Rachael: Hi everyone, you are listening to the Rachael Maves podcast and I'm Rachael Maves, your host. Today we are speaking with Mike Freeman. Mike has served in K-12 education in Northern California for 24 years, with roles ranging from high school teacher to district superintendent. He currently serves as the county superintendent of schools at the Shasta County Office of Education, where he began his tenure there in 2019 and was appointed to his current role in 2024. Mike holds degrees in Spanish and English and is passionate about supporting instructional leadership. Outside of work, he enjoys podcasting.

Wonderful. Playing and laughing through golf and cheering on the Seattle Seahawks with his wife, Kelly, and their two children, Grace and Abe. Mike, thank you for joining me today.

Mike: Rachael, it is a honor to be here and I appreciate that intro.

Rachael: Yeah, I can't wait to hear more about some of these things, Mike. So, as we jump in, like, tell me a little bit about why education, why did you choose that career path?

Mike: Well, I think that I actually I can geek out on this, right? And I don't know, I don't want to be here for three hours, but I think that life turns on tiny hinges. And I think that a lot of times, we find our place in, we find ourselves in places that we would have never imagined. And I think that's exactly what, that's exactly how I would describe where I'm at now. I think when I was a kid,. I think people saw some things in me that I didn't see in myself.

A few teachers loaned me some belief that they had in me that I didn't have in myself. I'm a first generation college kid. I think as I got older, I was looking for. I was looking at principals and kind of some values that I had in life, not necessarily career. Like I wanted autonomy. I did want to have a family, so I wanted to have a familyfriendly work schedule.

But I think in the end I did always crave impact. I wanted to leave fingerprints on the lives of other people in that. Interaction. And those principles kind of led me to consider the classroom. And then I started looking back on kind of the Rushmore of people that had an impact on my life, and they were teachers. So shout out to Nancy Hixon, shout out to John Perie, those educators that I appreciate.

I try to honor every time we have teacher appreciation week. I try to tell, I try to tell the story of how those individuals left a tremendous impact on my life. And in the end I got into, I got into teaching and then it became something else. Right, it became about you start to feel the impact that you have over the students in your. Classroom. I did love the community that the classroom created, that working with students.

The classroom, the community that we created maybe looked different than the way the outside world looked, right. I remember having conversations with kids about, hey, you might say those things out there, but in here we don't talk like that. Or, hey, out there we might be cruel, but in here we're kind. And then you start thinking like, oh, wow, maybe I can create a community at a site level. And so that gets you into administration. And then to me, I'm always been a denominator guy, right?

I could have 150, 160. Kids. A big year would be 175, 180. And you, then you can come to me and say,: "Hey, you want to run a school of a couple hundred? You want to run a district?". And now at the county office, right, we're 26,000, TK through 12, but we're also in the early childhood, so 37,000 kids every day, and you feel, like you, your work matters to them.

So, yeah.

Rachael: Did you grow up in the Shasta area, Mike, or where has your the majority of your career been?

Mike: Yeah. So, I grew up. I grew up in a small town. I grew up in a town of about 11,000 kids, or 11,000. People. And I went to school here, locally in the area, and then I met a girl from Shasta County, and the rest is history.

Right. So, and from where I come from, a girl from Shasta County is an upgrade. So, we call Shasta County home. I've been here my entire career. My kids have gone through my systems. In fact, I had the opportunity to take a job that would allow me to be my kids principal and superintendent, and I loved it.

They hated it for about three months. And you know, now they're they're 23 and 21, and they tell me how that hurt at. First. They left their friends and I took them into my school because I was just going to have a hard time talking to a room, talking to a gym full of people at back to school night if my kids weren't in that system, right? I didn't want to say nobody does it better than us, and then our kids go somewhere else. So yeah.

Rachael: Oh, I love that. So the line that you just said a little bit ago, Mike, life turns on tiny hinges. I, first of all, I'm going to steal that because it's 100% accurate. Yes. Yes. And I'm wondering, just as you think about your career and that trajectory, are there tiny hinges for you that really were like the?

