Dr. Jim: [00:00:00] thanks for joining us today. This is your friendly neighborhood talent strategy nerd. Dr. Jim, how do you dust yourself off after a big loss?

I suppose that depends on the circumstances, and one of the bigger losses that you can take in the K through 12 space is when you fail a referendum. The stakes are pretty high in those environments because you obviously need the funding to fund the future growth of your district. What can you learn from that and how do you move forward from that type of loss, in a way sets you up for success the next time around In today's world.

Many districts are looking for ways to build a future ready district. In this conversation, we'll talk through how you execute after taking that big L on the first go around on a referendum and still set yourself up for success and end up winning.

today We have Dr. Jason Cochran, who's an accomplished educator and leader, currently serving as the superintendent of rum ISD. He's part of a rapidly growing school district in north Texas, and he's got a career spanning over [00:01:00] two decades.

Dr. Cochran has consistently demonstrated a passion for fostering academic excellence, building strong relationships, and leading with integrity. At just 25 years old, Dr. Cochrane began his administrative journey as an assistant principal in a six a school district. Marking the start of a remarkable career in education.

By age 32 is named high school principal, and at 38 he assumed the rule of superintendent of schools. His dedication and innovative leadership have earned him widespread recognition, including being named superintendent of the Year for region two. 14, twice within a four year span, most recently in 2021.

Beyond his professional achievements, Dr. Cochran is a devoted husband and father. He is been married to his wife Danielle for 26 years, and together they have three daughters who inspire him daily. Driven by his faith and commitment to serving leadership, Dr. Cochran continues to positively impact the lives of students, educators, and the community that he serves.

Jason, welcome to the show.

Jason Cochran: That's quite an introduction. Thank you. Good to be here.

Dr. Jim: Nice having you on here too. It's it's always good to have a fellow zone defenser [00:02:00] in the house you have three kids, three daughters, which I would imagine is a lot easier to deal with than my three sons. But that's a conversation for a different show in a different day. I'm looking forward to this conversation. What I'm particularly looking forward to is is telling this turnaround story of sorts, because it's very difficult to fail a referendum and then pick up the pieces and position yourself up for success.

So I think that's gonna be an instructive conversation for a lot of our audience. But before we get into that. I think it's gonna be important for you to share with the audience a little bit more about your backstory and some of those defining moments in your career that helped shape your leadership philosophy and principles.

So why don't you tell us some of those key moments in your career that helped build you into the person that you are today? I.

Jason Cochran: When I reflect back over the key moments that define us as leadership, you can document the things. You can put on a resume. You can list the projects, you can list the elections. I think when you can really pivot and figure out what, when you were able to determine your why, that's what I.

[00:03:00] Drives us to go forward on many different levels. And my pivotal moment is a story about a kid. I was in administration like you said, I got into it early. And I came in contact with all sorts of kids. I started out at an, a middle school for a year and then went with the high school principal who was named the high school principal.

He took me in and I spent the next six years as his assistant a large large high school in Texas. So I had these kids over a period of time I had an experience with a student that tend to get in trouble in class and would come in and I would try to build that relationship and waste my breath.

And one day as he was getting sent in the building, I was going out of the building and I said, Hey, walk the track with me real quick. I got a couple things to do and I'm walking the track with this young man. then, and as we're walking around, I noticed he started deescalate and it clicked. I had to meet that kid where he was. And so we tend to start, when he came in, we started to have these walks. We immediately walked around the building, walked around the track, and I can't tell you how many laps we did. as that kid got older, his behavior started to change. And I say all this to say years later, I [00:04:00] get a phone call and my pivotal moment was when I picked up that phone call, and he said, Hey, Cochran. And I recognized the voice, but he was a man. And he said, I wanna talk to you and just check on you. And he was checking on me, but he had mentioned that he went overseas to serve he was hit by an ID and he went to a place in his head where he felt safe and he said, I was walking the track we do these for the kids and building those relationships with our kids and our community. that's the piece, the relationship piece goes beyond the reading, writing, and arithmetic. And we're growing adults. Good humans. I. That was the pivotal moment when I said, if I can remember that it's not my district, it's their district.

