Dr. Daniel Hile talks to Reporter about CRT, gender identity issues & school safety
By STU CLAMPITT
Noblesville Schools’ new superintendent, Dr. Daniel Hile, was hired by the Board of Trustees with a unanimous vote on Wednesday evening. Hile spoke to The Reporter about what brought him to this community, and he answered questions about some difficult topics in modern education.
Hile
Hile’s path to Noblesville
Hile said he began his educational career in the music department teaching choir and show choir for eight years. He then moved to a position as assistant principal in Middlebury Community Schools at Northridge High School and later as superintendent of Smith-Green Community Schools.
“When Dr. Niedermeyer stated her intent to retire earlier this year, I felt kind of called to look at this opportunity,” Hile said. “Obviously I’m very glad I did. Noblesville is such an amazing district. It’s a well-known top-tier district and one that has so many exciting things going on that I’m just very humbled that I am even sitting here speaking with you today.”
Hile told The Reporter each of his moves within the education system felt like things he was called to do: First to move from direct education to the administration in the role of assistant principal, then to a superintendent role in northeastern Indiana, and now to the Noblesville district.
Hile spoke highly of the legacy of Dr. Niedermeyer, noting that when he asks people in the community what they think needs to be improved, most people struggle to answer. He credits that to Niedermeyer’s work.
“She’s done so many great things here and in the district already,” Hile said. “In the first year or so my focus is going to be on relationships and getting to know everyone in this community as best I can. I want to fully understand what the norms are here. How does this community operate and what is important to everyone here? I am not a leader who thinks my job is to come in here and make a bunch of changes, especially in a district like Noblesville where things are already going so well.”
Critical Race Theory
“If I am being honest, when this first became a topic a year or so ago, I think I speak for most of my peers in saying we were kind of caught off guard in a lot of ways because it was something that none of us even knew what it was,” Hile said. “We all had to do some learning right alongside our communities.”
Now that he and other educators have learned about Critical Race Theory and seen it become both a controversial and misunderstood topic, Hile told The Reporter in clear terms that he does not see a place for it in Noblesville schools.
“From everything I understand about what Critical Race Theory is, is that it is not something that is taught in our public schools, and it shouldn’t be,” Hile said. “It is a very advanced way of taking a look at society and it is not something that public schools should be doing. It does not match our academic standards here in the state of Indiana, so it is not something that we teach nor is it anything I have any intention of having in our Noblesville schools either.”
Gender Identity
When asked about the challenges surrounding the debate over how to handle the gender identity discussion, Hile said it is a complicated issue and stressed that he wants to learn what Noblesville wants, rather than coming to his new role with a preset agenda.
“As a newcomer to the Noblesville community I will need to see where things already are,” Hile said. “This is not a topic many folks have spoken to me about yet, so I have a lot of learning to do about the work that has already been done and what are the norms and expectations of this community on that.”
Hile said in this area, as in others, his focus is about the quality of education and making schools a safe place for kids to be who they are.
“At the end of the day, regardless of what the specific approaches will be, I would hope that our focus always remains on making sure that every child who attends our schools and walks through those doors every day feels welcome, feels loved, feels cared for, feels accepted,” Hile said. “I know there are a lot of other factors in this particular issue, and a community can feel very strongly on one side or the other or sometimes right down the middle. But at the end of the day I hope that we work through those conversations and see where things go nationally. I hope that we don’t lose sight of the fact that we still want children to feel loved. We still want children to feel safe. They should feel like they can come to school ready to learn and not feel that they’ve been pushed aside or made to feel less.”
Hile noted that he had not given The Reporter a specific answer and said that was because he wants to handle this, and other issues, in the way the community wants them handled.
“At the end of the day, different communities see this issue very differently and I think we all know that,” Hile told The Reporter. “I think it would be presumptive of me to give a strong answer one way or the other before I truly understand what conversations have already happened and where we are in Noblesville right now.”
School safety
“I don’t think there is a school in the United States where school safety isn’t at the front of their minds,” Hile said. “Different cities have different perspectives on what that means and what they are ready to put into place or not. At my previous district, we had taken a pretty hard look at school safety. We made a lot of improvements to our facilities and to a lot of those physical things that I know a lot of schools have looked at and changed a lot of procedures.”
According to Hile, Noblesville is one of the districts that many others in the state have looked to as a leader in school safety.
“A lot of the conversations that happened right here in this community impact what the rest of us did and is what we began to follow,” Hile said. “We all learned a lot from that unfortunate incident that the Noblesville community had to go through. I’m very excited to get here and continue learning from the inside on some of those conversations that have happened, what are some of the lessons that were learned.”
Director of Marketing and Communications Marnie Cook told The Reporter, “Since the school shooting, we have implemented over 50 different safety enhancements for Noblesville schools, including being one of only a few districts with full time NPD resource officers in all of our schools. These enhancements are thanks to funding from the 2018 community referendum.”
Click here to see a full list of those enhancements.
Hile told The Reporter several times that he wants to hear from people in the community and build good relationships with the people and organizations here. Once his work email and work phone number are assigned and publicly available, The Reporter will pass them along.
Superintendent Hile posted a public video message to his new community on Wednesday evening. You can watch it at this link.