This is the moment that I'm I am committed to education, or I want to go in this?

Mike: Yeah. I mean I think going back to the impact teachers have had. I remember walking on campus, shout out Red Bluff Union High School District, Red Bluff High School, around 1993. I'm a senior and I'm walking onto campus and a teacher that I have comes up to me and says, "Hey, you need to, you need to reach out to Nancy Hixon and say thanks.". And I was like, "Why?"? And he said, "community scholarship night was last night and she went to bat for you and she believes in you and you got a little something coming your way thanks to her.".

And so that little something was a $500 Rotary. Scholarship. And it was because of Nancy Hixon. She defended me. I had some slothful studies, study habits. And I did not see myself in college, and she did.

And so she went to bat for me and that moment changed. I remember I was lit up and I was ready to get into a classroom and I talked to a high school administrator and I said,: "Hey, I'm ready. I'm in school. I'm I'm undeclared as far as, like, what I want to study. And I said,: "Talk to me. Like, I just wanted, I want to work in high school.".

And he said,: "you're bilingual?"? I said, "Yeah." And he said,: "you know? What? I just had an English opening and we had like 200 applicants. I just had a Spanish opening and we had six interviews.". He said,: "If you go Spanish, you'll never be unemployed.".

And so I changed, I went to, I went to Spanish as my bachelor and those words, those words happened.

Rachael: Wow.

Mike: I was able to jump into a long-term sub situation, emergency, credential, and I cried myself to work and cried myself home on those days. No idea what I was doing, but I was fired up and I wanted to. I wanted to do, I wanted to do some cool things for. Kids. Sub.

Rachael: As you're saying that, Mike, someday I might have to do a podcast that just brings on career educators and it's just about your first year of teaching, like just the stories from the first year of teaching. Yeah.

Mike: And I think the shift right at first year you're just trying to literally let's be real. Yeah. Right. You're just trying to fill the minutes because you don't want them to have unoccupied, like you don't want to have, you don't want to have free time. You don't care if the activity is effective. You don't care, like any of those things.

And then, as you go through it, it's like, "Oh, that really was not effective instructional strategy and my kids didn't necessarily learn the thing I needed them to learn." And then you start to refine some. Things. You start to have colleagues that take you under their wing. Shout out to Madame King. I'm a Spanish teacher and she's the French teacher and she takes me under my, under her wing to help us out. And we attack her classroom on the Cinco de Mayo.

So my kids can understand a little bit about what Cinco de Mayo is about. And she put up with all of it. So good stuff.

Rachael: Love it. Oh, that's great. Well, as you think about all of this work that you've done in education, and especially a real community focus and relationship focus, what keeps you up at night? As you think about our current.

Mike: Well, I go back to almost Martin Luther King. I hope we all feel a sense of urgency, like the urgency of now, today's dollars, today's kids, today's needs. I feel that at the county office level, like what are the support needs that my districts have? And I hope we're all having the conversations is like: are these things that we are doing? Are these actions and services and supports working right? Parsec is in that data, that analytics world, like making sure that what we are doing is actually having an impact on kids.

I always said, even in the classroom back in the day, like my nightmare would be that I didn't prepare you,. Right? My nightmare is that we hung out and we had a good time and, you know, we created some unforgettable experiences, but in the end, my, the educational product that I delivered didn't prepare you for the real world challenges that are legit, right? They're coming at these kids. I think also just this mistrust. I don't know.

I don't know. You know, your listeners are all over the country. In California, we health care and education coming out of COVID are, we are at a trust deficit with our public. And so that so, and I'm I'm down for scrutiny. I'm down for. Questions.

I'm down for challenges to be better. I feel the urge to be better. But just looking at, like, what are those essential components of trust, right? We've broken it down. And there's there's great research and resources out there, but we've broken it down to a simple ingredient, looking at relationships. We're looking at expertise and we're looking at consistency.

And if we have a trust deficit, what specifically can we do to be able to address one of those ingredients that might be lacking? So, and then I think too, we just got to be real. We weren't great before the. Pandemic. Yeah. Right.

