News
New Superintendent Looks Forward to First School Year in Dayton
Story and photo by Ken Graham
Doug Johnson balances more than the books, fulfilling the role of Athletic Director and Special Programs Director in addition to being superintendent.
Doug Johnson is a WSU graduate and a big Cougar fan. He was also a Junior High and High School coach during most of his teaching career. When asked if he is predicting championships soon from Dayton teams, he joked about being in the same league with DeSales. Then he got serious.
"Winning championships isn't the only measure of success in school athletics," he said. "If it were, only one school each year would be successful."
"Even though I was hired by the school board, I see my job as serving the entire community, including students, teachers and administrators, parents and taxpayers." - Doug Johnson, Superintendent
Johnson says he measures the success of a school's athletic program by the progress made by the kids who participate. "I'm a huge supporter of school activities," he says, "whether it's sports, music, clubs, or drama. Activities help broaden students' horizons. It's having a program that helps kids improve as much as possible that's important, not just scores against other schools."
In a wide-ranging interview, Johnson shared his thoughts about the role he will play in the Dayton community. "Even though I was hired by the school board, I see my job as serving the entire community, including students, teachers and administrators, parents and taxpayers." Johnson says he sees great importance in communicating to the community how tax money is being spent and how important it is for taxpayers to continue to support education in the community.
"Dayton has a strong history of passing maintenance and operations levies," Johnson says. "And I hope we can continue that." Johnson says that over the past couple of decades, M&O levies have become a much more important part of school funding.
Johnson says that the biggest factor in school funding continues to be enrollment. "Almost all of the funding we get from the state and federal governments comes based on dollars per student," he says. "The size of our facilities doesn't change and most overhead costs keep going up. So if the number of students coming through the door drops, we have no way of making that up other than cutting personnel, or asking local taxpayers to shoulder more of the burden.
"In my view, economic growth in the community is extremely important for the schools," says Johnson. "If we don't have jobs to keep young parents here, we won't have new kids entering the school and we'll continue to see staffing cuts."
Johnson said the projected enrollment in the Dayton schools for the upcoming school year is 435 full-time-equivalent (FTE) students. That's a reduction of more than 30 students from the ‘08/'09 school year average. He says that's mostly due to the fact that the graduating senior class was much larger than the incoming first grade class.
Because of the reduced enrollment, and other budget constraints, the Dayton schools have eliminated four FTE teaching positions this year. That's one less than the number the school projected it would need to cut as recently as May.
When asked about standardized testing, Johnson says that, after the coming school year, the name "WASL" will no longer be used in Washington, but students will continue to be assessed using a similar state tool and meeting the standard is still required for high school graduation.
"It's important that we're able to track our performance," he says. Johnson says that the state's new Superintendent of Public Instruction, Randy Dorn, is implementing changes that will make testing more automated and allow students and teachers to receive much more rapid results.
When asked what sports he most enjoyed coaching, Johnson said that baseball has always been his favorite sport, and that he coached baseball and softball for 20 years. " Basketball games were probably my favorite coaching experience though, " he said. "The excitement of the fans and the band in the gym when the team comes out of the locker-room is just something you don't get in other sports." And then he added: "I don't miss those bus rides though."