Leechburg Area school Superintendent Tiffany Nix gets 5-year contract

Leechburg Area School Board has renewed the contract of Superintendent Tiffany Nix for another five years.

“Really, in a small school, the superintendent does more jobs than what they do in a large school,” board president Neill Brady said. “She wears a lot more hats than the other superintendents do across the Valley. We’re happy to have her for another five years.”

The contract renewal, approved Wednesday night, starts July 1, 2021, at an annual salary of more than $143,000.

Nix has been Leechburg Area’s superintendent since 2016. The district has an enrollment of about 800 students.

She came to the district from Riverview High School in Oakmont, where she was principal.

In the past five years, Nix said her greatest accomplishment has been boosting student achievement, especially at the high school level. Before she arrived, she said, Leechburg Area High School was in the bottom 15% across the state in Pennsylvania System of School Assessment scores.

“Now our high school is one of the top-performing high schools in the area,” Nix said.

She led the district through a total restructuring of the school day, adding “enrichment periods” at the end of each day for students to engage in “customized” education, where they could get extra help in topics they struggled with.

There also were major curriculum changes, Nix said.

Nix’s goals for the next five years center on continuing that progress, especially considering the covid-19 pandemic and the challenges it brought in the past year.

“We want to make our programming the very best we could possibly make it while still being mindful of taxpayer dollars,” Nix said.

“I think it put our current momentum and our current achievement on hold, which I do not like,” she added. “So, we are very much looking forward to regrouping and getting our students back on track for optimal success. It’s been very frustrating.”

Nix said the district’s administration is pleased with how students are performing on benchmark assessments but there is still concern about students who have been learning exclusively online. Leechburg Area schools have offered a virtual option as well as an option for four days of in-person learning.

The board on Wednesday also approved a K-12 Summer Enrichment and Remediation Program, funded through federal grant money distributed by the state Education Department to help students catch up before next school year begins.

“We just want to make sure everyone is on an equal playing field so we can start fresh next year,” Nix said. “We’re more worried about a transition to make it smooth for them to come back to face-to-face instruction next year.”