Meet New Monomoy Superintendent Robin Millen

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CCNO: To start things off, please give a quick self-introduction.

Robin Millen: Hello, I’m Robin Millen. I am the new superintendent of Monomoy Regional School District.

Let’s talk about your background. Where are you from and what led you to the role of Monomoy superintendent?

Robin Millen: I am actually from the Cape. I grew up—part of my grow-up years were outside of Chicago and then we moved to the Cape full-time when I was in high school. So I graduated from Chatham High School, so I’m like one of the original Blue Devils. So I’m from here, so home here feels very much like home. I feel like I’ve come a full circle moment, in a very windy, not straight way.

After I graduated from high school, I went to university, and I was originally a different major. I was a business poli-sci major. I was married here, had our first child here on Cape, and my husband and I moved off Cape shortly after our first son was born. It wasn’t until later, after a few years of him growing up and he was about to enter kindergarten and I was like, “Hmm, I think I might be interested in education.”

There’s a lot of story behind that, and there’s a lot of things as to the happenstances of that. But in essence, I was working at a pharmacy and one of my clients was a superintendent and I was picking his brain about, how do kids learn how to read? My son’s entering kindergarten, what should I be thinking about? And he goes, “Why don’t you just come work for me?” And so I started working for him. I did some research for him, I did some instructional assistant work for him and I started at university to get my master’s in education. And from there, I never left the field of education.

I was a sixth grade teacher, I was a third grade teacher, I was a fourth grade teacher. I did credit recovery at the high school. I have done some university lecturer work. I’ve done a little bit of everything at all grade levels, almost.

So when my husband and I decided that we wanted to return home to the Cape, I was in the middle of my doctoral program and they tell you two things in the middle of that work: not to change your life and uproot your life and don’t change jobs and I did both of that.

Moved back to the Cape. We have a home in East Sandwich. I took an assistant principal’s job at Harwich Elementary School, and then I took the principal’s job within that year at Chatham Elementary School. I was there from about 2015 to 2021, when I went the two years at Nauset Regional Public Schools as a director of curriculum. And although I loved it in all the districts that I’ve worked in, and especially at Nauset, I had some great experiences there, the opportunity to come home back to Monomoy came available and I went through the process and applied for their director of curriculum, instruction and assessment position.

I was able to obtain that position, and then that turned into the assistant superintendent’s role and then just this year, fell into the superintendent’s role and I’m thrilled to be here and thrilled to be part of the Chatham-Harwich community. I feel very dedicated to the students and the community of the Cape, just generally, but specifically Chatham and Harwich.

It sounds like you have experience at many different levels of education.

I spent most of my career in grade six as a math teacher. But I’ve had lots of experiences.

That district asked me to go into grade three and I went to grade three to work on some initiatives in that grade. When I came here and I started at the elementary, it was a pre-K-four building. I’d never worked in a pre-K-four building.

I’ve always worked in pre-K-sixes, but I’ve only ever worked in regional systems. The three districts that I’ve worked in were all regional, and they were all different in its own way.

And they all had different regional agreements and different ways they operated and different budgets and things like that. Different states as well.

So I think that breadth and depth of all those experiences brings me a unique perspective to this role, right? Because I’ve seen lots of different ways that you can operate schools. I’ve seen different management and facilities operations. I’ve seen different budgets. I’ve seen different ways that communities approve budgets.

And then my teaching experiences just kind of rounds that out. I would say at my core, I’m an educator. When people ask me what I do, I say I’m an educator. I don’t say I’m an administrator. I’m an educator, and that’s that core value, and we have that here.

We believe that our children, every student, every day is one of our mottos. And that core at that student learning level is what all those experiences bring forth to me, that I don’t lose that student amongst all the other work, and sometimes all the other noise that happens in these positions.

But if we can continually focus on students, just like I did in my classroom, just like I did when I was a paraprofessional, just like I did when I did some of the other administrative work, then we can do great things for our students and be there. So I think that’s how it kind of wraps around my experiences and then my core values.

What is an experience that significantly influenced your professional mindset?

One thing maybe people don’t recognize about me and I’m, again, very open in my experiences and stuff, but I come from a big adopted family.So there’s five of us and we come from all over. Korea, Puerto Rico and I was born in the United States and I actually don’t know my ethnic or my heritage background.

So we all looked very different. And again, there’s five of us. So when we moved from Chicago to Chatham, that was a very small district, right? And we moved with a very diverse family and those experiences shaped us.

The diversity in Chicago, obviously, was much more broad and deep and we learned very quickly that that’s not always how the whole world is or how they think and it was a great experience.

