MARANA, Ariz. — Marana Unified School District has earned an A rating as a whole district, and Superintendent Dr. Dan Streeter says the grade is a starting point, not a finish line.
“When we share our accolades, this isn’t a victory lap,” Streeter said in an interview on The Clint Peek Show on Live the Dream Media. “This is the beginning.”
The official letter grades came out the week before the interview. Streeter said the district knew the result was coming, but the district-wide grade still meant something. “We’ve had A-rated schools, but when the whole system is rated as an A, it really speaks to the system-wide efforts that are in place,” he said. “That’s what we’re really most proud of.”
The district has about 2,000 employees and covers roughly 550 square miles, which Streeter said makes it one of the largest districts in Arizona by area. Its buses travel nearly 13,000 miles a day.
Three pillars: students, staff and community
Streeter said the district has focused on three pillars since he arrived: students, staff, and parents and community.
For students, he said, the goal goes beyond offering courses. “It’s great that we offer 50 different career and technical education courses, but if they’re not leading to industry certifications, then what are we really doing?” Marana students earned more than 700 industry certifications last year.
For staff, Streeter stressed support, a voice in decisions and career paths. “Education in Arizona is not easy,” he said. “Our best strategy for addressing those challenges is a collective, collaborative voice at the table.” His goal is for Marana to be “the place where every teacher in Arizona wants to come be a part of.”
The third pillar is partnership. Every Marana school has been adopted by a local church and a local business. Streeter meets monthly with faith-based partners, quarterly with a business coalition and a parent group, and regularly with a student advisory group.
“If we do partnership and support really well, then we get advocacy,” he said. “We have a district that’s advocating for the community. We have a community that’s advocating for the school district.”
Schools are not coffee shops
Streeter said society has three sectors: the market sector of businesses, the public sector of police, fire, parks and schools, and the civic sector of churches and service clubs. Schools, he argued, are being pushed out of the public sector and into the market sector.
“Now we’re treating our schools like the local coffee shop,” he said. “If I have a bad experience at the local coffee shop, what do I do? I go down the street to the next coffee shop.”
He described a parent at a recent fall festival who told him no child gets through kindergarten to 12th grade without some friction. That parent had decided Marana was the best place to work through it. “You’re not gonna find the perfect place,” Streeter said. “You need to find the perfect place where you wanna solve your frictions and your challenges.”
Pumpkin patch values, five-star expectations
Marana has grown from about 28,000 residents to more than 65,000 in roughly 25 years. Streeter said the challenge is keeping small-town values while expectations rise.
“We have pumpkin patch values. We also have a five-star Ritz-Carlton in the boundaries,” he said. “We need to have some five-star expectations.”
He gave an example. A business partner emailed to say his daughter, a successful career and technical education graduate, was struggling to find a job. Streeter said the district believes its job-readiness training is strong, but it still invited her back for a resume review and to reconnect her with local contacts. “I think that’s Marana values,” Streeter said.
Leading between the guardrails
Streeter started on July 1, 2020, and is now nearly halfway through his seventh year. His board approved him in February 2020. He visited the district in March, and the pandemic shut everything down that same weekend. He spent his first months working with his new team over Zoom.
He credits that team for the district’s progress: Assistant Superintendent Kristen Reedy, then-CFO Dan Contorno and Carolyn Dumler, who has since retired after more than 30 years in the district. “Any success that we had has to do with those three bringing me in and accepting me as a part of the team from day one,” he said.
Reedy and Contorno are “2340 kids,” Streeter noted. The name comes from the district’s 2340 Foundation, which funds student scholarships, staff training and employee recognition. The number 2,340 is how many days a student spends in school from kindergarten through graduation.
Asked what has driven the gains, Streeter pointed to people. “We’ve trusted our people to run between the guardrails that we’ve put in place,” he said. “We’ve put the guardrails in place and then said, go innovate between those guardrails.”
Everyone on his team, he said, must believe in three things: “You gotta believe in our kids. Gotta believe in our community. You gotta believe in our vision.”
The district is already asking what comes next. Right after the grades came out, Streeter’s senior team went to a training day for career and technical education student ambassadors. Their question afterward was “Who’s not here? Who are we missing?” The district now plans to bring student council, National Junior Honor Society and freshman-mentor students into a formal leadership program. “We have a model,” Streeter said. “Now how do we scale the model?”
Evolution, not revolution
Streeter said Marana’s long-time families and town leaders have kept the community’s character while it grew. “You can still anchor in the values of the founders while still evolving into the needs of the future,” he said. “We’re not looking for a revolution. We’re looking for an evolution.”
On the community’s growth and job base, he said Marana has a record of acting rather than waiting. “You can’t wait for somebody else to do the work,” he said. “You have to do the work.”
He also said the community does not have to choose between young families and retirees. “This doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition. This can be a both-and.”
Attracting better leaders
The interview took place the morning after Election Day. Streeter said he did not see the results as a shift from one party to another. He saw them as voters moving away from weak candidates. “I think the long-term impact of last night will be a higher caliber of candidates coming forward,” he said.
He noted that many races are effectively decided in primaries, which he said leaves important conversations out of general elections.
Streeter said continuity matters for school boards and superintendents, because frequent turnover means “constantly bouncing off the guardrails trying to figure out what the direction is.” The bigger question, he said, is how to attract the best people to school boards, town councils and the Legislature. On the low pay for state legislators, he said repeatedly voting no on raises limits who will run. “You’re trying to cast a net, and you’re intentionally shrinking your net.”
‘This is the beginning’
The district marked its 100th anniversary earlier this year with an event at the Marana Pumpkin Patch’s Red Barn. Graduates from the 1950s attended alongside recent graduates.
Streeter said the A rating is one part of a larger goal. “Letter grades are one component of the work that we’re really engaged in,” he said. “It’s really about expanding not just opportunities for kids, but expanding opportunities for our staff, and really making Marana the place that people around the state of Arizona wanna come be a part of.”
He also credited the district’s partners. “It doesn’t work without partners,” he said.
His message to teachers considering a move was simple: “Come see me.”
Listen to the full interview with Dr. Dan Streeter on The Clint Peek Show (Spotify)
