Blesener: ‘It has never been a job for me.’

Community Education director retires after 40 years in profession that allowed him to lead on many fronts

by Jim Boyle
Editor
Charlie Blesener wrapped up his 40-year career in community education with the same youthful presence he brought to the job as a 22-year-old in Litchfield and a 31-year-old in Elk River.
District 728’s director of community engagement and community education worked late on his second to last day as he finalized a few things he was working on.

He also helped facilitate a new development in the Outdoor Nature Explore Center at the Handke Family Center. A bison is being added to the educational space created for children, Blesener exuberantly told the Star News the evening of June 29. His last day in his directorship was June 30 after more than 29 years in the Elk River Area School District.
“It has never been a job for me,” Blesener said. “It has been a fun, challenging thing. It has been a career, not a job.
“It’s really a blessing to be able to say that after all these years.”

Seeds planted in hometown of Tracy
Blesener, 62, grew up in Tracy, a small but progressive southwestern Minnesota town of 2,500 people with a good school district. In the summer, there was a swimming pool and some youth programming to keep kids busy.
“It was mostly baseball, baseball and baseball,” Blesener joked. “Oh, and an art guy taught some arts and crafts. A couple coaches were running a track program. And, of course, there were swimming lessons at the pool.”
Neighboring communities would come to Tracy by the bus load to take swimming lessons. Blesener felt a sense of pride for his community.
He graduated from Tracy High School in 1971 and went off to college in Collegeville at St. John’s University to pursue an English degree. He would someday teach history to fuel his academic interests and coach to answer to his competitive desires, or so he thought.
It wasn’t that many history classes in when he realized that was not his desired path.
So what was?
It was between his sophomore and junior year something significant happened to dislodge the first notion of what it might be. Back in his hometown, Tracy hired its first community education director.
“That summer program all of a sudden looked like it was on steroids. There were way more opportunities,” Blesener said, recalling his wide-eyed reaction. “The schools were open in the evening. They’re running the wood shop. Everybody was buzzed.”
Blesener, impressed, talked to the guy bringing all this change. He was as physical education major from St. Cloud State University of all things. He didn’t know much about community education, but SCSU was going through a certification process for a parks and recreation degree.
“That kind of piqued my interest,” Blesener said.
The pace of life soon quickened, as he met Kathleen, the girl he would marry; his career aspiration now had a focus and he needed to finish his schooling.

He powered on with his pursuit of an English degree at St. John’s, figuring that was developing his written and verbal communication skills. He also began to chase down a parks and recreation degree through a tri-college program involving St. John’s, St. Cloud State University and one other school and got married before the start of his senior year at St. John’s.
By the time he was done at SJU in 1974 he practically had enough credits for both degrees, but he had to gain residency at SCSU and finish a few things, including an internship.
He did his internship the fall of 1975 in his hometown. By this time Tracy had hired a new community education director, a guy with a strong record of park and recreation background from Mankato State.
The Bleseners’ first son was born in October 1975 while Charlie was still doing his internship. He graduated from SCSU in February 1976.
He was home for Christmas in December 1975 when he learned of three job openings, including one in Anoka-Hennepin for a building level position, a community education directorship in Belle Plain and another in Litchfield, but it looked like the window of opportunity had closed on this one.
He called up the superintendent and got permission to send in his stuff though the deadline had passed. He applied to all three districts, but heard back from one.
He got an interview in Litchfield on a Saturday morning. It was with the mayor of Litchfield, school superintendent, the city clerk, the school board chair and two city council and a two school board members.
What Blesener may not have realized is there was a war of philosophies underway related to city recreation and community education. For Litchfield, they were on their second director, but they weren’t sure they wanted to continue their little experiment called community education.
That would be news to Blesener after he got the job. It was delivered by the superintendent who doubled as his supervisor. He needed Blesener to convince community leaders and public of its worth. He started there March 1, 1976, and he has been working in community education ever since.

Never a job, always a career
“The idea of community ed 101 is involving local people, making local decisions, engaging them in what’s going on and listening,” Blesener has said countless times. “It’s looking around for problems and trying to figure out how to solve them.”
That approach helped him as a community education director and also served him well of late as the director of community engagement in District 728 that gave him a seat at Superintendent Mark Bezek’s cabinet table.

Beginnings in Litch’
Blesener started an advisory council in Litchfield with his staff of three that included him. He had someone hired with money from the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act and a secretary. The state allowed levy dollars to serve as seed money for his program. Directors were hired with this money. They had to have the programs and services that came with a fee structure to support what they did. It has been that way ever since, giving wind to entrepreneurial wings of school districts.
In Litchfield, his unit started community theater (that’s still going strong), health fairs, preschool fairs and more.
“We had a fun time,” Blesener said.
He was there until 1987.

