Henry S. Bangser

School Administrator, Jan, 1996

Never Losing Sight of Privilege

Henry Bangser still takes a rap for the time he returned a lengthy memo to a colleague, a former English teacher, after marking it up thoroughly in red ink.

The recipient was Sandra Wright, an assistant superintendent in St. Charles, Ill., where Bangser spent three years as superintendent. "I brought it up to him and said, 'Nobody's ever done that to me,'" relates Wright. "He said, 'I thought you could use some constructive suggestions on your writing.' He looks at everything with that same critical eye."

However, Wright adds: "After that, he used purple pen, and I didn't turn anything in to him without reading it 4-5 times."

Bangser, who moved in 1990 to the superintendency of the New Trier Township High School District in Winnetka, Ill., has heard that indictment against him on-and-off since the original incident. The story still elicits a chuckle from him, though the message it conveys remains essential to his take on school system leadership.

"I try to create an environment in an office, in a school district, among people, where it's fun to be challenged to do more and do better," says Bangser, who once ordered 10,000 copies of a bond referendum flyer be reprinted because the printing wasn't lined up quite right.

"It's going too far to call me a perfectionist, but I believe anyone who works for a first-rate school organization" ought not submit "something less than I think a person is capable of." He says a top-flight school system must project quality at all times.

Bangser ensures there's plenty of substance to back up the projected image in New Trier, one of the nation's best-endowed suburban school districts. (The U.S. Department of Education in 1992 listed the district as the highest spending in Illinois at $12,200 per pupil, but Bangser says two or three neighboring districts in Cook County now surpass New Trier.)

"With the kind of intellectual rigor people have around here, you'd better be ready to have your thoughts together and be able to articulate those thoughts," says Bangser, who credits his own early education at Mamaroneck High School, in mostly upscale Westchester County, N.Y., and then Williams College, one of the country's best liberal arts colleges.

He has just taken New Trier, which has nearly 3,000 students, through an exhaustive strategic planning process that resulted in 185 specific recommendations for achieving some lofty aspirations. New Trier's school board this fall approved 65 as worth pursuing immediately.

"We think we can retain the strength of the parts but make sure the whole is better by integrating the parts better," he says.

The planning process, which began in 1991 with a rigorous self-study for regional accreditation, involved a 36-member central planning committee and 200 others on eight task forces.

That was purposeful, he says, in a district with a tradition of excellence. "People need to believe you looked fairly and honestly at the options."

Bangser never loses sight of the privilege he has to lead a system with comparatively few fiscal problems and a sterling national reputation, in part because he spent five years in the 1970s as a young history teacher at New Trier East High School, one of the district's tandem schools that merged during the past decade.

He keeps a hand in the classroom by teaching a few sessions of Advanced Placement political science each semester, typically on issues of school law and constitutional rights. Veteran teacher Douglas Chase, whose classroom Bangser visits, gives the superintendent high marks for demonstrating where the vital work of a school system takes place.

"It's not like he just comes in and chats with them," says Chase. "In some ways, he gives them more work than they can handle."

Bangser believes a superintendent's "single most important talent is the ability to teach, not necessarily in a classroom with your own class. The most effective superintendents, in board settings, in committee meetings, in settings where you are one of a number of superintendents, and among legislators, can lake a subject matter they believe in and help others to believe in it."