Schlechty Center

Vickie Phelps Senior Associate

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My passion is in the system transformation part of Schlechty Center work. It took me longer to begin to understand the impact of systems thinking on organizations than it did to understand the need to give students more engaging work. It took me a while to understand that system transformation is required for teachers to be able to sustain "working on the work." And I have become passionate about helping clients understand the importance of working on the system.

The most inspiring times for me are the times when our clients show evidence that they are building capacity to move forward with transformation through their own initiative. I was recently with a client who described the way he had changed his administrative meetings to make them more engaging. What excited me about that was the way this client was "walking the talk" of engagement.

VICKIE PHELPS is the former superintendent of Clover School District, York County, South Carolina. Her experience includes 16 years as a superintendent in two states, Texas and South Carolina. She started her career as a teacher's assistant and later was an elementary and middle school teacher for 10 years. She was also an elementary school assistant principal and principal. Vickie was one of the first recipients of the Meadows Foundation Fellowship in 1986, a fellowship which was established to help outstanding Texas teachers to become administrators. She counts that cohort experience as one of the two highlights of her experiences. The other is her participation in the Schlechty Center Superintendents Leadership Network from 1998-2007. She co-authored a book in 2004, entitled Refining Common Sense: Moving from Data to Information. During her time as superintendent in the Taylor, Texas Independent School District, she helped bring a focus on the core business of providing students with engaging work. As superintendent in Clover, she helped the district focus on the district's beliefs, recruitment and induction system, and development of district and campus Design Teams.