And if I keep my why, the relationships, whether it's with the community, with the kids, then this career is gonna be rewarding and I can do it effectively. So I can, I had many of those stories, but that relationship piece is the key to being successful in this profession and keeping that first and foremost.

Dr. Jim: That's a really great story and it actually.

Sets up something else that I was thinking about. You got into leadership pretty early in [00:05:00] your career, and you just told a story of how one of the key lessons for you was meeting people where they are, and especially the students that are in your district. As a 25-year-old that gets bumped into leadership.

That's a tough task. So how did you make, how did you navigate that transition successfully where you weren't irritating everybody around you as this young hotshot and you might, you probably have a district full of people that have 10, 15 years of experience on you. So what was that transition process like when you first got into leadership and what did you learn from that experience?

Jason Cochran: My first mentor was Jim Banister, and he was the principal that hired and gave me a shot, and he told me two things. He said, I need you to rely on your instincts. build relationships with kids and then provide an environment where the teachers can teach. You're not gonna tell them how to teach physics.

You're too young and you don't know physics, you can make sure that you build a relationship with those kids where they can be held accountable and provide them the environment that they can be [00:06:00] successful in. So that was the main piece is I keep going back to, and I've talked to. Young people that I've hired now, and when we talk about instincts and what we do with our strengths and what we do as leaders is to make sure the classroom is done effectively. It's not trying to be the expert in a specific area, but we hire the experts and our job is to help control that environment.

I.

Dr. Jim: you mentioned something interesting there where you said the principal that you worked for. Saw something in you and then decided to give you a shot. Was this, did this catch you out of the blue? And if it did, how did you take that lesson and take the chance out of somebody noticing later in your career, because this sounds like it happened out of the blue.

Jason Cochran: I, that's a funny story because you'd have to know Jim Banister, but when he introduced me to the staff, again, I'm young, I come in a midsummer hire and he says, okay, ladies and gentlemen, this is Cochrane. It was between him and a monkey, and NASA got the monkey. And so he set that tone that we were gonna build that funny relationship.

And he took the risk on me in the summertime. But, he [00:07:00] was an, a phenomenal mentor. I ended up working for him for several years, and I would attribute most of my success to the legacy that he's helped instilled in me to find important.

Dr. Jim: Switching gears a little bit you've come a long way from that 25-year-old and now you've been a superintendent for a while as well. What are some of those things about your district that you feel is important for the for the listeners to know and understand?

I.

Jason Cochran: What makes Kram a special place is they are a bedroom community that, in recent history, experienced being very rural and I. Matched a little bit of what the middle of my career ended up being. I went from the large district and then I went to a medium sized district as a high school principal. And from there I went to West Texas and was the superintendent of a phenomenal school district, Eastland ISD for eight years in a rural community. And crumb's special match when I was selected for this job was Crumb. Has the rural history very [00:08:00] recently. And we are located in North Texas. We cover about 128 square miles. But the difference we have now in Crumb is we have 2,500 students, but we have 16,000 houses plotted. So we are going to, where in some districts can say, I remember back in the day we're just barely one generation removed from being a one stop sign town. And now we are going to have thousands of students and we have to build capacity for that. We're, what makes Crumb special is we're trying to build that district capacity and keep the rural community feel. And that's where I felt the match between what the strengths I brought to the district. And I've been here three going on four years now. My strengths and experience, come from the value that I found in Eastland to be very important and very community oriented. And how do I make sure as we grow, our students and our families still experience that because that's the reason why they picked Crumb. It has that relationship piece [00:09:00] that doesn't feel like a number in a big city.

Dr. Jim: When I'm thinking about what you just described and also putting it together with your career history where you've worked at districts of all sorts of different sizes, how do you feel that diversified experience in all of those other districts has positioned you for success in navigating the growth trajectory of this district?