We all love being here on the Cape and now most of us have moved home. But it was a time and a place where we needed to learn that not everything is equitable and not everything is accessible and everybody has their own feelings and beliefs about different family structures and about racial differences, ethnic differences and things like that.

So when people look at me sometimes they think, “Oh, well, you’re just who you are and you look a certain way and that’s your belief.” But that diversity of my family has really shaped, again, that core understanding that everybody’s different.

We might look one way, we might act one way, we might feel one way, we might want to learn one way, we might want to do all those things, but when we put all those identities together, we’re all very much individuals.

And going back to [how] individuals learn, we have to make sure that we keep that idea in space and that we know those individual identities of our students, because it might not be what we assume.

Let’s talk about your goals as superintendent. For starters, what are your academic initiatives?

People ask me this all the time, “What are your initiatives? What is your thing that you want?”

It’s never my thing. It’s really what students need, first of all, but it’s coming from a core of a data decision-making core. So when I say these things, it’s not like I just woke up in the morning and said, “Oh, this is what’s going to happen at Monomoy.”

So, some of our academic goals have been here since I started, right? To making sure all students learn, making sure all students have universally designed learning environments, so learning is the key and that it’s never an end to that learning.

It’s a trajectory that we create from early, early littles, pre-K all the way through post-grad. The learning that we’re setting our students up [with] is learning they’ll do as adults when they get out of high school, if they get out of university, if they go into the workforce. We’re preparing them for a lifetime of learning.

So the educational goals for our district are itemized right now in our strategic plan. We have academic and learning goals. A lot of those goals are really looking at some of the community needs that we have, including early childhood; preschool.

What [we’re] doing for preschool and making sure all students have access to high-quality preschool experiences, whether it’s in the public school or in a community partners. That’s an academic goal.

We have academic goals for literacy and numeracy throughout the grade levels. Then we also have goals in which we are moving towards a more innovative learning experience for our students.

[The high school] is a great example. We have a really robust internship program here and that connection between that internship program, the learning and the academics that are happening within the high school and then post-graduate from that is a goal. It’s an academic goal, but it’s preparing our students for the future.

So we have lots of goals and action steps happening, but they’re really rooted in a very focused, coherent mission to make sure that we’re moving forward in those ways.

I don’t know if [there is] any one particular—I don’t know how to put this—but elementary, middle or high school [goal]. They all have their own school-wide improvement plans and all their own action steps in which they’re going to meet their original goals, their own independent goals, but that’s all feeding to the district’s strategic goals. And we’re working on that.

One of my things with my administrative team and our administrative team here is to make sure that we have coherence in there, so that we focus our directions together. So it might look different and everybody might be in different places for creating multi-tiered systems of support for our students and making sure we have those universally designed and equitable systems, but we’re all moving in the same place.

We have internal and external accountability systems set up, so that keeps us in check. We can set goals as kind of like when people set [an], “I’m going to run a mile” goal and then they don’t have actually any sort of accountability to running that mile. We have [that accountability] and we work on those [goals] constantly. We’re constantly adjusting them.

We’ve been working on collaborative cultures so that our instructional leaders at the high school have a very similar instructional leader philosophy and mission and goals and professional practice goals and learning goals as a pre-K student, so that there’s a line of sight between those type of goal-setting and action steps that we do in the district.

And then we want to make sure that we are deepening our learning at all times and making sure students have that real, deep, authentic experiences in our classrooms.

What are your initiatives regarding the district’s facilities?

So Monomoy Middle School is [currently] undergoing a full envelope renovation and upgrade.

(…)I think over the next, I’d say five to seven years, not only because of the age of our facilities, but also because of the declining enrollment, I do think facilities is something that this community will have to grapple with.

Our elementary schools, the years old that they are, they’ve had some additions along the ways, but it’s just like when you own a home, you’re going to have to have certain amount of upgrades.

We live in a very wonderful high wind area. The exterior of the buildings need to be buttoned up in some of the cases. Internal facilities like boilers, electrical systems, security systems, those things, they always come up, right?

So if you go into our budget presentations over the last umpteen years, you’ll see Michael MacMillan, our Assistant Superintendent of Finance, talk about that capital kind of outlay. Those are discussions that we’re going to have to have and we need to keep up with those facilities.

[The high school] building is 12 years old—13 years old almost—and as with anything, it’s beautiful, it’s gorgeous, but there’s going to be significant amount of upgrades and we have to keep up with those in order to maintain those healthy and actionable environments within our classrooms and so that our staff and our faculty and our community and our students, most of all, feel like this is a good environment, a healthy environment for them to learn and to work and to engage in other community events here. So those are the things that we have to consider.

