How a student-centered superintendent meets every family
Superintendent Kenneth Spells immerses himself in the Hoke County Schools community, going to baseball games and a different church every weekend to meet every student’s family.
It’s a core pillar of his leadership philosophy and why the North Carolina superintendent describes himself as “the student-centered superintendent.”
District Administration sat down with Spells to learn about his priorities for the upcoming school year, successes achieved in 2025-26 and involvement with the DA Leadership Institute.
Note: The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
What’s top-of-mind for you heading into the upcoming school year?
Top-of-mind for me is always providing a great education for our students and ensuring they’re prepared for a career or college.
One of the first things I do when I move into a community as a superintendent is to try to become part of the community. I try to meet the families, meet the students, meet the principals, and just try to get a good feel of what’s going on. I just immerse myself in the community and let everybody know that we’re in this together.
We are all a team that I call “Team Hoke.” It means that we work together to improve student outcomes. That means going to different events. I go from everything to basketball games, to church and the church fish fry, becoming part of that community and letting everybody know that we have a task, and our task is improving student outcomes.
You have a track record for improving student achievement. What’s your strategy?
There are a couple of things I’m really proud of. One is our superintendent’s night out, where we invite our community to come in and talk to all the leaders in our school district. They can ask questions to all of my departments at this meeting.
We meet at one of our middle schools. We present what’s going on in the community and in the district. Then we listen to the community for feedback and answer questions to give people ownership of the district and what we’re doing. We like to do two or three of those per school year.
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You have experience leading districts through financial fallouts. What advice do you have for leaders who face budget uncertainty?
We have a philosophy here in Hoke County, and we have a philosophy in every district I work with. Every decision that we make, from the boardroom to the classroom, is going to be about students, and every decision we make is about improving the classroom. So we’ve learned to do more with less without impacting the classroom.
We sit down and do our budget, and if we have to make some cuts, we try to do things that have the least impact on classroom instruction. We try to do more cuts away from the building. A lot of our cuts will be central office or things that are on our wish list.
Tell me a little bit about your leadership philosophy.
I try to make sure that everybody in the district feels valued. The bus driver is the first person that the students see every morning. The cafeteria worker works with students and provides good meals. I make sure that everybody feels like they’re part of the team.
I find that if everybody feels valued, they work harder to support kids. The instruction and the academics go up when everybody feels like they have a part in what’s going on.
We also make sure that we’re communicating whatever we’re doing with our staff and that they have a voice in the process. We feel like that’s very important in the Hoke County Schools. We make sure that we keep our consumers, our parents and our staff informed.
We’ve also started a superintendent’s Christmas giveaway for our families. This year, we gave 25 families $105 to support their Christmas shopping. Hopefully, we can go up to about $150 next year. Again, we feel that it is very important to be part of the community.
Tell me about your involvement with the DA Leadership Institute.
I’ve been involved with DA leadership since 2018, and it’s just been amazing for me—the networking and the workshops on improving instruction and financial literacy, especially when I was a younger superintendent.
I learned so much just going to those meetings and having a chance to talk to other superintendents about what’s going on in their districts. I’m going to continue to be a member as long as I’m a superintendent. There’s just a wealth of knowledge in the room at the events.