Jason Cochran: one of the things when you're a school superintendent, you have to realize in Texas, the shelf life of a school superintendent is two and a half to three and a half years per district. to be somewhere for an extended period of time is an anomaly. I. Because so few people do what we do and can handle the stress load and the relationship mode that is, is put on us on year to year basis. I've been lucky to work for two great districts as a superintendent, and the first one went eight years, and this one's going on year four. The experiences on student superintendents that I've mentored getting into this business that have started in the smaller school district. The valuable pieces that I say that, with the movement comes and you can grow in this [00:10:00] career really rapidly, but I. I now get to run a district that is gonna grow to thousands, but I also have the experience of mowing the yard at a smaller district. I have experience on delivering paper to the classrooms building relationship with those kids in a smaller capacity. And that's the piece we can't forget is to be. On the campuses, in the classrooms, no matter how large you grow priorities stay priorities because we haven't been submersed into 30, 40,000 student district for too long. So I, I think ha, knowing I. What happens behind the curtain and being able to be involved with that on a day to basis is really important to be able to remember that as we grow as a district and being able to see those pieces that as we get larger, have to end up hiring people to do the things that I used to do on the front line as a superintendent. But to remember, be able to get in there and do any of it ourselves is important to keep it as a priority.

Dr. Jim: when I think about what you just described you're attributing your ability to [00:11:00] navigate in this environment and also your tenure in other environments, in large part, to your experience in some of those smaller districts where you had to wear a lot of hats, I would think.

And that feeds right into kind of my bias anyways. 'cause I've been a small, startup type organization. That's where I'm most at home because you get to wear a lot of different hats. The flip side of that is that as you get into these larger environments, I. You might feel the need to get into everybody else's kitchen and kind of pitch in where maybe you're not needed or even welcome.

So how did you scale yourself back so you're not getting in everybody's business as you started getting into these larger organizations? I.

Jason Cochran: That's a good question. One of the things I think is with teachers, especially in students, they can see fake from a mile away. so if you're going in a classroom for a picture or if you're going in a hallway to check a box, they can see through that. If you truly are going around the [00:12:00] building you're throwing knuckles at a kid that you truly know that man, that kid did X, Y, Z or that kid needs X, y, z or you're two seconds with that kid may give the teacher the two minutes of a break that they need for that moment. There's a level of trust. And honesty that I think comes in that moment. And I say that to say my teachers and my staff, I feel are very comfortable to come to me and ask or see me around and not feel I. Intimidated because if it's out of my lane, I will hear them and I'll say, I hear you.

This is how I'm gonna direct your answer. Or This is why I have to say no to it and be able to direct a conversation into the people that were supposed to make that call, for example. I had, I have a good relationship even with, good relationship with all my administration assistant principals, directors. Whatever you name it. But I had a board member call and say, Hey, this happened at the middle school. Their students were there and [00:13:00] to redirect them to the administration and not fix, finish that problem for them builds capacity with the people I serve as an elected board because they now go, oh, wow.

He knows where to point it. And the people that work for me goes, wow. He pointed in the direction and he didn't try to fix it for me. So there's a level of confidence on both ends, and I believe that comes from being approachable at both ends and not fake.

Dr. Jim: When I opened the show, I talked about recovering from a bond failure and you got a little bit of a taste of that when you started in this district. So tell me about what, what happened in those circumstances and what you learned from that first failure that you feel set yourself up for the future.

Jason Cochran: The first failure, and the only so far, which is we can, keep checking that box. But that actually was in Eastland, so this was in my prior district. So I, I came into that community as a young superintendent, my first superintendency. And we. Sometimes with leadership transition, a board sees a [00:14:00] pivotal moment to go, Ooh, now we get a chance to do X.

Or, now we can, are you the sacrificial lamb or are you gonna be the savior? And how's this gonna work? So we set up some, ideas of what that community needed to grow. And we strategically implemented a bomb ref bond referendum that we put in front of the community that failed on the first go round. So that, that was the first experience. And the ironic thing there is we knew the community the change. That community had never passed the bond. And and we had buildings that were built in 1927. And so we needed, we knew we needed to impact change, so going through that experience. that time I was writing my treatise for my doctorate and I chose to write it on how to pass a bond after one's failed in a previous election. And so it hit it home 'cause we were living it. And and so then we had to reset and pivot. but the good part going into it, we built the first bond that if we have to have a plan B. What's our approach? Because it was something that had [00:15:00] never been done before in that community. And we started with the practical aspect of it going, okay, what would B look like? And so we didn't, it was frustrating when it fell the first time, but I. The failure didn't hit the red light, it hit the green light on what next. And then we had to just begin to strategically plan and take several specific processes to continue to transform a platform in which we could begin to do another proposal.

