Farewell message from Iowa MTSS/EWS support team's Connor Hood

Connor spent decades supporting Iowa Iowa educators, AEA staff, and his fellow DE colleagues in all things data and MTSS data systems-related. He has been a steady, reliable source of direction and support in Iowa’s landscape, most recently in MTSS data system support tickets. As a jack-of-all-trades, Connor has helped innumerable users interpret scores, locate a missing button, guide users through a click path, find missing student rosters and so much more! He has been an integral part of designing, maintaining and supporting the inner workings of the MTSS data systems and supporting Iowa educators. His impact on the field is difficult to measure. 

We are grateful for his work and wish him well in retirement. 

~~~Connor's farewell message to Iowa educators and colleagues~~~

Dear friends, 

I wanted to let you know that I have retired. Thank you to all for your kindness and friendship over the years (as well as your tolerance of me at times). I have had the honor to work with passionate, caring people all over Iowa who have worked hard to make education in Iowa better and better. I will miss that dedication. I hope that all Iowa educators will continue to strive to provide leadership and services that will always improve outcomes for kids. I've always maintained that trying to do the best for kids will get better results than focusing on minimum compliance. Remember that to get different results you must change what you do. Sometimes subtly, but sometimes you've got to make big changes, too. 

The work I did at the end of my career was VASTLY different from what I learned to do early in my career. I started working as a school psychologist in 1985 back when an evaluation for a learning disability in special education meant kids often didn't "qualify" until they fell far behind their peers, and often they never caught up. A few years into my career, I learned about the idea of curriculum based measures, and we built our own local assessment systems. Then came concepts like universal screening and frequent progress monitoring, piloting early warning and early intervention programs and creation of the Iowa model for problem solving. All of which were intended to get more focused help to students quicker so that we could work on smaller, more easily solved learning problems sooner rather than big, intractable problems later. 

Over the next four decades that work has grown into statewide systems that support early warning assessments, etc. and have received nationwide recognition. Who knew??? It's amazing how far we've come, and even more amazing that, for the most part, we take it for granted. Iowa has an incredible early warning data system for reading and now math that consistently creates awe when it's described to other States' Department of Education folk. I've been glad to be a part of that work. 

Even so, I started Kindergarten in 1964 at age 4 and have been in school ever since then in one way or another. That's 60 years including 40 years working in education settings. It's time for recess. I want to play and then have milk and cookies. You are welcome to join me, should you wish.

Connor Hood