Steve Joel on Twelve Years Leading Lincoln Public Schools

Episode Summary

Steve Joel led Lincoln Public Schools for twelve years, from 2010 to 2022. In his first year, the district office burned to the ground. Eleven years later, the building that replaced it was named for him.

In this conversation with Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn S. Moore, Steve talks about what he found when he arrived in Lincoln, what he learned from the fire and from the two harder things that followed it, and why he has spent more than fifty years in a state he came to almost by accident.

About Steve Joel

Steve Joel is Regional Director for the Central Region at McPherson & Jacobson, the executive search firm, where he has consulted since 1996 and has led more than one hundred national searches. He serves on the Doane University Board of Trustees.

He served as superintendent of Lincoln Public Schools from 2010 until his retirement in 2022, capping a 37-year career as a superintendent that included ten years in Grand Island, eight in Beatrice, and seven in Kansas. He was named Nebraska Superintendent of the Year in 2000. In 2022, the Lincoln Board of Education voted to rename the district office the Steve Joel District Leadership Center.

A native of Long Island, New York, he came to Nebraska in 1972 to play football at Doane College and graduated in 1976. He holds degrees from Doane, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and Kansas State University.

About the Conversation

Randy opens with a prop. Years ago, after being told by Steve that he would never have coffee with him again — every cup seemed to end in an assignment — Randy had a life-sized cardboard cutout of Steve made, so he could have coffee with him anyway. Both cutouts, Steve's and the matching one Randy commissioned of himself, now live in a garbage bag in Randy's basement.

From there the conversation goes where you would expect it to and then somewhere you would not. Steve describes arriving in Lincoln and spending his first year mostly watching — sitting in on meetings, learning why a district with average demographics kept producing above-average results. He credits a community expectation that predates him, and a support system for first- and second-year teachers that he says has no equal.

He talks about the fire at the end of that first year, and about what different people lost in it. His own losses, he says, were trinkets. Marilyn's were thirteen years of research: file cabinets holding the progress reports, paintings, first stories, and photographs of 254 Lincoln students she had followed from kindergarten, two children randomly selected from each of the district's 127 kindergarten classrooms in the fall of 1998. That class graduated the weekend before the building burned. The stories survived. The data did not.

Marilyn asks him the question the show is named for: whether there is still common ground. His answer is short. The children are the common denominator.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, Randy asks him to explain what a snipe hunt is, which is how a homesick freshman from Long Island ended up alone in a ditch somewhere between Crete and Dorchester at two in the morning, holding a gunny sack, waiting for a bird that does not exist.

“It's the profession that makes all professions possible. If we don't have good educational systems, this country doesn't exist.”

The Mug

Steve brought a mug he received for Boss's Day, printed with a still from Carpool Karaoke — one in a series of videos his administrative team made for the start of the school year. He describes assembling that team almost from scratch after Marilyn, Dr. Biggs, and business manager Mark Shepard all moved on, and calls the years that followed some of the most energizing of his career.

The video that traveled furthest was shot at Duncan Aviation, with the administrative team in the back of a plane and the late Lanny Boswell, a twelve-year member of the Lincoln Board of Education, playing the pilot. Boswell bails out. Steve says he could not go anywhere for months afterward without someone bringing it up.

It is not a mug he uses for coffee so much as one he keeps for the people in it.