Breakfast With Brooke

Retired General Plans To Make Aurora Schools Soar

AURORA, Colo. (CBS4) ― A retired two star Air Force general is using his military skills to lead the Aurora Public School District.

John Barry took over as superintendent of the district in 2005 with the goal of making Aurora the state's top district. Before becoming a school superintendent, Barry flew fighter jets, led the world's largest fighter training base in the world and headed the investigation into the space shuttle Columbia disaster.

Barry said he uses skills he learned as the lead strategist for the Air Force in his new job.

"Strategy is connecting ends with means and our end is the vision," Barry said. "Our vision is pretty compelling. The vision is to graduate every student with the choice to attend college without mediation. Every student."

Barry has challenged everyone in the Aurora community to get involved in the school district, including business leaders.

"We can't do this alone," he said. "A teacher can't do it, a principal can't do it, I can't do it, the board of education can't do it. We have to do it as a community. We decided if we're going to challenge the kids, we're going to challenge ourselves."

Those challenges include encouraging businesses to provide awards and support scholarship funds as well as getting parents into the school as teachers for a day.

Barry also knows the importance of making sure students are in the classroom learning and not on the streets playing truant.

For the 2007-2008 school year he has set up a program where teacher sponsors stay in contact with truants and campuses are closed.

Upper-classmen have to earn the right to leave campus for lunch. They receive the privilege based on grades and behavior.

"It's what the world expects when you get out there," Barry said. "You're not given the right, you earn the right to get a job, get a promotion, those kinds of things."

Barry also wants to increase CSAP scores. Math and science scores were up this past year in Aurora schools, but reading and writing were not.

That prompted Barry and the district to start school early. Students returned to class 23 days early to help students catch up to grade level.

Barry is not a hands-off superintendent. He is in the schools, helping serve meals and sitting at tables with students, where he leads by example.

Barry said students notice all sorts of things, including his Air Force Academy ring relating a lunch he spent with a group of seventh graders.

"They said, 'That is a really cool ring' and I said, 'You can get a ring like this,'" Barry said. "They said, 'How do I do that?' I said, 'You graduate from college, you'll get one of those rings.'"

Barry said encouraging students to set those kinds of goals is the vision he has for Aurora schools.

"The problem is not that we set the goals too high and don't met them, the problem is we set them too low and we do."

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