Longtime BCLUW Superintendent Ben Petty will soon be starting a new role as shared superintendent position with the AGWSR School District.
Current AGWSR Superintendent, Erik Smith, is resigning at the end of the school year to take the role as shared superintendent of the New Hampton and Turkey Valley school districts. Petty has been at BCLUW for 20 years, the last 14 as superintendent, and tells RadioOnTheGo News after meeting with some school board members at AGWSR, he is ready for his new role.
“We started off the process a little bit more informally after I was reached out as to whether or not I’d consider it. Myself and a couple board members from BCLUW got together with Mr. Smith and a couple board members from AGWSR just to have some initial conversations on whether we thought it might be a good fit and might work out. And we thought it probably would, so proceeded to go on with the next step of meeting with the full board at AGWSR and their administrative team. So even though don’t start until July, I’ve had a few opportunities to visit with their board members and their administrative team and went up a couple of weeks ago during an in-service time up there just to go around all the different buildings and just kind of do a quick introduction, you know, face-to-face for the staff there just so they could kind of put a face to a name a little bit before we got into the next school year.”
Petty says staffing positions at both school districts are mostly filled heading into 2025-26 but knows filling these positions can be a challenge for smaller schools.
“My district, as well as much of rural Iowa, you don’t get nearly as many applicants for most positions now that you might have 15, 20 years ago. I think it’s just a lot fewer people are going into education as a career. I’m hopeful that with some of those bumps in minimum salary that the state’s helped to fund recently, maybe that’ll shift things the other way, but it’ll certainly take quite a while for that to happen if it does. So, you we may not know for a while, but yeah, there are fewer people going into education. And in all honesty, sometimes it’s difficult to draw them and keep them in rural Iowa, because it seems like a lot of them, if they aren’t going back to the area, maybe they grew up, they tend to be drawn a little bit more towards the suburbs and the little bit larger cities.”
Petty will officially begin his role as shared superintendent of the BCLUW and AGWSR school districts July 1st.