In 1983 the advisory council there submitted a nomination for community education director of the year, unbeknownst to him. He ended up winning it.
“That was pretty sweet,” Blesener said. “I still have the plaque here.”
Blesener had critics to overcome before he was able to win any awards, though. One of the most vocal was in Kingston, about 17 miles away from Litchfield and barely inside of the district boundaries.
“Everything was happening in Litchfield,” Blesener said. “They were wondering ‘what about us,’ including a frequent letter writer to the town’s newspaper. The man was very critical of government spending and he wasn’t seeing anything happening in Kingston. And what, if any, educational value was there to this increasing expenditure of tax dollars.
“The superintendent keyed me in to him, and I went and talked to him,” Blesener recalled. “The man was in his 70s, and he made a good point.”
Kingston had a ball field, a tennis court along the river and a Legion club but no school. Blesener started scheduling programs, classes and activities out there and things smoothed out over time. By the time Blesener left, a newspaper columnist who had been a critic, too, wrote rather positively about him.
He prefaced the column saying Blesener was a nice enough guy, but he couldn’t understand what he was doing in community education when he first met him. But by column’s end he came around to say he and the CETA worker, a local kid, had assembled a pretty neat program that added a lot to the quality of life in Litchfield. Blesener had converted a significant non-believer.

Banded together
To help them grow in their profession, Blesener and other directors formed a regional group that gathered monthly to swap horror stories between places like Litchfield, Dassel-Cokato, Glencoe, Willmar and Hutchinson.
One of the directors in the group was Denny Carlson, who went on to take a community education director post in Elk River in 1980.
“We said goodbye to Denny,” Blesener said. “I didn’t even know where Elk River was.”
But Carlson would always talk positively about it when he would reconnect with him at conferences. Seven years later he had accepted the Anoka-Hennepin position as its community education director, and Elk River was now open.

