Success Stories

Ron Duerring
Superintendent, Kanawha County Schools, West Virginia

“How Can You Question Giving Kids Hope for the Future?”

When Ron Duerring, Superintendent of Schools in Kanawha County, West Virginia, decided to become a representitive for his school district to College Summit, in 2001, it was a logical extension of his life-long commitment to student success.

Listening to Dr. Duerring, you can feel and appreciate the passion in his voice. It is at once gentle, befitting his time as an elementary school teacher and principal, and, at the same time, forceful. His ideas pour out like a cable unspooling. Dr. Duerring sometimes stops himself, in full gallop, and admits that if he doesn’t stop now, he could go on forever.

Like a true visionary, Dr. Duerring has a principle and an ideal that drives him: that the children in his county come first. “Everything we do, every dollar we spend, every policy we adopt is for the children.” When he addresses politicians and parents and board members he says: “I don’t want to sound mean, but I really don’t want to hear what you think. I want to hear what your children think.”

His voice takes on a new urgency when he begins to discuss what it will take for every child to see his or her future, to climb out of the cycle of poverty, and to experience happiness and fulfillment in life. Of the 28,500 children in the Kanawha County school system, fully half are eligible for free lunch. Duerring explains that many of these children do not even think of going to college because there is no talk at home about post-secondary education and they believe that they cannot afford higher education. His message is simple: (1) you can go, and (2) there is money out there for you.

To match his message with action, he chose to partner with College Summit. After meeting members of the College Summit team, he was convinced that the organization met his personal benchmark: a sincere desire and commitment to help each child succeed. “I’m hard,” he says, “it takes a lot to convince me that you really care about children. But when you do, I want to work with you.”

Duerring looks for results. He needs to see not only the impact on one student but also that impact scaled to reach every child. In fact, Duerring’s desire to provide his team with concrete data and results drove College Summit to expand its scorecard for use as a management tool for all its partner schools. Each spring, Duerring sits down with the Kanawha County principals and their College Enrollment Scorecards© to evaluate their success in enrolling more students in college. When one school demonstrates more improvement than another, Duerring asks the higher performing principal to share his or her secret with the others.

Of course, it isn’t all about the numbers. When Duerring first visited a College Summit Workshop and heard students read from their essays, he was convinced that it could root out the passion he sees in every child. He was so moved by the honesty and the courage of the students’ essays that he encouraged all of his board members to attend a Workshop and see and hear for themselves. As Duerring asks, “How can you question giving kids hope for the future?”

Choosing to work with College Summit was one of many visionary decisions in a career focused on doing the right thing. When Duerring saw that African-American students in his district were continuing to underperform, he reached out to the African-American community to talk about the issues. Together, they started a program called MAAC (Maximizing the Achievement of African-American Children). By turning the conversation back to the desired outcome for the children, MAAC was able to create bridges of support and consequently Kanawha’s African-American children have experienced steady, significant gains in achievement.

Duerring knows what keeps him going: “It is every child that comes through that school door with that glint in their eyes. We must help the potential that they have. And when we do, you see them light up. The whole world changes. It’s like everything is colorful now. I can’t stand to see kids not being successful.”