And just because the age of some of our buildings, that is going to be a number that this community is going to have to dedicate depending on how the structure of the facilities goes.

So that, coupled with our declining enrollment, will be some really interesting conversations and they’re not new. These are conversations that we’ve been having since we became Monomoy, or even before we became Monomoy, while we’ve been becoming Monomoy, because we are seeing what Dr. Carpenter, my predecessor, would call the canary in the coal mine.

Our early elementary and into our middle school now, we’re seeing a significant decline in enrollment. Even our incoming kindergarten, again, this year is a decline, especially in Harwich. Chatham is maintaining about the same, but it’s still small. We’re teeny tiny in those grade levels in my opinion.

So I think that affects what you do with your capital when you’re running two autonomous elementary schools. That percentage-wise, as far as facility availability, is something that the towns are going to have to consider. Both towns run both their elementary schools. They are fiscally responsible for their own elementary schools from a recent regional agreement change.

So, again, when I worked at Nauset, the core of the towns was okay to keep the small elementary schools, but even Nauset is considering this now, right? These are communities. These are not just Monomoy challenges. This is happening all across the Cape, all across Massachusetts. We have a declining population of young families and young children.

What are your personal goals while serving as superintendent?

I’m a learning leader. That’s how I would describe myself. So I’m constantly growing. And I love that. I think that’s one of the best things about being an educator is because you’re constantly learning.

My husband gives me a hard time that my stack of books next to my bed stand is all about education and not necessarily a novel. Although I do try to work it in there once in a while.

So, the education journey that I have been on has just kind of laid itself out as far as I’m in this because of learning and students, like children, and young adults. The high schoolers don’t like me just calling them students or children—so the young adults.

But I think as far as leadership goes—I don’t know how to explain it. I have leadership competencies and things like that, but I think as far as understanding the systems as a whole and making sure that all those systems thinking is happening, and I’ve been working on this since I became a leader 15 years ago and even before that as an educational leader. But understanding that every decision we make is interconnected to some other decision.

And a lot of people in leadership roles often think that it is a, “Oh, here, I’m just going to take care of that.” But whatever you decide there has a long-term impact on something else. And it could be a large impact, or it could be a small impact, but any impact is sometimes very different than intent, right?

So learning that and making sure that I’m stepping back and making sure I’m taking a view and that’s kind of what my transition and entry plan has been. Since January, I guess it must be now, I’ve been meeting with all different types of individuals and groups of individuals…from educators to administrators to students.

I spent a couple of lunchtimes down here talking to students in classrooms. I have a video series going where children are asking me questions about myself, what my favorite food is, what is all that. All those things, but the reason I’m doing a full transition plan and entry plan— which might seem interesting to people because I have been with this district mostly since 2014—is because I need to see it from that new lens. I need to see it from the superintendent’s lens and I need to know how I can be in service in that new role to all of this community, our educators, our administrators, our students.

And that is a really important part, I believe, of central office and how central office works, especially in Massachusetts, but other places too. Central office, as a superintendent, I am in service to everybody who’s doing the work. I’m the one that needs to be supporting them and I need to be making sure that it’s not me, like I said, making that decision out front just by myself. That’s not what a superintendent is supposed to be doing, nor would I ever lead like that.

So I think some of the growing and learning for me is not only for me expressing that to people so that they understand that when I sit back and I’m looking and watching and learning, it’s because then I know I do probably need to make a decision and I will make a decision, but it’s partly of my systems thinking and growing in that, in this new lens.

I have done that through my time as assistant superintendent and director of curriculum and principal and assistant principal since being in this district. But this role is different, and it has different responsibilities and it has different roles.

But the key thing for me is to making sure that I am not taking those steps as a collaborative, coherent leader, not as a single-minded person moving ahead, which is not in my nature anyways.

Is there any aspect of the school district you want to expand or change?

We have great systems here. We have been working on a multi-tiered system of support, which has all these different operational drivers and we are working on that.

So what I will say is that what I want to do is make sure we always, always have a continuous improvement mindset. We can’t be stagnant. The world isn’t stagnant. Our students’ future is not stagnant. We have everybody from maybe the next president of the United States here to the next person that finds the next galaxy. I don’t know.

So, we have all different kinds of learners here and they all want to do different things, right? So that continuous improvement is, I guess, something that I would say I want to make sure that we sustain that mindset. There needs to be pathways all the way from the pre-K-12 system.

