000. Hobbies: Reading and running.

needs to come to us or a lot of interventions that could happen happen when teachers are in hallways, teachers are actively supervising where students are present. We have made a concerted push to make that happen. I think it just prevents a lot of possible problems that you might have later on. If people are present, then a lot of problems don't happen. I think it also adds to the sense that children would have of this being a safe place to be. That the hallways are friendly places; there are many adults available to greet me good morning, to ask me how my evening was. I just think that's very important as far as setting climate and culture in a building.

TH: Whenever someone new comes into a role, whether it's a school principal or a newspaper editor or whatever, they bring their own management style. You mention that you consider yourself hands-on and you want to be highly visible to people. What other attributes or words would you use to describe your management style, your leadership style?
KS: I would hope that people would see me as well informed. It's really important to me that if I have to make important decisions about so many people's lives that I have all the information that's out there and that I'm able to somehow assimilate that information into the best possible recommendation that I could make. I think that that's probably true of me. I think I'm able to get lots of input from lots of kinds of people. I hope that I'm very well read and very well informed. Fairly calm when it comes to decision making. Able to analyze lots of points of view. It's always my goal to see the big picture and then try to apply my view of the big picture to the individual situation. I think that's important in a leader. It's important to me in my leadership style. I would hope my vision is to be a curriculum leader. Different principals have different visions for themselves, but I want to know about curriculum. I want to know who's teaching what to whom, in what order. What the teaching methodologies look like. I think I bring that to this job. I think I believe the teachers here would think that I myself am a good teacher so that I might be able to give them feedback or ideas about their teaching. I think I'm a collaborator. I'm not a very competitive person, so I would view it as my job to work very closely with administrators in other buildings, with the central administration to make decisions that don't just affect Dubuque Senior High School, but affect all of Dubuque Community Schools.

TH: At one end of the spectrum, we're looking at more credits which usually will translate to more challenging course work for students. Meanwhile, we have No Child Left Behind legislation. Are these two -increased credits and No Child Left Behind requirements -in conflict or at cross purposes in any way?
KS: There would be parts of them that were probably at cross-purposes. I'm sure that the intent of No Child Left Behind is that all of our children would achieve at high levels. And certainly the intent of raising graduation requirements would be that all of our students would achieve at high levels. However, when you start looking at graduation rates, which are measured by No Child Left Behind, and you think about how that is going to be impacted by an increased number of graduation requirements, there certainly could be some challenges posed there. There are kids for whom 40 credits was a challenge. There are students who left school because they thought that was a bar too high for them to jump. We're now telling those very same students you now need 46 credits to graduate. Yeah, there's going to have to be some additional support for those students, whether that's support to be able to pass the classes the first time around within classroom situations or additional course offerings to be able to make up for credits that you haven't passed previously. It is going to challenge the system. There was a time when kids came to school and had study halls. That was a normal part of your education and mine. Study halls were built into the day.

TH: No, detention hall.
KS: Detention hall or whatever it took, that might have been the intervention they used for you, Brian. For me, they were called study halls. We thought that was part of our school day. When you start doing 46 credits required to graduate, there's very little study time built into students' days. Although I support the effort, I think we have to recognize really what a big deal that is for some kids. If you're in classes all day and you're a high-achieving student, then you need to study sometime other than during the school day. Very often those high-achieving students are the students who, in addition to going to school all day, also spend many hours in extra-curricular or co-curricular school activities and/or they have jobs in order to support their cars or their college fund or whatever they need. For those kids, I think that that's very difficult. For kids at the other end of the academic spectrum, again, you have classes all day and not much time to do the homework for the classes that you already have. Like lots of our society, we're filling up adolescent's lives to the max and thinking that that is a good thing and thinking that that makes us a more rigorous place. And it does, if it works; but when it doesn't work, I think we have to provide some way that those kids can also receive our support.

TH: There's an organization making the rounds talking with editorial boards about harassment in the schools as it relates to gay students or maybe allegedly gay students with some incidents of harassment or even violence in some districts. To what degree is that a problem in the Dubuque schools, from your observation?
KS: I think it's one of those topics in which the youth has really led the adults. My experience with adolescents today while there's still a lot of people who aren't accepting of others' sexual orientation, predominantly teenagers are much more open to the fact that many people have many different sexual orientations. I think it's better than it was 15 years ago. I sit somedays when one of the young students here is make announcements about the Gay-Straight Alliance meeting that is going to happen third hour and it just is another meeting that's going to happen. TH: Like the chess club.
KS: Yeah. It's not any kind of big deal. The students come to those meetings and no one's hiding inside a classroom saying, "Oh, we're going to have a meeting but we don't want to be harassed." That's a wonderful thing. That's a wonderful improvement as far as what's happened over the last 10 years. I think the media actually gets a lot of credit for that. We are quick I think to slam television and movies but I think that has exposed kids to a lot of lifestyles different from their own and maybe in a more accepting way. Certainly there are still students who refer to each other as gay and use derogatory terms when what they might think of as kidding or whatever. Much more of that happens than should happen, but I think things have improved greatly.

TH: You completed the Chicago Marathon (Oct. 9)?.
KS: I did. It was a great experience. I ran my first marathon in 2000, thinking that I was going to run one in my life. I hadn't run one since. So I ran this one. It was actually fairly easy. Running a marathon, like lots of life, is just mostly the time you put in before the actual event. It's all about the training.

TH: For the record, I want to get your time.
KS: Oh, yeah.

TH: Do I have to look it up?
KS: No. 4:40, which is pretty slow unless you happen to be a 49-year-old woman, in which case it puts you in the top 50 percent.

TH: I cut you off a little while ago, when you were listing hobbies. Are there any other spare-time activities you'd like to mention?
KS: You know, I don't know that it's an activity, but a big part of who I am has to do with my commitment to human rights. That's a big part of who I am. I care about the rights of all people. Over the course of my life probably have not given enough time to those efforts, but certainly have given some and value those kinds of activities.