New Cedar Rapids schools’ operation director to lead in new facility plan

CEDAR RAPIDS — Chad Schumacher is melding his vocations — having been an educator and construction administrator — as the new director of operations in the Cedar Rapids Community School District.

As operations director, Schumacher, 49, oversees facility planning; the transportation of nearly 5,000 students to and from school every day; building and grounds and custodial departments, which handles new construction; ongoing maintenance; daily cleaning; and safety and security of each school.

His first day on the job was Oct. 19, mere weeks before district voters turned down a $220 million school bond referendum. Former operations director Jon Galbraith left the district in September after he was hired as the chief financial and operating officer for the Linn-Mar Community School District.

“I feel a huge responsibility with the decisions we’re making out of this office,” Schumacher said. “I truly believe — and this is probably one of the reasons why I was motivated to take the job — we can have a huge impact on our kids by providing them with facilities that are top-notch and state of art.

“I really believe we can have a huge impact on Cedar Rapids by working with community and business leaders. That’s a lot of responsibility, but I think it’s also an exciting responsibility to be able to have a small piece of that puzzle as we move forward,” Schumacher said.

District leaders are working toward a goal of having every Cedar Rapids school be renovated or newly built by 2040, Schumacher said.

That starts by asking voters in the district to consider extending the Physical Plant and Equipment Levy for an additional 10 years. That’s an existing capital projects fund for the purchase and improvement of grounds, construction and remodeling of buildings, major equipment purchases including technology. This question will go to district voters in September 2024.

Stepping in to his role last month, which pays $130,000 annually, was “daunting” with the impending bond vote, Schumacher said. “That ship had already started sailing, then we put a whole new crew on it to get it to port,” said Schumacher, referring to himself and Cedar Rapids schools’ Superintendent Tawana Grover, who began in the district in April.

The proposal to bring the multimillion bond referendum to voters to fund improvements to the district’s middle and high schools began about a year earlier but under different leadership. Only about 38 percent of voters in the district were in favor of the bond during the Nov. 7 vote — far short of the 60 percent needed to pass it

Schumacher said the bond “could have been more successful if we had the time.” A new proposal is expected to go to voters in November 2025.

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Lessons in construction

Schumacher grew up in Cedar Rapids. His parents owned Schumacher Carpets, which continues operating today under new ownership. That was Schumacher’s first taste of the construction business.

As a child, he went to alternative kindergarten at Taylor Elementary School in Cedar Rapids — a building that is now Metro High School. From there, he was enrolled at the private Catholic St. Jude Elementary and graduated from LaSalle High School — which is now a middle school — in 1993.

He went to college at Coe and coached football at Xavier High School, which is what inspired him to become a teacher.

“The thing that drove me to education was the coaching piece, but that’s not where I landed,” Schumacher said.

After getting his teaching license, Schumacher worked as a government and psychology teacher at Linn-Mar High School before becoming the school’s associate principal in 2008. He also held roles in the Linn-Mar district as director of teaching and learning and principal of Linn Grove Elementary School.

In 2015, when the Linn-Mar district began a $30 million renovation and improvement project at Linn-Mar High School, he was asked by then-Superintendent Katie Mulholland to be the project manager.

He caught the eye of Larson Construction Company out of Independence — contractors on the Linn-Mar High School project — and was offered a job.

Schumacher took it, and ended up working on a lot of projects in K-12 school districts across Eastern Iowa, including renovating the more than 100-year-old Longfellow Elementary School in Iowa City.

Eventually, he moved on to be a construction administrator at OPN Architects and oversaw the construction of schools in the Cedar Rapids Community School District, including West Willow, Maple Grove and Trailside elementary schools.

All this experience has given him a “unique perspective” as he steps into the role of operations director for the 16,000-student Cedar Rapids school district.

“I can see the importance of having good facilities and the positive impact that can have on kids” and the district’s financial health, Schumacher said.

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Can bigger schools be better?

A facilities plan goal is for each elementary school in the Cedar Rapids Community School District to have the capacity for about 600 students, a number that can seem “a little scary” to families, Schumacher said.

Building larger schools alleviates operational challenges smaller schools present and provides consistency to staff and students — saving money that can be funneled back into educating kids, school leaders say.

One of these operational challenges is having only one section of a grade level in a school building, isolating teachers who don’t have peers to bounce ideas off and help them problem solve. Another challenge is having specials teachers — like for art, music and physical education — rotate between smaller schools, making it harder to establish relationships with students and burning time and money traveling.

“When we look at that size of school, we make sure students are in smaller communities, so it doesn’t feel so big,” Schumacher said. “My nieces go to school in Kansas City, and their elementary school has seven sections per grade. We’re talking thousands of kids in one elementary building.”

Buildings with that many students are designed to have “pods” or groups of four or five classrooms in a wing of the building with access to a common area, lockers and restrooms, so students don’t have to navigate the large school building on their own.

Schumacher said as plans are created to build new schools or renovate buildings, “each building’s story needs to be looked at.”

“We’re not saying ‘Let’s replace all of our historic buildings,’” Schumacher said. “I’m committed, and I think our district is committed, to looking at historic buildings and making sure we can keep some of those. Our plan for the bond was to renovate McKinley and Franklin (middle schools), and keep those in our inventory. That was purposeful because they had good bones, and we could have done a lot of neat things for those buildings.”

Then there’s schools like Harrison Elementary, which the school board has voted to demolish with a new school to be built on the site opening to students in August 2025.

Schumacher said decisions like those are made based on the size of the site where the building sits and the cost to renovate.

Improvements to Cedar Rapids elementary schools are being funded by Secure an Advanced Vision for Education (SAVE), an existing statewide school infrastructure sales and services tax.

As the district prepares to open Trailside Elementary School next fall, Schumacher said the district needs to be “good stewards” of the schools it replaces. Trailside will replace Arthur and Garfield elementary schools, which district officials have said will be repurposed with community input.

Schumacher said district officials need to “make sure those buildings don’t sit empty” and the buyers use them “for the right purpose.”

Schumacher has two daughters — a senior at the University of Iowa and a senior at Linn-Mar High School — with his wife, Lisa Schumacher, who is a teacher in the Linn-Mar Community School District.

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