Like I look at our data and if I kind of remember, I remember being a new teacher and I'm hanging out in the staff lounge, right, for one of the first times. I don't really know the politics and the dynamics of the staff lounge, so I'm just I'm just hanging out and there's a grizzly old senior econ teacher bragging about how many kids failed his test. And I kind of pop off like: is it teaching if they're not? Learning? And I stopped hanging out at the in the teacher lounge after that. But I mean, I think that you know, being real about where we're at with the outcomes our students are produc, producing.

And then I just think also keeping me up at night is just partnerships. I think so many of us are trying to do this thing by ourselves, and just that importance of community engagement and partnerships and what can that look like?

Rachael: Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate you bringing that up. One of the things that we talk often about is relational capital. And in a lot of the training that we do around real, we talk about if you think about it like a piggy bank, you know, when you're you're putting things in, but then there are times when something like the pandemic happens or this health care piece happens, and it makes massive withdrawals. And in order to build that relational capital backup, you have to make deposits.

And it's not just one deposit, it's multiple deposits over time. So I appreciate you calling that out, Mike, because I think that there is like a lingering piece in education that we're facing because of. That.

Mike: Well, and I think we learn through pain, right? And if you've ever, if you've ever seen the impact that your transactional, Yeah. Exchanges have had on families, and you can realize that's actually that one way that asking, hey, we need the judging, or even like from a deficit standpoint, like I think that to get where we need to go, that transformational needs to be relational right, it needs to be that like, hey, like I want to partner with you. I don't have an agenda here. My only agenda is we're not very good at doing it without you. Yeah.

Our history has shown. So, hey, how can we, how can we partner and collaborate and do this together? In my office, I got a. I got an old three-legged cow milking. I got a. I like a stand that you sit on, right?

And just that reminder of teachers do their job, schools do our job, parents do their job, students do their job, and the system works. If we, as schools, are trying to step in and o and overreach, that's going to be a challenge. Yeah.

Rachael: So, as you think about a couple of ways to move forward based on what you've just shared, the, this deficit that we're facing with trust, this need for partnerships, what are some ideas that you have or some things that you guys are looking at putting into place to address? Those?

Mike: Yeah. Well, here in California, we have we've had the opportunity to participate in the in a community engagement initiative and I think, single, I think that has been one of the most impactful professional development experience experiences of my career. And you mentioned Reel, right? Just that idea of like, what does listening to voice look like authentic voice? And so I think a way forward is we've got to shift from this involvement to engagement and, you know, imagine that metric of like: am I doing things to you or am I doing things with you? And in that spirit of with, is that co-creation right, everything from IEPs to, you know, parent teacher conferences, like, rethinking all of those things in the spirit of engagement.

In the spirit of doing with and truly listening. I think so many times the strategic plans already been made and we're just going through motions of talking to our public because we have to, right? In California, we've got educator, we got educational partner engagement requirements booked into, you know, kind of baked into some of our strategic planning. It's like I think it's, I think it's just essential that we get to that place of co-creation with our partners. And then one of the things that we've seen, just with the political polarity of where we're at right now, we have seen. We've seen some promise in this idea of going in all in on mutual convictions.

So gone are like we're not trying to compromise, where I take something you believe in and I take something I believe in, and we work and we come up with something that no one believes in. Right? Like the idea instead would be: what are you fired up about? What are you all in on? And is there anything that might be in common that we can go all in together? And so here in Shasta County, we are wildly political and it is polarizing, but we have seen seven individuals on a board agree that getting reading right and literacy matters, and so that all in mutual area, mutual conviction would be.

Literacy. We're also done. We're scared of fentanyl and so we're looking at how can we partner with folks to use our platforms in schools to teach kids of the dangers of substance use and provide that education to help them prevent that. So again, there's a lot of things we could be doing. Those are the areas where all heads nod, everybody agrees. And so I think that finding those areas of mutual conviction.

I think that's really our only way forward. Yeah. Great if we had seven, right? Great if we had seven areas of conviction, but you know, we land on two and we go forward.

