Listen, learn and lead.

That’s the approach Superintendent Tammy Campbell will take during her first 100 days working for Federal Way Public Schools.

Already knee-deep into listening and learning, Campbell started her first day as superintendent on July 1 and has met with every principal in every Federal Way school as part of her pre-entry plan.

“Although I have been in multiple systems and I’ve had significant experience around continuous improvement and instruction, you still need to learn the system,” Campbell said in an interview. “You need to listen to see what the context is. Then, once you do that, you can lead the organization.”

During her 100-day plan, she hopes to accomplish five goals: strengthen the school board and superintendent relationship; understand the district’s abilities to ensure that students are academically, emotionally and socially successful for life after K-12; strengthen community and family engagement by better communication; promote and ensure a positive, collaborative and constructive climate for student outcomes; and to identify and analyze areas in the district that represent barriers and opportunities when it comes to better student performance.

“Federal Way has a long history of being innovative, we know that,” Campbell said. “However, when you look at our student data over the last two or three years, the shape of that data does not look like a district that has been as innovative.”

Principals want to maintain that innovative reputation and, during her 100 days, Campbell will work to identify the “root causes” of why that data doesn’t match with innovative efforts.

Campbell has met with the community through forums, with one in particular at a church that had 60 people in attendance.

Some of the concerns she’s heard from families center on more access to choice programs, such as the Federal Way Public Academy, better communication with parents so that more could participate in their child’s educational life  and the need for schools to be better equipped.

There will be several community forums through the next months until her plan is complete in December, Campbell said.

In building off of what works, Campbell assures she’s not the type of leader who will come in and “clean house.” But she does want to establish systems that will make it so things runs smoothly even if changes occur, such as change in leadership at the district level or policy changes with the board.

Since spring 2014, the school district has had one interim superintendent, two superintendents and three school board presidents.

“One of the most important things you can do in a time of change like that is have systems in place that are not people dependent,” Campbell said. “And that’s something that I think Federal Way will benefit from.”

Campbell said developing teams and structures is what will make a district successful.

“I will never be able to single-handedly turn Federal Way around,” she said. “I can do that if I mobilize teams, if I can really promote a vision and if I hold folks accountable for that but teams have to do that work.”

During her first 100 days, Campbell said the biggest challenge with her plan will be the scale and size of a 22,000 student district.

“You want to bring it down so that you build relationships and get to know context and this is why you see me taking a school by school strategy,” she said. “Bring it down to size, bring it down in terms of its scale.”

After Campbell has done as much listening, learning and leading as she can in these next months, she will present what she’s learned to a transition team in December. However, she will not talk about goals — that will be discussed during the strategic planning process, which the district hopes to launch this winter.

The mother-of-two has been passionate about teaching and education since she had an epiphany while teaching her daughter (now 22) to read in the kitchen.

Campbell said she was expected to be a doctor because she graduated valedictorian at her high school in a small town in Louisiana and earned a full ride scholarship to Southern University at New Orleans.

“I grew up in Louisiana and the job market really wasn’t friendly there for some of the people who lived in town and my mom always pressed us, you know, when we were younger, to be good students and to get a good education because many people who looked like me weren’t able to get out of town,” she said. “So I just took studying and reading books very seriously.”

Campbell recalls working at a library with the goal of reading every book in it during her adolescence.

But she cut her pursuit of the medical field and didn’t complete her degree at Southern University.

Instead, she and her husband moved to North Dakota and she had her children. But as soon as she had that life-changing realization that she wanted to teach kids, Campbell said the rest was history.

She enrolled in Minot State University and got her bachelor’s degree in elementary education and became a teacher. Her first year there, she was nominated as teacher of the year. Campbell went on to earn her doctorate degree and became a principal.

“After the principalship, I was recruited to come to Spokane Public Schools where I supervised at their elementary schools,” she said. “And I did that for 17 schools. I learned a lot during that time.”

While she initially missed being around students, she went on to do that work for five years, with two years in charge of curriculum and instruction.

She also held positions at the University of Washington Center for Educational Leadership, Washington State University, Spokane Public Schools and Central Valley School District, and was the Assistant Superintendent of Learning and Teaching at the Renton School District prior to coming to Federal Way.

“Over that period of time, I’ll tell you what I’m proud about is the work we did around standards-based grading reporting,” Campbell said. “I know Federal Way’s had its challenges but we did it too and we did it really with very little pushback.”

Community forums across the city coupled with three years of work on the structures before a full conversion made for a smooth transition, she said.

Campbell said she doesn’t intend to bring a standards-based grading package to Federal Way Public Schools but she will bring a set of experiences “that will allow me to help lead teams to create what I call ‘novel solutions’ in this system that have some of the learnings from other systems.”

A few of those novel solutions included elements such as a handbook, a band of teachers and a selection of best practices.

Ultimately, Campbell views teachers and education as students’ dream keepers.

“I feel a great sense of responsibility that they bring their hopes and dreams and their parents’ hopes and dreams and we have an obligation to treat them with care,” she said. “I believe the future of this country is dependent on what we do with the children every day and how we tend to their dreams and hopes.”

When Campbell isn’t spending time with her family or engaging in her interests of astronomy or science, you can expect she’ll be gardening, once she moves into her Federal Way house, that is.

“I love to garden, I can get obsessed with it,” she said. “I love growing and it parallels to teaching, probably. I like seeing something from a seed grow and I like going out every day to make sure it’s got enough light and enough food, so that’s part of my personality.”

To learn more about Campbell’s 100-day entry plan, visit www.fwps.org/entry-plan/.