ESCANABA, Mich. (WZMQ) – The superintendent of the Delta Schoolcraft Intermediate School District (ISD) is retiring after years of dedicated service to lead a statewide education resource.
After ten years at the ISD and 34 in education, Doug Leisenring is moving on to a new chapter.
“It’s been something,” Leisenring said. “You had the global pandemic in the middle of it. You’ve had an increase in resources provided to school districts in Michigan and ISDs. It’s been a great experience, seeing us be able to grow and provide more services for the local districts.”
However, this is not his goodbye to education. In fact, he wasn’t planning to retire for a few more years. Rather, Leisenring has been chosen to become the project director for a new program called MiGreatDataLake.
“MiGreatDataLake is going to be an online storage system for student academic, behavioral, and assessment data,” Leisenring explained. “There’s some really talented technologists in Michigan and people at Amazon Web Services that are building the infrastructure, and they wanted someone with an administrative background to lead the project. The goal is to get all students’ data to just flow seamlessly into this data lake, and then you’ll be able to use a variety of tools to make it easier for school districts to analyze their data and determine what interventions they should have in place for their kids.”
He says MiGreatDataLake will bring those tools, which are often unaffordable for many districts, right into teachers’ classrooms.
“They’ll be able to use real language and use AI tools to do things like, ‘Look at my fourth-grade math scores’ and ‘What interventions should I try? Give me the names of other schools that have those interventions in place’ to analyze their data in a system that’s already set up for them,” said Leisenring.
That means even though he is leaving his office at the ISD, Leisenring will still be helping schools in Michigan, including ones in the U.P.
“The best part of working in the ISD is you’re a problem-solver,” he said. “You’re basically helping every kid from birth to age 26 in some cases. It’s really fun to find economies of scale where like, these three districts are having the same challenge, so if I can put some personnel in place, that can help them all address that challenge together. Now instead of doing something for eight districts, I’m doing something for several hundred.”
Leisenring will start his new position with MiGreatDataLake on July 1. The ISD has hired a consultant from the Michigan Association of Schoolboards to help find his replacement. The goal is to have the ISD’s next superintendent in place in May.
Until then, Leisenring says he will treasure his remaining time at the Delta Schoolcraft Intermediate School District.
“It’s bittersweet,” he said. “The hard part of leaving is just we have such a good team right now, from the administrators and the school board to our professional staff and support staff. It’s fun working with 100-plus people who come to work every day like, ‘What can we do to improve education for kids?’ That’s a fun place to work.”