Dr. Jim: What's interesting about what you described is that you, this was in a community that had never passed a bond previously, and this one that you rolled out failed and you have a contingency.

But how do you develop a contingency when the track record. Has been a series of nos and you just stack another no onto it. How do you build an informed contingency so that your plan B is actually realistic and does something differently and drives to a different outcome?

Jason Cochran: So in hindsight, and what I did on the next bomb proposal that we ended up passing, and in the one in Crumb that we passed, we approached the first [00:16:00] bond proposal in Eastland with the idea that we were doing what's best for kids we put what we believed to be the best plan out there we put what we needed to make that district what we thought was spectacular.

And I'm using key words like we put, because what ends up happening is you forget. When you got into administration early on, the key advice that said, remember, it's not your district, it's their district. And if you ever start feeling it's your district, it's time to figure out another way to reestablish yourself or somewhere else to go. So I. What we have to remember in building capacity is it's as important to build capacity in what you're going to put in that proposal. It's also just as important to have the pieces where you can continue to gauge, buy-in on what your community wants, and to establish the parameters in which your community is willing to follow you. bonds get written and it's so obvious that, Hey, we need X, that they just go, and it's carte blanc. Now sometimes [00:17:00] when that's not the case, you had to find out other ways to establish buy-in from what your community needs. And it's gonna be in two folds. One, do they agree with the vision that you're willing to put out in front for those kids? But probably sometimes more importantly is. How much are they willing to believe in that vision and by how much I'm putting dollar signs with it. So you have to begin on twofold. Is your idea good? Is it developed by the consumers and b, is it within their taxable threshold? So we, you have to begin, we establish meetings and surveys that gave us a boundary, not only, Hey, do you believe this is a good idea, but. If the idea was presented and you leave that blank, if an idea that you can buy into is presented, would you buy in at a 7 cent tax base, 14 tax threshold, 18 tax threshold, and you find that sweet spot. And so you're balancing the community designed idea with a pre community proposal of this is what our [00:18:00] taxable threshold's gonna be.

And if you can align those two things up in your proposal, you bring back to the board from your community design. You've designed it basically A, on the community's financial willingness to believe in you, but B, on what they believe is a priority. When you can package those two ideas together, the next group of that, the next task of that group as you go down the pre-bond.

And that campaigning is not only how we educate, but how do we continue to gauge buy-in because we constantly gotta make sure that we're on target, that we pre-established with the two, that two version threshold. When you build your second capacity of a proposal. that's one of the things I think we did really well in Eastland, is we stopped.

And when we reset we said, okay, what did we miss? I. And it was a version of two things. We realized that the threshold had to be adjusted, and once it was adjusted, as we created the plans on what it, what the community could fit, we had to gauge the idea prior to being proposed back to the board on, Hey, here's the package we put together for a proposed [00:19:00] bond. key piece done is missed at the beginning of a lot of bond campaigns that can really drastically change the outcome.

Dr. Jim: And that's a really detailed answer. And if I'm taking that and condensing that down when you talk about gauging buy-in, there's an ongoing sort of listening exercise where you're getting the temperature of the community. I. As you're developing the bond structure through the entire bond lifecycle.

That's what I gathered from there. But I want to go back to something else that you mentioned in that process, which is your capacity conversation. I'm a little fuzzy on what you mean by capacity. So tell us a little bit more about baking in capacity into your bond conversations as you're working on buy-in.

What does that mean?

