Inside One District’s Effort to Strengthen School and Central Office Collaboration: Q&A With Kathy Hinz and Lauryn Fullerton

December 19, 2025

Developing a coherent districtwide leadership culture can be complex, especially when established school leaders and incoming central office administrators are navigating change simultaneously. To deepen individual leadership while supporting systemwide improvement, Crystal Lake Elementary District 47 in Illinois turned to WestEd’s Leadership Playbook, a professional development workshop series designed to enhance school leaders’ capacity to strengthen culture, build teams, and develop talent.

In this conversation, Crystal Lake Superintendent Dr. Kathy Hinz and Leadership Playbook facilitator Lauryn Fullerton reflect on the district’s goals, what it took to strengthen trust between school and central office staff, and the ways that structured reflection and relationship-building activities enriched leaders’ understanding of one another. They also share how the Playbook has helped foster a culture in which continuous growth is expected and supported at every level of the system.

Kathy Hinz: Our main leadership goal was to develop a better relationship between our central office leaders and our school administrators. The tenure of our school leaders is long—5, 10, 15 years. But our central office administrative positions had turned over more recently, and so, as new ideas were being brought in, there was a tension between honoring what we’d always done and bringing in something new. We decided to partner with an organization to address this challenge in a less feelings-based and more development-based way.

KH: It’s still a work in progress, but really, it was about trying to get people to open up about their own leadership style and how they got to where they are. There was an exercise we did with the Leadership Playbook where we discussed early experiences that may have impacted our leadership—things like, “What was your first job? Where did you go to school?” We shared things that our colleagues may not have known about us and things that we had in common. That was the first step in starting the dialogue, and once you start the dialogue, it opens the door for building trust and relationships.

Lauryn Fullerton: The activity Kathy was mentioning is called Six Degrees, and the intention is to show the connections that we have with one another. That was in Session 2 (of the six sessions the Playbook offers), which focused on relationship management. We all have a story we tell ourselves around the people that we work with, but there are so many things that we don’t know, and so encouraging everyone to lay down their defenses helps people think differently about how they can relate to and work with one another.

KH: I think it was getting people all in the same room, talking about their journey, why they got into administration, and what their struggles are. Many of my central office staff have been principals, but they were principals prior to the pandemic, and being a principal is different today than it was before the pandemic. Some of the exercises we did as part of the Leadership Playbook helped people verbalize that reality. I value that central office administrators have experience as a principal, but the job has evolved, and these conversations led us to discuss our leadership pipeline—what we’re doing to prepare people and what we’re doing to support our school leaders so that they don’t burn out and leave.

KH: I think with many of the exercises that we went through, there was an individual piece before there was a systems piece. There was a lot of learning about your own leadership style and what you need as a leader to grow, how you make decisions, and how you engage with people. You had to understand that piece of how you fit before you could put yourself into a system. I think a lot of our leaders learned some things about their style that maybe they just hadn’t put that much thought into to understand why they behave or why they respond the way they do. This work through the Leadership Playbook gave them that opportunity and the time to do that.

If another superintendent asked you about embarking on districtwide professional learning for school leaders, what advice would you give them?

KH: I would want them to be able to answer for themselves: Why do you want to do it? Is it because you want to or because the need has come up organically from the group? Do people feel like they’re a part of it and it’s not done to them? I would challenge them to come up with at least two objectives they’re hoping to get out of it and be realistic about the time it’s going to require. With the Playbook, the 2-hour sessions were important for us. There were times when we could have spent even more time on a given topic.

LF: What I’ve seen be effective is when leaders come together with their staff to highlight areas of growth they have collectively. For example, “What are some things that are holding us back from realizing our strategic plan goals?” A lot of times, people are working in silos, or the central office is disconnected from the school. There’s also not a lot of time for the people leadership side of the work. Technical skills around curricula and instruction—schools always have time for those because they are not optional. They don’t have a choice. But people development isn’t always given the most urgency. So, when superintendents have gone through the Leadership Playbook, they’ve found it helpful to work on how they and their teams are going to relate to one another, which opens doors for communication and improves their effectiveness.

KH: One of the main ways is by shifting how we look at ourselves in terms of growth and development and creating a leadership pipeline. As we were starting to see some of our principals retire, we began asking our assistant principals, “Where would you like to go?” That wasn’t a standard question that our principals were always asking, and I think people assumed that the APs always wanted to be a principal. But maybe they wanted to go into the central office or do something different.

It was similar for our principals. Do they want to come to the central office? How do we grow and develop them? Our principals are now also having more conversations with teachers about whether they want to change grade levels or try a different curriculum area. I’m not sure that we were consistent in having those conversations across all of our administrators before the Leadership Playbook. There’s no end of the line. We can always be developing somehow, someway.

Learn More About the Leadership Playbook

Crystal Lake’s experience shows how intentional reflection and relationship building can reshape a district’s leadership culture. If you’re interested in exploring how WestEd’s Leadership Playbook can support your system’s growth, contact Lauryn Fullerton to start a conversation about what’s possible for your leadership team.