When Debra Parish started in education, becoming a superintendent wasn’t in her plan. However, in July she stepped into the role for the Neelyville R-IV school district.
“It’s like the other 33 years I’ve done (in education),” Parish said. “It’s going fast and furious. This is a challenging, crazy, complex job, but I am thoroughly enjoying it.
“That’s what I tell the students ‘you’re going to be working for a long, long time so you make it something you enjoy doing and it won’t feel like work, it’ll feel like pleasure.’”
Parish started her career in education as a teacher in Arkansas before returning to her alma mater. When she came to Neelyville schools, she took the place of her own third grade teacher, Ruth Gray, in 1990. She also served as the elementary school counselor for two years before moving to serve as the high school counselor in 2000. Most recently, she worked as the Hillview Elementary school assistant principal in 2012.
When the position of superintendent opened last year with the announcement Brad Hagood would be moving to the Doniphan school district, Parish didn’t consider applying until he brought it up to her. She applied and the school board approved her for the position in February.
In her first six months, the district has started and completed a new building for the high school office — which is being moved into during winter break. The school board has also approved the construction of a new maintenance shop on the high school campus and is considering a project for a new concession stand.
Parish said continuing to improve the facilities is one of her goals looking forward. She said these goals aren’t a one-year plan, but things that are more realistically in the five-year range.
Two of the big items on Parish’s list include improving the bus fleet and the district’s facilities.
When it comes to the buses, she wants to transition the fleet to buses with air conditioning. Currently, the only buses with AC are the ones transporting early childhood students.
“I know it’ll be difficult,” she said. “We can’t have all 18 buses with air conditioning right off the bat, but I would like for us to work toward that.”
For the facilities, she said the ones the district already have need to be updated. In order to achieve this, she said the district will likely need to introduce a bond issue in order to get the additional funding.
“I think my vision is to have early childhood through, say, fourth grade, up at the Hillview campus,” Parish said. “Then have down here (in Neelyville) more of a middle school and high school facility, but we don’t have the rooms at this time for that.”
Parish said the district has broken up the gym at the Hillview campus to hold a music room, a teacher conference room and storage space. This shows the need for additional rooms on that campus in order to house the students and needs that are being placed on the school.
She said the metal building on the campus needs to either be gone or transformed into a storage space because it doesn’t have good classroom sizes and “it’s not really safe.”
Parish said she’s signed the school up for adopt-a-classroom. Through this program, teachers can hope to be matched with businesses or other organizations that offer financial contributions for classroom supplies and materials.
One request she has in the program currently is a $5,000 request for new Chromebooks. Of the approximately 450 Chromebooks the district has now, Parish said, a little over half of them are running out of compatibility with the programs required for testing.
This will make the mandated testing the students take in the spring more difficult than in previous years, because there will be fewer machines students can test on.
Additionally, her staff is keeping an eye on grants. She recently received information about a science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) grant that the district is looking into.
“Even if we got all those fancy machines, we don’t have a place to put them,” she said. “But we’re going to keep working on it and see what we can get done.”
Along with the goal of improving the facilities and buses, Parish said she wants to work on expanding the technology available to students and STEM curriculum the district offers.
“I know just enough to be dangerous, but I hear about coding. I don’t even know what coding is or how to code,” Parish said. “I want our students to have those same opportunities starting early.”
When it comes to staff, Parish said she wants to look into ways to make the district’s pay scale more competitive with other districts in the area.
“Just because we’re a small district doesn’t mean we don’t work as hard as those with larger districts,” she said. “Sometimes you have multiple jobs. We need to have competitive pay.”
Another goal Parish has is to get the community and parents more involved, along with giving the students more opportunities to “showcase their academic success.”
“The students really are doing a lot of neat things and sometimes nobody really knows about it,” she said.
Overall, Parish said she appreciates the school board’s trust in hiring her to take on the position of leading the district.
“It’s an honor to serve my district in this capacity,” she said. “I hope to keep going on.”