Jason Cochran: When I refer to capacity, how much money that you're gonna be able to generate to do the projects. And when I think about my household capacity I'm looking at when you break a proposal down and you say, per every a hundred ba dollar value of your home. 'cause our, in Texas, ours is done on property value for every a hundred dollars value of their [00:20:00] home. Would you be willing to put X into a vision you believe for your school districts? can you. What that looks like. So just for example, random numbers. So a $50 million bond may cause a taxpayer an extra $68 a year on their taxes. Is that threshold worth $5 and 20 cents a month? You can have and that's one of the structured pieces that I think people miss is having that capacity conversation before they propose an idea or right along with it. 'cause you're not making them say no to a new high school. Everybody wants a new high school. Everybody wants shiny and new for free. I. But what they also want to know is, if I'm willing to commit this, how is the value of my dollar being spent as a voter and the value, what my household capacity can handle? What I mean by not only capacity, because it establishes the size of the project, but your voter capacity is what are they willing to invest in, in that piece of your community?

Dr. Jim: I like how you broke that down. It's [00:21:00] basically gauging what is the level of comfort in budget for this particular bond request that you're finding. At upfront. Or at least that's how I understand it in my head when I spin that forward. So theoretically you have this pool of money that everybody has said, yeah, we're comfortable with this.

How do you build flexibility into that pool of money to see how those investments are gonna be allocated? What was the process there?

Jason Cochran: I think that's again, what you have to be aware of when you're building those bonds. And that's the transparency in, what you're dealing with as you build with your community sometimes. And in my previous position we passed the bond for, from, for specific purposes. Remodeling and adding onto a high school for X amount, paying off debt for X amount.

It was very specifically wrote and you had to get it approved by the ag and those type of things to get it passed. Going through the same process in Cru. We knew that we had to meet the needs of a growing market, and we approached the community had the threshold [00:22:00] discussions, and then we had the discussions of the what ifs and what we were building in here because it wasn't so much we were to able to define those needs of this community.

This community for Crumb is passionate about their school system. They're scared of the growth. And our goal is to keep prioritizing our kids and making 'em the number one thing safety and to make sure that we have the facilities that can match the growth that's happening to us. So as those became generic facility discussions, we had to create a template of. What that could look like, but also build the flexibility of of what, how to be flexible for changes that were to come. I can give you the end result of what we ended up passing in Crumb is we found out that our community being as small as we were now, and saying we want to vote on long-term change.

Dr. Jim: When you're navigating these processes you need as many people behind you as possible. One of the things that I would [00:23:00] imagine would be challenging, especially if you're in a high growth, I. Area is convincing the people that don't have any stake in the district, so maybe they don't have kids, or maybe they're elderly or whatever that they should support this bond initiative as well.

What was your strategy in getting those fence sitters or maybe the people that don't have a stake in the community as far as school districts go to come over to your side? How did that conversation go?

Jason Cochran: I think that goes where you have to determine and know your key audience and know your percentages on the front end on what you have to get and their stake in the game. my, my two experiences were different in my previous experience. There were a couple key employers in the community that had an influence that had a pretty wide net cast, and I had to make sure that, that those people were involved in the decisions. And what I found in those scenarios and one of my goals was it was, I go back to referencing, being transparent. even with your key players, you don't ever wanna make promises that you can't keep. And those, even in a [00:24:00] time when they disagree, I think you go a long way with transparency. we would include those people with collaborative discussions and there are pieces that we can say we all agreed on, but if it was a disagreement or a, a vote of nonsupport. had enough conversations to understand why we were going at certain perspectives. So knowing your key players and being transparent and including them in the process is a very important point. That being said, transferring it to Crumb. Crumb is a unique bedroom community. We're the largest employer. We don't have many businesses that drive a strong tax base, and most of our businesses employ people that live outside of Crumb. If they're not necessarily right here, are made of bedrooms. We're houses that, that now, that drive 30, 40 minutes away to different areas to work. So we had to keep the focus of those next, of those, of the previous bond about growing the school district for the community members. And so keeping it about the family, keeping it about safety for their children, keeping it about the things their students were involved in and.