Everybody teaches a senior. I say that all the time. That’s not my quote—I took it from somebody else. But we need to not only focus on graduation, we need to think about that whole long learning experience.

We also have to consider what do our students need and want for the future? So we just completed a Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium. It was an equity audit and some of the initial data—and we haven’t unpacked it thoroughly—but some of the initial data is our students want us to be a little bit more forward-thinking as to what their world looks like, not only in clubs and some of the extracurriculars, but also in the classrooms.

Schools traditionally can get really stuck in the ABCs of what they teach and I think we’re lucky here at Monomoy because we’ve always had very innovative, forward-thinking administrators, educators and things like that. But it’s unsettling sometimes to change and to shift in those ways. And again, we’ve done it and we’re working at it and we’ll continue to grow and learn in those spaces.

But I think that’s one thing that I would say, making sure everything is interconnected and making sure there’s a deep connection to what a student wants and needs for their own learning.

When I went through the process of becoming the superintendent, I talked about Monomoy kind of being in its infancy. It was like a baby district. We went through all the initial bringing together, the buildings. We talked about the regional agreements, all the financial parts of those things that happened. But we were still a young district. We’re learning and growing as we’re going on. We’re branding. We’re bringing curriculums together, resources together, all of those things.

And now Monomoy is in its teenage years and we need to know who are we becoming, similar to how a student becomes who they are and they really branch out, and they test the waters a little bit and they look at ways to maybe look at the world a little different as a teenager. I feel like Monomoy is in that space.

So I think it’s an exciting time to be superintendent and I think it’s a great time for our two towns to have some really good conversations about the educational system that we provide to our children. And then what does that system look like for those who work for us and then for our community in general.

Where do you see Monomoy five years from now?

The best in the world. No—yes, I do see it.

But I do see the district still being its core. It is [what] it is. It is a regional district. There are two distinct towns who really think very highly and support high-quality instruction and high-quality learning. So I do see us in a very—I don’t want to say similar place—but a core place still centered around students and learning.

Where that goes from here, like I said, I do think this district has some really hefty questions ahead of them. Just out of its structure, but it’s also a budgetary issue, how the towns go forward with housing and if the towns go forward with some new regional agreement. I think there’s some hefty questions to ask.

But we can do it. We’ve done it all of our whole infancy, early childhood, like I said, at Monomoy. But when we get into those high school and adolescent years of Monomoy, like 13, 14, 15, then those will be some tough things to, and it’s not only us that it’s tough for. We have an environment of communities that some of those things, they’re going to have to wrestle with.

Do you have a message for the community?

Yeah, I think in general, I would ask the community to make sure that they’re engaged with the school district and make sure that they are open and they’re communicating to us their wants and needs and desires.

The community is a bit, again, diverse. We have community members who are caregivers and they are able to know what we’re doing and they get all the newsletters and they get the communication. They’re in our buildings. They’re using our buildings. They’re interacting with our educators and our administrators, our coaches, our extracurricular.

That’s great, but we have also a large part of our community [whose] children didn’t go to school here. They didn’t raise their children here. They come here for the summers or whatever it might be,and they’re as important in their voice as everybody else is and we would like to make sure that we engage that part of the community and make sure they know we’re open to hearing from them, but also understanding that we have a responsibility to educating our children that do live and work and reside here on a year-round, 24/7 basis.

So I want to make sure that they know that they can reach out. They can call. They can engage in some of our activities and we’re here for them and I would love for us to know that they’re here for us as well. So I think that, again, bringing everybody together.

I would like to see an increase in that communication for sure, just so that we know when we’re making decisions, what is everybody thinking? And not that we don’t get communication, but we typically have just a set of communicators. And we want to make sure that we’re hearing from everybody. So reach out. I’d love to hear from you.

What excites you most about the superintendent role?

I’m just thrilled to be able to serve the students on the Cape. Specifically in Chatham and Harwich.

I didn’t ever expect that my life choices—we were in Chicago and we were in Connecticut and I did my teaching career in Connecticut. The opportunity to come home and do this, it makes me a little emotional.

But to do this, to make sure that the children on the Cape have the opportunities. As superintendent, I can be in service to pushing those opportunities and making sure that I can help support the resource allocations, the instructional leadership, making sure I can do those things is like, I don’t even know.

I’m just so thrilled and humbled, but I’m also just—we know what promotes student outcomes and learning outcomes and we know what makes sure that students have the best opportunities, again, academic, social, emotional and wellness opportunities. And I can help support that. And I know that I can lead this team as a collaborative, coherent organization to go there.

But it’s really about being home and being here for the students who fill our community.

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