The superintendent of the school district is what one would call the guy at the top. From making executive decisions to being the figurehead for the district, a superintendent has many jobs. The superintendent of Frisco ISD is Dr. Mike Waldrip. Dr. Waldrip has spent 20 years in Frisco, starting out at Clark Middle School and gradually making his way up to the top.
Although Dr. Waldrip is involved with the entire district, with more 65,000 students, and 9,000 employees, it can be difficult for students in the district to get to know the man who helps shape their education. To get to know him better, Dr. Waldrip sat down with Wingspan for an interview.
Wingspan: What were you like in high school?
Dr. Mike Waldrip: “I was not a straight A student, I was in athletics primarily. That was my extracurricular activity. I did a few other things but I was just a typical student. I went to a small school. I had 64 students in my graduating class. Back then, it was a 2A school. I am from Post, which is just south of Lubbock.”
Wingspan: Did you have any career goals?
Waldrip: “At a young age, I really felt like I wanted to be a teacher and a coach. I had good teachers and good coaches. I was really influenced by them and I enjoyed that. I had thought that that was what I wanted to do. So when I went to college my goal was to become a teacher and a coach and that’s how it worked out. I had no idea that I would become a superintendent.”
Wingspan: So, where did you go to college? What did you study?
Waldrip: “For a year and a half, I went to Angelo State University. I walked on the basketball team and played a little basketball. Then I transferred to Texas Tech University and majored in Physical Education and Biology and that’s what I graduated with.”
Wingspan: What was it like when you first started teaching?
Waldrip: “When I first went to work, I coached, and I did that for 16 years. And then in the early ‘90s, I started working on my masters degree to be a principal. In 1998, I got my first administrative job as a high school assistant principal in Seminal. In 2002, I moved to Frisco and I was principal at Clark Middle School, and I did that for a couple of years. I then went to the central office and I was the first director of secondary instruction here in Frisco. I then went back to open Liberty High School, I did that for five years. I came back to central office and became the assistant superintendent. And then I became the deputy superintendent and I was in charge of operations and then I left for three years to be superintendent in Coppell and then came back to Frisco to be superintendent in 2017. That’s where I am today.”
Wingspan: What drew you into Frisco?
Waldrip: “There were 13,000 students in FISD when I first came here in 2002. Now, there are 65,000. We’ve seen tremendous growth over that time. What drew me here was that in Seminal, all the positions I could advance into like an administrative position, they were occupied by people that were like my age in the same place in their careers. None of them had any designs on leaving Seminal to go do something else. If I wanted career opportunities, I needed to do something else. I had a friend that was working in Frisco: his name was Randy Spane, and he was the principal at Centennial High School. I called and asked what kind of opportunities were out here and he told me that he was looking for an assistant principal at Clark Middle School. And I was like I absolutely need to do something and make a career move. He hired me to be the assistant principal at Clark. About a week later, he finds me and tells me he took the job at Centennial High School and Dr. Reedy, who was the superintendent at the time, would like to talk to me about being the principal at Clark Middle School. And I was absolutely interested. This is now my 20th year in Frisco, not counting my brief stint in Coppell.”
Wingspan: You were there when Liberty first opened, what was it like?
Waldrip: “We were really small in the beginning. We only opened with freshman and sophomores. There was a big hoopla back then. The district was growing so rapidly that they couldn’t build Liberty fast enough to take the student load off of Centennial High School. Centennial was about to have like 20 portable buildings around it and had like 700-800 more students than it could hold about to come. So what they were doing at the time was building Fowler Middle School. They accelerated the construction of FMS. So, for a year, Liberty High School was actually housed in FMS. So the very first year LHS existed, we existed in what is now FMS. We had a sign on the front that said Liberty and we were doing all of the high school things. We did that for a year while they finished building the current Liberty High School.”
Wingspan: How have you seen the student and teacher quality develop throughout the years?
Waldrip: “The really great thing about Frisco is that there have always been quality teachers. The student achievement level in Frisco has always been high. There’s a lot of indicators about what makes a school district great. Over 90% of our students go on to college or some post-secondary education in some form. That doesn’t happen everywhere. That’s an incredible statistic. It’s almost 92%. That level of student performance has always been high and that’s just been maintained while I’ve been here. I haven’t seen it decline at all and, if anything, has just gotten better over time. We attract probably the best teachers around to come and work in FISD. I was in a meeting the other day and we invited what we call priority candidates. There was a room with about 100 people in it. These were teacher candidates we felt were exceptional and invited them to Frisco for a special day to tell them more about Frisco and attract them to come and work in FISD. We had a job fair recently and 800 people showed up. Frisco is a good place and people want to work in Frisco.”
Wingspan: What does a day to day look like for the superintendent?
Waldrip: “I really go to a lot of meetings. I meet with groups of staff. We make a lot of high level decisions, get a lot of reports, and information about what’s going on in the district. I also go out to campuses a lot. I go visit campuses, go into teacher classrooms, talk to teachers, talk to students. That usually fills up my day. Sometimes I will be with different groups outside. We meet with our business partners on a pretty frequent basis. I met with the COO of FC Dallas the other day. So my life is full of meetings.”
Wingspan: When is your busiest time of year?
Waldrip: “It gets really busy this time of year. 12 graduations is a lot. Last year, we did them all in one location, so I went to all 12 graduations. Now, we’re doing them at two different venues so I can’t be at all 12 of them, I’ll only be at six. But the things that go on this time of year like celebrations, banquets, and things outside the school day. All of the activities are the spring, athletic events and the fine arts. I try to go to as much of that as I can. I’ve spent a lot of time travelling to San Antonio and Georgetown to see our students compete in state events.”
Wingspan: Whenever FISD encounters a difficult situation in the press or within the district, how do you respond and deal with the stress of it all?
Waldrip: “We are very fortunate in Frisco. We have people that are involved. We have an executive director of emergency management. We have a director of security. We have a whole department that is focused on nothing but communications. We have some very involved processes when we all have to come together. If something happens in the district, there is something we call a bridge call and there are around 50 people on that call and it’s school officials or city officials. It can be the Frisco PD or Frisco FD. It depends on what’s going on as to who is on the call. It’s a very smooth running, efficient process. We try to have everybody involved because we have periodic information that needs to go out at different times. We map that out. We do a lot of things where people are sharing documents and editing them and things. There will be multiple people working on different projects. In my opinion, it’s a very well-oiled machine, and we are able to respond quickly and very efficiently when we do have things occur.”
Wingspan: Now, for a fun question: when there are bad weather days, how do you make that executive decision to cancel school?
Waldrip: “So, I hate cancelling school. But I will tell you what we do. Say in the winter, we get an ice storm. The emergency management person I told you about, or The Voice, and I have a phone call with the national weather service and surrounding police departments. We talk about the weather conditions, we talk about the weather forecast. I get all the information and input from all of those groups. I contact the surrounding districts’ superintendents and then I’ll make a decision on if we have school or not. There’s actually a lot of people involved in the process, and we have a lot of information before we make a decision like that.”
Wingspan: Did any of your children want you to cancel school?
Waldrip: “My children were not FISD students when I was superintendent. My grandson is in kindergarten and after you all went to school one day when the weather was a bit bad, it wasn’t really bad, the next time I saw him he said, ‘Big Mike, why didn’t you cancel school?’ And I was like, ‘what do you care, you’re in kindergarten.’ So, I didn’t have my sons do it, but I do have my grandson scrutinizing everything I do.”