“I was definitely intrigued and interested,” Blesener said. “I ended up applying.
“That was a hard decision. We had a lot of friends and by then we had three kids.”
Blesener also interviewed in St. Francis but bowed out in hopes the more attractive job in Elk River would materialize.
“Elk River there was the old downtown,” Blesener recalled. “The theater down there. A Super Value. And one of the first things I saw was the pit.”
Blesener made it through the first round and was called back for a second interview with Superintendent George Zabee and Assistant Superintendent David Flannery. The whole process had delayed by a hunting trip Zabee took out west, but he had a 3.5 hour interview.
He and another finalist were passed on to the School Board, and Blesener was picked. He started January 1987.
Carlson was glad to see Blesener get it.
“I had no doubt he would be a good fit and people would respond to his leadership,” Carlson said. “He had already established himself as a great community educator. He has a great sense of humor, is a problem solver, a team player, collaborative, innovative and experimental with his ideas.”
Blesener’s career spanned 40 years: 11 years in Litchfield and 29 in Elk River.
Former Superintendent David Flannery said Carlson, with the leader he had been, was a tough act to follow, but the table was set well for someone like Blesener who clearly wanted to come in and make a difference.
“What started as a recreational program plus some hobbies into what it is today where the wide-ranging needs of preschool and postsecondary school populations were taken seriously and served, everything from diagnosing learning needs of infants to addressing the driving needs of senior citizens are now integral parts of public education,” Flannery said.
Litchfield prepared Blesener well for Elk River. Kingston was a trial run on reaching out to communities like Zimmerman and Rogers that didn’t have the same access to services. Here, however, there was provincialism unlike he had ever seen.
Blesener has been one of the architects of alliances and partnerships with the public to break through the walls of provincialism. The district is now decentralized and the latest building project aims to make buildings across the district comparable to one another with additions of gym space, theaters and early childhood spaces.
“For a long time district leadership was stuck on the idea of build one big high school east of town, but lost several referendums trying to do so,” Blesener said.
Over the years there have been 20 bond or levy elections in 29 years. With the two “yes” votes in 2014, the district has a 16-14 record at the polls.
“We’re above .500, which is more than I can say for the Twins,” Blesener said, chuckling.
Successful referendums came as a result of educators and community members pulling together, Flannery said.
“Charlie’s work and insight made a ‘yes’ vote more likely, more often,” Flannery said. “He probably doesn’t get much credit for levy success, but, in my opinion, he should.
“He understood the complexities of our complex five-county, multiple-community district and he helped the rest of us understand it, too,” Flannery said.
Blesener served a population of about 10,000 in Litchfield, and there were about 22,000 people in the Elk River Area School District when he arrived. That number has tripled by career’s end.
He has excelled at looking out for all populations, from “womb to tomb” or “cradle to grave” as he has said over the years.
“We started with the idea that public schools belonged to the community and that everyone should be able to get use out of these tax-funded facilities,” Carlson told the Star News.
An advisory council has been a key ingredient to success, Blesener said, adding the people he has worked with over the years have been the driver.
Early Childhood Family Education was in its infancy in the 1980s. School readiness came on the scene while Blesener was in Elk River.
He started an adult Basic Education and ECFE in Litchfield. Here, he was tasked with growing them. And using the entrepreneurial spirit of community education, he started a school-age program from scratch in the Elk River Area School District.
Blesener became the director of community engagement about five years ago, a position that was a natural progression for his career, according to Superintendent Mark Bezek.
Blesener facilitated community cafes that led to the creation of the district’s strategic plan documents, and he became the keeper of the plan and eventually was tasked with heading up communications, too.
As he departs, there are more than 400 employees working in District 728’s Community Education program. The district serves 800 families with school-age care in the EdVenture program.
In addition to the core programs, there are also screenings, youth and adult enrichment, arts and career skills classes, programming for adults with disabilities, Adult Basic Education and the Adult English Language Learner programs.
Blesener has also been instrumental in the legislative advocacy for District E-12 students. He headed up the Legislative Action Team for the school district.
Most of the challenges in the Elk River Area School District over the years were brought about by growth, Blesener said.
He said he always leaned on the community education model to dial into the needs of the community.
“It’s all about anticipating what’s coming,” he said.
“There were years when our enrollment in the fall was 500 to 600 students greater than it was in May.”
ECFE often got bumped out of its spaces, but space specifically for early childhood has placed dedicated spaces in all four major population centers of the school district.
“If it isn’t secure, then we have gone against the compact we made with our public,” Blesener said. “That would be the argument I would make inside the system as well as outside the system.”
The merits of early education have long been touted, but they are resonating more than ever.
“Those of us within the field, within community education, within early childhood, school-based early education, have been talking about this forever and a day,” Blesener said. “What has finally begun to change some of that is probably that some of the Fortune 500 companies in Minnesota have grasped it and it has now moved into the political realm for the past two, three legislative sessions.
“That has bathed decisionmakers, councils, school boards and superintendents. High-quality learning experiences before children are 5 years of age have such lasting effects. We are doing a disservice by not making sure opportunities are available for families.”
The more kids are ready to learn by kindergarten, the more children are going to be able to read by third grade.
Blesener said District 728 is well-positioned with the Handke Center, the E-8 facility in Otsego and early childhood spaces coming online in Rogers and Zimmerman.
“The next logical place is to have dedicated spaces at each elementary school attendance area,” he said. “I think one day we will see high-quality preschools, and school-based programs for 3- and 4-year-olds will be as ubiquitous as all-day K.”
Blesener has been at the center of the Elk River Area School District’s decentralization, its strategic plans and its building program plans.
“I have taken seriously the responsibility of being a community education practitioner and understanding the philosophy of it.”
The challenge is engaging people in a day and age of two-income families with most of the jobs outside of the community.
“These are exhausted people that come home,” he said. “How do you effectively engage citizens to care and make a difference, weigh in and share their precious time guiding something like this?”
Once they’re there, it’s identifying needs and ideas on how to bring resolution. Blesener says his biggest success was the most recent strategic plan document.
“We just finished a fourth year with that,” he said. “That work began with community conversations. We had the community cafes.
“We had purposeful questions, carefully crafted, future-oriented.”
That led to committee work and finally a guiding document that has been used to implement changes in a big system with more than 13,000 students and more than 2,400 employees.
“We have really listened,” Blesener said. “The board used information well to craft the two questions that showed up November 2014. Two questions passed with yeses in the high 50s at a time when dollars are tight.
“It sets the district up really well with a lot of space, accommodations, better technology than ever; early learning is well-positioned to grow and meet more needs.”
Blesener is also proud of the work at Handke, putting it back in its rightful place as historic building, the creation of the nature play area, the stadium being put on the National Registry and early childhood facility grants that were landed.
In retirement, Blesener plans to travel with his wife and live more spontaneously. They want to knock things off their bucket lists and spend time with their children Lucas, Dominic and Isaac, daughters-in-law Kate and Erica, and grandchildren Alex, Carson and Claire.
“This is a career where the 40-hour week is not something that came with it,” Blesener said.