With a smile and his own tune, Singer begins job atop USD 501

By Barbara Hollingsworth

THE CAPITAL-JOURNAL

There is an adage handed down by teachers determined to establish authority at the start of a new school year.

Don't smile until Thanksgiving.

As an elementary school teacher, Kevin Singer never did follow that advice and he certainly didn't Tuesday as Topeka Unified School District 501 began a new era with him as superintendent.

Singer smiled, and he joked in his self-deprecating way.

"I appreciate you all coming in," he said as he sat down for his first weekly meeting with the district's administrative team.

Singer quickly made plans with a couple of others to ride together to the funeral of Grant Cushinberry, who for years had worked to help the needy in Topeka. Even on his first day of work coming to Topeka from a superintendent job in Pennsylvania, Singer knew Cushinberry's significance.

That is one reason school board members liked Singer so much. He provided the district a chance to put a homegrown product at the helm - a Highland Park High School graduate who might just stick around longer than the typical three to five years that superintendents stay with districts.

As a kid, Singer sledded down the hill that slopes just outside his office window. He wrestled for Highland Park Junior High School and got plenty of time to study a sign on the ceiling of Jardine Junior High School: If you can read this sign you're being pinned.

Things change. Those thick black glasses he wore when he was an honor roll student at Highland Park High School and a member of the debate team are thinner now.

Now 53, Singer's hair is gray and a thick moustache bridges the gap between his lips and nose.

Similarly, Topeka isn't the town Singer left behind about 25 years ago when he stopped teaching in Auburn-Washburn USD 437 and began an administrative job odyssey that took him across Kansas then to Texas and Pennsylvania before bringing him home.

One of the things Singer has become over the years is a curriculum auditor, who goes into districts and suggests ways to improve.

People bring in curriculum auditors for different reasons, he said. Some try to use it as a hammer to begin beating in change.

Singer's own style for bringing about change, he said, doesn't tend to include a hammer.

"That's why we go into teaching to begin with is to affect change," he said. "You want to help a child become a little bit better the time that you have with them. "

Singer said he will interview staff members. He said he wants to understand their jobs and what they see as the district's strengths, weaknesses and role in the community.

Some weekends, Singer plans to fly back to Lancaster County, Pa., where his son is finishing his senior year of high school. His wife will move after their son graduates.

For Singer, who pulled into town Monday night, home is now where he started life.

He reminisced Tuesday about his sports teams and high school days. About those moments as a young teacher when he realized that the whole not smiling advice would never work for a man teaching kindergarten and first-graders at Pauline East Elementary School.

Just before the start of school one year at Pauline East, Singer was bounced from room to room.

One last bounce came the day before classes started. And in a moment of fatal ingenuity that evening, he decided to move aquariums and plants by placing gym scooters under a desk and pushing the desk down the hall.

"To this day it's still in slow motion," he said. "The aquarium hitting the ground exploding. Ten gallons of water goes a long way. Then the plants, like little grenades, plopping off. Fish that are jumping around on the floor."

Dejected, Singer turned to his principal, who told him not to worry about it. He could decorate his room later.

But laying in bed late that night, Singer couldn't stand the thought of 31 kindergarten students showing up for their first day of school to find a sparse, institutional-looking room.

With the help of his fiancee, now his wife, he decorated early into the morning, leaving enough time to head home and shower before school began.

Even with a shower, Singer figures he was a dreadful sight. But to skip the smiling?

"It just wouldn't have worked," he said.

Barbara Hollingsworth can be reached at (785) 295-1285

or barbara.hollingsworth@cjonline.com.

Copyright 2008
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