And keeping that piece to [00:25:00] be the tax, 'cause the taxable base wasn't coming from large businesses, it was coming from the home. So getting to be able to identify what, when I go back to their threshold discussion, making sure the parents knew that once we establish a comfortable base, this is what we're gonna, this is what we're gonna ask for, and then going, okay how long till you come and ask again? That was the next big piece of that threshold as we begin to build that bond.

Dr. Jim: Okay, so that gives good context. There's another piece that I was curious about, and that's the whole idea of, you have this community that's going through a pretty aggressive growth cycle. They were rural, now they're this mid-size community, and now, in the future, at some point they're, they have 16,000 new homes that are slated to be there for the people that are.

In the community, it's hard for them to connect the implications of growing at that rate. So how did that, that implications piece of the conversation come into those bond conversations that you're having with various people in [00:26:00] the community?

Jason Cochran: So that's one of the things that helped us build the bond policy that we finally passed. And what we passed was a $242 million bond for 42 cents. Which takes it close to the threshold in what you could get for a bonding capacity in the state of Texas, the. Kicker. And what we ended up working with the community, I mentioned that, they didn't wanna be asked over and over again.

That's twofold. still had a small town feel you still had a small number of people making a very large financial decision. But under the umbrella rules for a fast growing district, can vote on a bond referendum that is established on future growth. And so this community wanted to control their destiny. So they said, what can we do? And we, what can we do to vote for the future and keep up with the growth? So instead of for the same 42 cents, we could have gone, let's take an XX amount of money and get $70 million for X process. If we vote now, we [00:27:00] have so many years to match that growth, and then when the people move in, the taxable values go up.

We get another 90 million released without going to a vote. So they were able to empower their own destiny in part of that selection having to go back to the next 4,000 people that move in. And so they were able to take that small town communal vote and say, we're gonna help control the destiny over the next seven to 10 years. And that was part of this referendum was allocate a bond to keep up with growth. Growth, not a blank slate, but confidence in the district that says when it grows, these things will happen and this is how we're gonna handle it based on the finances that come our direction. they wanted to control their destiny. And so part of the success of that vote was we're deciding today. For the next 10 years of crime, ISD on how much we're gonna put in front of the kids. So they voted on the larger referendum for 242 million that we can draw down as we grow without going [00:28:00] back to the taxpayer and saying, do you wanna vote again?

Do you wanna vote again? Do you wanna vote again?

Dr. Jim: When you look at setting up the structure and planning for future growth, how did you bake in safeguards or guardrails for when the economic situation shifted?

Jason Cochran: So it, this is where when we talked about that pivotal moment of defining that, the relationship is the key and it can't be just about me and I talk about going back to the students. It overlaps so much when you're planning for anything political or bond campaign. You can't just include them on the front end. By the letter of the law, could we have done X, Y, Z and keep moving on? Absolutely. You can do those things and be within the realm of your possibilities to do it ethically. But the commitment we made to the community was to keep them involved in the process. And as that market shifted, and that's what happened for us, one of our initial ideas was to build a new high school. And at the time of the bond passing, the cost for a high school was about $300, $323 a foot. Now to build the same high school, after we have the growth get to where [00:29:00] we need to draw down to a growth, that cost has almost doubled. the capacity to build a high school is non-existent for Chrome ISD. So instead of just going, here's a plan B, and moving forward, because they entrusted us to make a plan B looking for the future of any type of movement, we have to include them in the decisions that are made today. We spent about 18 months following the market afterwards. And knew we were eventually gonna have to design, build, and plan. spent those next 18 months when we started the market shifting and we continued to have community meetings. We continued to reference it at every board meeting to the point where we came up with a design that we felt was approved by the people at those community meetings.

We had the board vote on a final referendum to make the change. The public recommended based on what they, the taxable appro taxpayer approved. So we took those community meetings, came up with a reprimand, and proposed it to the board. Last November, the board approved to change to a middle school design then moved to potentially a remodel project in the future, but we left it open-ended on the initial end of the bond. Kept our [00:30:00] communication going and let the voter participate in the board actions that were being designed as we continue to make these plans, and we'll continue to do that as the market fluctuates over the next 10 years of construction for.

