It’s 7:45 in the morning in Stevensville, Montana. While a lot of superintendents are at their desks with coffee and a budget, Jon Konen is walking into a kindergarten room. Then a second-grade room. Then a high school English class. Same question in each one:
“What can I do to help support you?”
He’s been asking it, classroom by classroom, most mornings, for the better part of 28 years in education.
The man doing the walking
Jon Konen leads Stevensville School District: roughly 1,000 students, K through 12, on a single campus of three buildings in western Montana. He came up through the assistant principal’s office, the role that, by his own account, taught him the most about discipline patterns and about the classrooms that somehow never generated them.
A few months back he published a book, and in it he called a second-grade teacher in his district, Beth Schreiber, a “super spreader.” He didn’t mean it as a passing compliment. He meant a specific kind of educator: the kind whose practice lifts the culture of every room they walk into. Then he did the thing most superintendents don’t do once they spot someone like that: he moved her into a district leadership role and reorganized parts of the district around what she was already doing.
A leader who builds the systems on purpose
The morning walk-through isn’t a leadership theory. It’s the daily mechanism that makes the rest of Jon’s work possible.
When he started walking into Beth’s classroom each morning, he saw something the office data had been hinting at for a while: she almost never sent students down to him. Her kids were tightly bonded to her, and she could read their triggers before anything escalated. “There’s something else to her,” he remembers thinking. The walk-through showed him what the metrics couldn’t.
That instinct runs through how he leads the whole district. Jon treats big decisions as what he calls teaming exercises: his admin team comes together, works through structured protocols, and lands on a call collectively. As Beth puts it, “It’s not a top-down structure. It is a collective communal structure. And nothing is ever complete. Everything always gets to remain flexible and fluid.”
A lot of school leadership runs on inheritance: you take the systems you’re handed, work the calendar you’re given, and react when a crisis lands. Jon builds the systems on purpose instead. He runs PLC+ across the district so the collaboration goes vertical as well as horizontal, middle school teachers connecting with high school teachers, not just with each other. He’s brought the Utah Dignity Index, a one-to-eight rubric first built to score the tone of state legislators, to his school board and parts of his elementary staff. He reads Patrick Lencioni closely on organizational health, and he can tell you exactly why a school’s response to a crisis reveals everything about how healthy it really is: “You can definitely tell the health of an organization,” he says, “by digging into the decision-making process when there is a catastrophic event.”
He’s a Brené Brown reader who leads vulnerably. He’ll tell you he doesn’t have all the answers, and he asks first. (That posture, leading from trust rather than authority, is its own discipline; this conversation on radical trust in teaching and leadership sits right next to it.) He believes in restorative circles and is working to bring them back into adult staff life, not only into classrooms. And he talks openly about the skeletons in the closet most districts carry (the unhealed staff trauma from past administrations and old incidents) and the slow, deliberate work of opening those doors.
Why he leads this way
Twenty-eight years in the work go a long way toward explaining Jon’s approach. He’s watched the profession get heavier. His wife is a high school special education teacher, so he’s seen up close, in his own house, what burnout does to someone who carries the day home with her.
That’s the part that worries him most, for young teachers walking in, and for veterans who’ve stayed long enough to watch education reinvent itself three or four times underneath them. He doesn’t frame it as a workforce-development problem. To him it’s person by person, a reality he’s responsible, as the district’s leader, for noticing.
He’s been in districts where it went the other way, where the staff trauma never got addressed and the next crisis cracked open every old wound. “All of a sudden we’re not just dealing with what’s in front of us,” he says. “We’re dealing with the three or four skeletons that never got dealt with before.”
So he doesn’t look away from it. He walks into the preschool classrooms, holds a roomful of four-year-olds for five minutes while their teacher steps out, and lets the modeling do its quiet work. “That servant leadership, it really is his leadership style,” Beth says. “And it delineates down to really all of us.” He’s not the only district leader proving culture can be built this deliberately; a Denver superintendent hit record graduation rates the same way, by building coherence first.
Where Breathe for Change comes in
Jon’s district has folded in a number of Breathe for Change practices, mostly through Beth, who completed the training and now weaves Human Intelligence practices into how the district teaches, meets, and works through conflict. Her curriculum role gives those practices a structural home. Jon’s leadership gives them district-wide permission to spread.
Jon himself isn’t a Breathe for Change alum. He’s the kind of school leader the work is built to stand alongside: someone who already gets that culture is the foundation of teaching and learning, and who’s hunting for the daily practices that turn that belief into something a teacher and a seven-year-old can both do tomorrow morning.
What you can borrow from Jon’s practice
The question worth taking from Jon isn’t am I doing enough? It’s simpler: what’s the first question I ask each day, and who gets to hear it?
And here’s what stands out: almost none of his practice costs anything. The morning walk-through, the teaming protocol, the five minutes holding a preschool room: none of it needs a budget line. It needs a leader willing to do it.
What it buys is a district where teachers stop carrying the day home alone, where a second-grade teacher doesn’t have to choose between staying in her classroom and leaving the profession, and where a seven-year-old learns, that year, that the adults in their building ask each other for help.
Jon Konen is the superintendent of Stevensville School District; his recent book is the source of the “super spreader” framing. School leaders and educators thinking about how to build this kind of culture district-wide can begin with the practices themselves at the next free TeacherCon.
Want the rest of the story? Listen to Jon Konen and Beth Schreiber with Dr. Ilana Nankin on A Work of Heart, the Breathe for Change podcast, including the morning Beth’s second graders led a wish circle for her healing.
