On April 1, 2026, there was an ISD 200 Community Collaboration meeting in the lecture hall at
Hastings High School. An estimated 70 people attended the meeting—a blend of students, parents, teachers, school administration, community leaders, school board members, and media.
Kari Gorr, community education director of Hastings Public Schools, facilitated the meeting. The framework of the meeting was set from Dr. Dave Webb’s book, Homerun Leadership.
According to Dr. Webb’s bio from the Homerun Leadership webpage, prior to retirement, Dr. Webb was the superintendent of South St. Paul Public Schools for twelve years—beginning his career as a Spanish teacher at the Stillwater Public Schools before serving as a high school principal for Fridley Public Schools. Dr. Webb attended the Collaboration meeting.
In the meeting, there were three questions presented. The attendees had the opportunity to respond anonymously through iPads or smartphones, and the responses were immediately available on a screen at the front of the room.
The three questions were:
1) What is working well in the relationship between Hastings Public Schools, the School Board, and the community?
2) Where are there opportunities to strengthen communication, understanding, or connection moving forward?
3) What ideas do you have that could help continue to build strong relationships between the School Board and the Hastings community?
At the end of each question, AI technology was used to generate clusters of answers based on theme.
For what was working well, response themes were: improved communication and regular meetings.
For the areas that need strengthening: trust and respect issues, and communication gaps.
After the Collaboration meeting, KDWA connected with various attendees for their reaction to the meeting.
One participant said:
“I was a participant at the meeting this evening, and I thought it was a great way to bring the community together. I really appreciated the way that the format gave everyone an opportunity to give their opinions. It also gave some time for collaboration with your neighbors, and I feel like we left with some action steps on how to bring the community together so that we improve our schools.”
Collaboration meeting facilitator Kari Gorr offers the reason behind the format.
“It was my pleasure to facilitate the community collaboration meeting tonight. It was a unique opportunity to allow multiple voices to be heard, and we did that through using an application and using the IROD system from Homerun Leadership, which was written by Dave Webb, and I thought that tonight went really well. We had lots of comments come through on each of our questions. We had well over 100 responses, and it’s really encouraging to see what we might be able to do for next steps.”
The number one thing I heard for feedback was that people really liked when they submitted answers that it was anonymous, so people felt the freedom to share their voice. Was that the whole point of the process?
“Absolutely intentional. Really, what we want to do is create communication that’s open and honest and have, like, a two-way street so that we can hear what each of our parents, community members, staff, you name it, we want to hear those voices and bring them all together. So yes, it was very much intentional, and it was also very intentional to leave those comments up on a large screen so that we had full transparency on what’s being said and also allows people to build on the ideas that they’re seeing. It really kind of triggers some thoughts for everybody in the audience.”
ISD 200 Director and Treasurer Mark Zuzek is grateful for the leadership and attendees of the Collaboration meeting.
“So, there’s several subcommittees on the board, and one of them is community collaboration. I was really impressed with the work that the community collaboration subcommittee did between our last meetings and this meeting, and I’m proud of what they did and the crowd that showed up tonight. I was very excited to see not just the number of people that showed up, but there was a salient energy in the room about problem solving at a deep level, trying to fix things, trying to understand things at a deep level. And I’m excited to see where we go from here.”
Author Dr. Dave Webb highlights the guidelines from his book, Homerun Leadership, and offers insight into his methods of productive communication.
“I have three key frameworks in the book. I have a problem-solving framework to accelerate team decision-making. I have another framework which is all focused on innovation and improvement. That’s the framework we use tonight because they really wanted to innovate and improve that community collaboration and connect, right? And then I have a third framework, which is really focusing on restorative practices and conflict management. I wrote the book four years ago, but this month, I’m actually just launching the software that’s perfect, example, superintendents or CEOs can use with their organizations. And they did it masterfully. So they, everyone, logged in, and the first question came up: What’s working well with our collaboration with our school board staff and community? And people had like, 100 positive things to say, and then they flipped the coin over… So in my dissertation, I studied all the research of great leadership systems, and I found this pattern that they all follow the same core. It’s always the same four steps. But I didn’t know it when I started doing my doctorate work 20 years ago. Question two is, what’s not working as well as it could be with all of our community connection and collaboration? And step three, the science that it always follows, is now, how can we make our community connection and collaboration even better? Because we’re doing good things. Every place has challenges; every business, every church, every school district has challenges. We have to acknowledge those and then brainstorm; how can we make our collaboration even better? How can we improve from where we are to get to a better spot? And that’s what my technology does.” Dr. Webb further explains, “And so tonight, in five minutes, we were able to ask that question and get 100 responses, and then, now with AI, you can click it and no longer have flip charts and Post-it notes, and you’re trying to group things into themes.”
Well, it was a great meeting, and the number one thing that people were giving for this kind of format in a meeting, anonymous responses, people felt safe to give an honest answer.
“Yeah, my app developer, he said, ‘Oh no, you have to put a name with a comment.’ I said, ‘No, wait, we can’t put any names because people won’t participate when they won’t feel safe.’ And so one gentleman said, ‘This really felt safe tonight, a safe place for us to all share,’ and that meant the world to me.”
[Click the soundbite to listen to the broadcast.]