On a winter morning in Engadine, the hallways hum with a quiet confidence. In a single K–12 building that houses just 246 students—some of whom even stay an extra year to earn community college credit—Heather Luoto slips easily between roles: former science teacher, current instructional coach and 7–12 principal. She jokes that she wears many hats, but the truth is more poetic: She stitches systems together.
Three years ago, Luoto noticed a pattern familiar to rural leaders everywhere—an influx of non-certified and probationary teachers who wanted to do well but needed more than a rubric to get there. The district had the Thoughtful Classroom Dimensions, but not yet the shared understanding that turns paper into practice.
So she built it.
Today, probationary and non-certified teachers meet monthly in Professional Learning Communities that feel more like workshops than compliance. Luoto models mini-lessons on organizational norms using CHAMPS, on engagement through “hooks and phenomenon,” and—most recently—on assessment, aligning summatives as exam season approaches. Everything lives in a shared Google Classroom, a living library of strategies teachers can use the very next day.
Heather goes beyond just giving information to teachers.
“I will assist by going directly into classrooms to show them how to implement the ideas I share-teaching lessons, helping set up classroom norms, and engaging with students and staff to directly teach CHAMPS,” she said.
But the innovation doesn’t stop at instruction. Engadine embeds Compass Navigate 360 SEL lessons across classrooms, then circles back to them during discipline moments. A referral isn’t the end of the story—it’s the start of a restorative one.
The results read like a case study: office referrals cut in half, high-quality instruction aligned across grades, and more than 50 percent of students choosing Engadine as their school of choice.
Luoto’s advice to other leaders is simple: Start with relationships, choose SEL tools together and name a point person to protect fidelity. Next on the horizon? An attendance campaign, refreshed curriculum frameworks, and an Early Warning Intervention and Monitoring System—proof that in Engadine, improvement is not a project. It’s the culture.