Dr. Jim: Yeah. I think the big thing that I like about this entire process that you've described is that there's an ongoing listening component that happens over the life cycle of these initiatives from concept to completion. That I. In and of itself builds in those safeguards where the community doesn't feel like you're getting something outta left field.

Really great stuff. Jason, I think one of the things that I'd like you to tie all together is you've gone through this entire exercise and you've learned from some of those failures on what to do effectively.

How did things turn out when you went to market with this bond and how is it set it setting you up for success in the future?

Jason Cochran: So one of the ways it's helped us out when we built in the flexed of this specific bond issue and mind you, we didn't target a specific project. We targeted keeping up with [00:31:00] growth. We did several platforms to gain input and the key piece that we put in place that we continue to follow up with is gauging buy-in. If we can continue to have purposeful actions to gauge buy-in then we'll know we're on the right track. with our specific bond conversations, we have our conversations with many times they hear Plan A, plan B and a plan C, and we always tie it back to what's best for kids and what's financially feasible. And. They've ridden this rollercoaster with us and what's appropriate for that time. I'll give you an example. We pivoted to a middle school we're building a new middle school that's gonna hold about 1200 kids. built it out with the capacity to add onto the future if that ever needs to become a new high school. And the question keeps coming up. What are we gonna do with the old middle school? The way we're marketing that plan now is based on the community needs at that time where we see the growth coming into our community. We have two, if not three potential explanations. Number one, can make that a fifth and sixth grade campus if we're seeing a lot of growth happen at the [00:32:00] early at the younger age levels.

And we need to make some flexibility on our younger elementary schools. Two, we could pull it aside and make it a ninth grade campus and lower the numbers in our high school as we need to relieve the upper-end the upper-end age groups. The third piece we could make some transitions on a fifth and sixth grade center or a version of both. Depending on that's the what if if something out of left field comes up. to all that is. The community isn't gonna hear about that the first time, three years from now. When we need to make a decision about the middle school, we educate them along the way and include them in the process of the what ifs and the planning.

So when we talk about the new high school or the new middle school, we're also referring back to the potential plans at. Point a, point B or point C. And the whys, when we talk about establishing a we added a wing onto an elementary. They hear the why. The why was to build sustainable program that we can implement and move when we build new elementaries.

What does this pre-K program looks like? Now we move it here, we move it here as we build new elementaries in the future the [00:33:00] key that we're finding out is. They have to be part of the process and they have to trust you to be transparent with your communication. the universal is not just me, you it's my team. It's the leadership, the elected board officials everybody that is wearing the brand behind me to be approachable enough to be and be felt that they're getting an honest answer.

Dr. Jim: Great stuff, Jason, if people wanna continue the conversation. What's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Jason Cochran: The best way to get in touch with me is gonna be email Jason dot cochrane@chromeisd.net. Cru Id, you can follow us on Facebook. We have posts all the time. We do a lot of fun things. You can follow us on there. And drop a line right there. We have a communications director that would get straight to me from that point as well.

Dr. Jim: Awesome stuff. I appreciate you hanging out with us and sharing with us. The the, your story and particularly the things that you've learned from some of those missteps and how you built flexibility into this process. I think one of the key things that I take away from listening to this conversation is that.

If you want to get deep [00:34:00] commitment and buy-in into anything that you want to do, you have to do two things. First, you have to listen throughout the entire process and make sure that you're synthesizing and prioritizing the information that your audience is telling you.

And then the second part of the process is that as you start executing, you need to make sure that people are aware of how that execution process is going and any pivots that you need to make. I think in general then, this is not a K through 12 issue. I think in general, if you're keeping people looped in and minimizing surprises, you'll be surprised at how committed they stay to backing you and backing the initiatives and that those are important things that I've pulled out of the conversation that we had.

So for those of you who've been hanging out with us and listening to this conversation, we appreciate you checking it out. If you like the discussion, make sure you leave us a review. On your favorite podcast player. If you haven't already done so, make sure you join our K through 12 leadership community.

And then tune in next time where we'll have another [00:35:00] leader hanging out with us and sharing with us the game changing insights that help them build a high performing team.