Superintendent Renee Nugent: How to truly connect

The whiteboard in the office of Superintendent Renee Nugent office at USD 409 Atchison Public Schools reflects one of her top priorities: her schedule of school and classroom visits.

As of early November, she had already visited 244 classrooms in her northeast Kansas district. Part of her mission is to find and then share examples of great teaching in her weekly superintendent shoutouts.

“I can’t make decisions at the top if I’m not truly connected to classrooms and kids. So I’m not doing evaluations,” she says of her visits. “I’m visiting classrooms to look for good instruction.”

In her first year at Atchison Public Schools, she estimates that only about a quarter of high school teachers were teaching at grade level. Now, about 80% of teachers are teaching at grade level or above. “We are moving the needle on instruction and kids can verbalize and demonstrate that they’re successful in a classroom,” says Nugent, recently named Kansas’ 2025 Superintendent of the Year.

The definition of what makes a successful student has evolved in recent years. “Now, a good learner is, ‘I’m resilient. I can problem-solve,” Nugent points out. “When I ask a kid, ‘What are you learning? And how do I know you’re learning it?’ they can name the learning intention. And I can ask, ‘What does that mean to learn that concept?’ And then they can name the success criteria.”

Meeting mental health needs

Among Atchison’s traditional buildings is an alternative K12 school that partners with a local healthcare provider to serve students with behavioral issues related to mental health. Students attend core classes and group and individual therapy sessions during the school day. Last year, in a first for the school, all 18 seniors graduated, Nugent points out.

“We’ve learned that our most at-risk kids are never going to leave our community and we have to give them the skills necessary to be productive citizens,” she explains. “So we try to individualize everything for them. If they want to go to vo-tech, we make that happen. If they want some work-based learning, we make that happen.”

One of the things that keeps Nugent up at night is the growing number of students grappling with mental health. “I would love to place blame on things like devices and the Internet but we’ve had distractions in our lives forever,” she observes. “I think it’s a culmination of adults not handling stress well, and that seeps into children. As educators, we can make sure what we offer kids is as secure and safe as possible and provide them with strategies so that cycle doesn’t continue.”

‘Our mascot was a barrier’

Nugent’s strong ties to the community were built, in part, through Atchison’s recent mascot change. The district had failed once before to shed the name “Redmen.” But Nugent found success with a long process that started with a community groundswell and a unanimous school board to dump the old mascot.

Nugent and her team then gathered about a year’s worth of community input and the school board ultimately chose a new mascot, “Phoenix,” that was suggested by a student.

“What we did was, we said, ‘We have a mission and a vision and a policy for non-discrimination and our mascot doesn’t match with any of that. So if we’re going to keep this mission and vision, we need to align everything we do to that,’” she explains. “We looked at it from the standpoint of we say all the time that we’re going to remove barriers. And here our mascot was a barrier.”