Rachael: Yeah. Well, I mean, and you know, with all the improvement work you guys have done, if you do, if you have too many anyway, you're not going to do any of them well. Being able to have those really clear focuses, but it's, I think about it, almost like a ven diagram, you know, where, when we have these circles, where can we find those places of overlap? And I appreciate, Mike, that you're slowing down to spend the time to look for that, because I think too often we just we see that this is so polarized that it's a I'm we're never going to find that. Space. So then it becomes a fight of one side versus the other, instead of the no, there's actually quite a bit in the center of these circles.

And how do we bring that forward and remind ourselves of the commonality and that's the great energy?

Mike: Right, because success we get success. And then, once the idea is, once we have systematically. Attacked one, we can reload and go get and go find another area of mutual conviction. School safety is on the you know, on deck to become a mutual conviction area for us. Just imagining what is that worst case and then what can we do to attack that and make sure that those worst case scenarios never happen.

Rachael: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So, as we wrap up with our final question, Mike, what is one question in education that we're not asking that we probably should be?

Mike: One question, really like there's, so there's so many, right? There's. So like, I wonder, art, this artificial intelligence, is buying us so much time. What are we doing with that time, I wonder. I kind of going back to that teacher lounge: is it teaching if there's no learning? I think of some of the grading and learning that we're have.

Like I listened to a couple of your podcast episodes and I think it was Missy Tester that talked about just how parents think their kids are on grade level and they're just not. And like what is our grading? Communicating about learning, and so like I can get into all of. That. I mean, I think honestly right now, the question would be: how bad do we really want it, right? Like, if we really want it, then it's a whatever it takes.

And we've all, we've all had those, whatever it takes, moments in our careers, whether it's like I see a, I believe in this kid and this kid doesn't believe in himself and I'm going to go out of my way to make sure that he doesn't mess up a good thing, right? I think where there's want. Where there, where true want to have impact, nothing will get in our way. I think that I think that really comes down to like: how bad do you want it? Because, honestly, yes, we're busy. I do what I want.

There's aspects of my job that I don't want, that I don't like to do, and those are the things that I procrastinate on, and those are the things. But those things that I want to do get done. And if we want to help kids,. Improve their reading, then we will move heaven and earth and overturn any rocks and prioritize budgets and do the things that we need to do. I think, and that's just not superintendent asking how bad do I want it. It's asking in leadership.

It's asking our teachers. It's asking, it's asking every member of our educational ecosystem: how bad do we want it? And in the end, if we are asking that, then it gets into that grounding and purpose. Right like this is how this is what I was born to do and I'm not going to let anything deter me from those objectives and that. Aim. So I think that's a question that maybe we're afraid to ask, because I think some folks in our system don't want it.

Rachael: Yeah. H moment there, Mike, pun intended, truly. And they're invited to leave.

Mike: That's right. That's right. Only people who have that urgency and desire on the ship.

Rachael: Yeah, absolutely. I Well, I appreciate you wrapping us up with that and I think it's a it's a good question for us to take away for our listeners too, as they're thinking about that. I had a company once that was doing some coaching and it was just for individual. It wasn't for a system, but what they asked us to do was to look at our time and bucket out how you're spending your time and, from there, this realization of wow, the things that I actually care about the most and aren't what is dictating my time, and so what does that mean? And what if we started to do that at a systems level? I think is a good thing for us to think at through and look at: how do we?

Mike: Well, I think it goes to that. I think it goes to that sense of urgency of now. Right. Like in schools, we're not resource rich. Our resources, we do have some money and we have time. That's right.

Like if I were to look at your personal life and I looked at your checkbook and your calendar, I would be able to gauge what's important to you. What are we doing with the money and the time that we have? Yep. 100%.

Rachael: Well, thank you for your time today, Mike. I really appreciate it.

Mike: Yeah. Thank you.

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--- This transcript was created from the episode's captions and lightly edited for readability. It may contain small errors; please refer to the audio for exact wording.