AURORA | Just a few days after Harry Bull ended his tenure as superintendent of the Cherry Creek School District, he traded his suit and tie for attire befitting a man who had worked his last day for the foreseeable future.

Outfitted in shorts and a muted Hawaiian shirt, Bull sat down with the Sentinel to talk about his 34 year career ar CCSD, including the last five as its top dog. He announced his retirement in January, citing a desire to spend more time with his family and to take care of health concerns.

Bull said the idea of being retired from the school district that had been his home for the vast majority of his professional was something that feels like he’s pretty much conquered.

Of course, it’s only been five days.

“I finally made it out of bed and shaved,” Bull said jokingly. “When it will be different is come August. I think that’s when it will really hit (I’ve retired from Cherry Creek). Between now and then there’s still a lot of time. Like I said, I’ve never taken that amount of time away from work.

“If you think about it, for 55 years I’ve gone to school every fall. It started when I was 6 years old, and I never stopped.”

Bull said even though it had yet to truly hit him, it had been an honor to serve CCSD and its students over more than three decades.

“I have thoroughly enjoyed serving Cherry Creek,” Bull said.

Since he announced his retirement to the CCSD Board of Education, Bull said he worked with staff to ensure a smooth transition over to new Superintendent Scott Siegfried, who most recently served as deputy superintendent in CCSD. Having someone from CCSD taking over leadership will mean a less chaotic transition, Bull said, but he fully expected Siegfried to lead in his own way instead of trying to emulate Bull.

“It’s not that Scott won’t do things differently, Scott’s going to be Scott,” Bull said. “But in terms of continuity and direction and the like, it’s much less disruptive when you have someone from within who has been involved in the work.”

All kids needs to mean all kids

Bull said the district’s work to address the needs of every student, whether it was children with special needs, economically disadvantaged or students whose path wouldn’t lead them to college, is what he was most proud. He pointed to the Career and Innovation Academy, focusing on equity, and bringing in options for students who weren’t headed to college but instead wanted to have a career right after they graduated as things he believed would have a lasting impact on the district and its students.

“I’ve talked for years both inside and out of the district, if you’re going to use the word ‘all’, all needs to be all. And if you don’t mean all, then just stop using the word,” Bull said. “The truth is if you’re going to talk about all kids, then make sure what you’re doing is about all kids. And all kids in the context of learning. I think we’ve pushed hard for five years to really get those things in place.”

While Bull believed the district has achieved great things for its students, he said there never was truly a moment when he thought CCSD was in a perfect place.

“Excellence is a moving target. It always moves up. Every time you get close to it, it moves further up. And just for a fleeting moment it would have been really cool to have arrived. To just get there and go, woah this is it,” Bull said. “I put (success) in the context of all kids. We’ve improved the performance of our historically underrepresented kids. We’ve improved our performance of black students, of Latino students, our Native American students, our biracial kids. We’ve improved the performance of our kids with special needs. When you talk about kids that often are the ones that are ostracized, I think they fell, I hope they feel, more a part of (the community). That’s what I come back to with ‘all’. That’s the work I’m probably most proud of.”

The hardest days when you lead with the heart

The worst is when a student dies, Bull said. It’s something school district officials have had to confront with increasing unease, especially in Colorado. While Cherry Creek schools hasn’t been the home of school shooting, nearby schools and the Aurora theater shooting have caused endless pain.

But school shootings are not the only tragedies. Medical crises, car crashes, accidents, it’s a large school district and children die.

“Every time a kid lost their life, those were hard days. That’s real. There’s a lot of things you can recover from, but when you have a kid or a colleague, a teacher, someone who works for you in the district, when you get to that loss of life and you lead with your heart, those are really hard. They become personal,” Bull said. “The days that are most joyous are the antithesis of that. They’re the celebrations. It’s the cardboard challenge our foundation hosts. You sit down and have this conversation with this first grader about their project and you see that spark, you see that life. And you say to yourself, yeah this was a good day. The big things are nice …  but it’s when you have that one on one engagement and you see that spark, that life, that energy, that’s what special.”

A tenure not without controversy

During the last school year of Bull’s tenure, CCSD dealt with a string of stories of multiple instances of students being sexually assaulted by staff. The reports resulted in scrutiny of how the school district handles such issues and when parents of a school community should be informed.

“It’s easy to try and look at each instance and situation in isolation. And yet there was a collective (of incidents) this year that opened the door and kept the door open. We currently live in a time right now, in my opinion, where people can be very critical and in the discourse we’ve lost civility. There’s almost at times a hostility. And that becomes self perpetuating. It fuels it,” Bull said. “And so I think in retrospect, could there have been an opportunity to have done something differently? The answer in every instance, in the good and the bad, is yes. What I know is that we, I, made the best decision at the time with the information we had. And when you’re in the midst of making those decisions, you’re not afforded the perspective of hindsight.”

One issue that CCSD faced scrutiny over was reporting instances at the end of the year to the Colorado Department of Education. Bull had initial conversations with the CDE on how districts should balance student privacy rights with reporting information on incidents that hadn’t been litigated through the court system. But even with clearer direction, Bull said the idea that one-size fits all policy can solve every issue, whether it’s the horrendous acts of a staff member or the death of a student, is a fallacy.