Vinson began his career in operations and logistics for Frito-Lay after graduating from Texas Tech University in Lubbock. In the job, he said he began to question if he wanted to do that for the rest of his life, and he began to think of careers where he would be able to work with kids. Vinson has been the superintendent for Wylie ISD since 2011, which has over 19,300 students and 20 campuses.
Vinson spoke with Community Impact Newspaper on Oct. 2 about his goals for CISD. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CISD is significantly larger than your previous ISD. Based on your experience as a leader, what skills are you bringing to Conroe ISD that you think will be beneficial?
My job is to listen and to learn and be the ambassador from whoever I represent. And ... if you learn that at the very beginning, everything else is going to become so much better. ... You learn what their needs are, how you can best serve them, and then bring the complexity of ... what is public education in Texas, to solve the problems that they uniquely have. ... It didn't matter if it was a small school where I mowed my own lawn, or the seventh-largest school district in Texas. And you know, the goal is for people to be proud of what they are and what they have.
What goals/objectives do you have for CISD to help improve student outcomes and teacher retention?
In my life, I've found a great deal of success in student achievement. I've never received less than an A in student performance on the [State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness] as a district. I don't talk a lot about assessment, because what I do is try to find ways to engage people and help them engage in the process of finding students who are going to be hopeful, engaged and have a high sense of well-being.
The first thing is that we're looking at our curriculum, and we're going to do a complete assessment of all of it. I always do that at the beginning, not because things are wrong, but just to understand it better, and then get experts to tell us, you know, what we can do better. Then the second thing that I've done is we'll be asking the trustees, asking principals, asking parents—if a kid walks across our stage and we hand them a diploma, what character skills, skills do we want them to possess? They'll make us proud to call them a graduate of Conroe ISD, and we're going to focus on those values and those characters built, because we feel like that's what's going to make us strong.
What are the biggest challenges and issues you think Conroe ISD faces?
Part of the process, when I onboarded any school district, I do what they call a staffing analysis. It's about efficiency. It's about comparison to other school districts that compare to us, that not necessarily they're more or less efficient, but about what they do and how they do it. ... I can give the taxpayer an analysis of where we compare in terms of that, because that's the biggest funding component of what we do.
What further measures, if any, would you take to enhance student safety here in Conroe ISD?
The most important thing is that parents send their children to us, and they want to know that their babies are safe. And through those processes, what are the standards, measures and systems that we're going to take to make sure that those kinds of things happen.
What we're going to look at is making sure that we're looking through those compliance measures, and processes [and] systems that make reasonable sense, and give measurable processes of safety. And then look at, you know, what the needs assessments are. I've not seen a need that's not been met in terms of school safety, that I would change and that we would do differently.
What do you look most forward to in CISD?
I want for every student, parent, employee, worker ... to think that we're the best in Texas and feel good about what we're doing. I want them to know that I care about them and that I have their best interest at heart. Then I want to hear their concerns and find ways to say that we care about them and that they feel like they're getting their needs met from whatever situation it is. So I look forward to knowing people and learning what their needs are and increasing their hope, and their hope is that tomorrow's gonna be better than today, and that we have the power to make that happen.
