Tim Frazier Steps Down After 20 Years Of Morning Greetings At Southampton Intermediate School

Twenty years ago, students and parents arriving at Southampton Intermediate School for the start of the school year were greeted — literally — by a new face and a new approach to education that focused on better, more personal engagement of students and their parents.

Principal Tim Frazier started his tenure at SIS, standing outside the school building every morning, bidding a good morning to students and waving to parents.

On Wednesday morning, a new generation of parents, students and faculty, paraded past that same school entrance to say good morning one last time to Mr. Frazier, who is retiring at the official end of the school year next week.

Perhaps it was the most painful of ironies that an administrator who anchored his philosophy in education with in-person and up-close connections with students, was unable to conclude his career in quite the same way, thanks to the coronavirus epidemic and the early derailment of the school year.

While the epidemic and how it will force a retooling of education across the country — in both a short-term, nuts-and-bolts manner, and in a more lasting systemic paradigm shift — is consuming the final days of his tenure, Mr. Frazier says the last 20 years have seen dramatic changes in the approach to education that has made the educational system in the district better.

From a district that was mired in aging approaches to teaching that were only just being discovered to be failing many students, Southampton has become a school system focused on better engagement of students and increasingly on building the reading skills that are the critical foundation of sound learning.

“When I first came in, it was the traditional approach: you sit in class and you listen and you go through a body of knowledge an then you are tested on it — and the amount of learning that was coming out of that is questionable,” the retiring administrator said in an interview on Tuesday. “We had a lot of angry students who felt disenfranchised when it came to their education. It comes down to how we treat each other. There’s a difference between teaching them and engaging them in the content and finding ways to make the content meaningful to them.”

With a deep background as the longtime principal of an elementary school in his native Virginia, Mr. Frazier saw students coming into the intermediate school lagging in reading skills and set out to improve the way reading was taught. Through partnerships with organizations like the Columbia Teachers College and Tri-State Consortium, an educational assessment program, the faculty at SIS and the district’s other schools pored over their teaching methods to find ways to improve its programming foundation.

Mr. Frazier said he also spurred a shift toward improved diversity among the school’s faculty, so that it was more representative of the racial and cultural diversity of the student body. He said that former Superintendent Linda Bruno was a particularly strong mentor for him, championing diversity and improving reading instruction.

Mr. Frazier, who is also in his 10th year as a member of the school board for the Springs School District, said that the epidemic has laid bare the fact that his and the district’s years of efforts at improving its connection to its diverse community still has a long way to go. Despite the school’s abundant resources, which allow it to provide tablet computers to all students, educating students remotely proved to be an exercise of vastly unequal results across the student body, he said.

“In school, we have the support systems and the ways to deal with the needs of each student, but when they go home, kids have such different home experiences and I don’t think we fully realized that until this happened,” Mr. Frazier said. “There’s such an inequity in the ability to do this kind of learning. It’s really been challenging.”

It has also spotlighted the teachers that have been able to harness their students’ attention to learning when they are home have seen better results — something Mr. Frazier said he saw with his own East Hampton High School senior daughter, Grace.

The epidemic will represent a tipping point for education around the country, he surmised, that will have to send the nation’s education system in search of other paths in approaching the balance of education of children from different walks of life.

What school will even look like in the fall, or maybe even late summer, remains a great unknown. Discussions among all of the region’s school district administrators are ranging through broad catalog of possible approaches: from starting school in August in anticipation of having to adjourn in late fall to dodge a “second wave” of the epidemic, to bringing in smaller numbers of students for on-campus instruction on alternating days interspersed with remote instruction, administrators have been left to spitball possibilities until the state is able to provide more focused guidance on what is possible as the epidemic runs its course. Educators across the country are looking to school systems in other countries that saw their epidemics peak earlier and have now begun returning to new versions of old routines.

With so many balls in the air, and the future of education suddenly in the mixing bowl, Mr. Frazier said he still harbors no regrets that he had announced his retirement before the pandemic hit. In fact, his next act, he hopes, may be even more relevant in the new world that will emerge in the wake of the COVID-19 tumult. His wife, Tracey, is still a teacher at the Springs School, so East Hampton will remain home.

His exact plans are still unclear, but he said he may pursue work in the non-profit sector.

As for the district he leaves behind, he said the future is bright. Superintendent Nick Dyno is intent on redefining the school curriculum and instruction program to improve engagement with students through small-group instruction and cooperative learning that focuses on understanding and teaching to the strengths and weaknesses of each individual student.

“It’s something this district is really getting better at doing,” he said. “For a long time, I thought we were stuck in a rut about how to provide instruction. We were talking about things but Tri-State showed us we really weren’t getting results. It is really where our district leadership is focused now. It’s exciting.”