MILTON — After being announced as the next principal at Milton High School, Keith Nerby says he’s excited to take the job because he thinks it’s a “destination district” borne of student success.
“It’s a place that the community rallies around. Test scores are great and I’ve heard nothing but great things about staff,” Nerby said.
Nerby, who is originally from Delafield, is the principal at Sturgeon Bay High School in Door County, roughly 45 minutes northeast of Green Bay. He returns to southern Wisconsin, where he has spent most of his career.
Nerby started as a business and markerting teacher at Tremper High School in Kenosha in 2003.
He became associate principal at Hamilton High School in Sussex in 2009. He became Karcher Middle School principal in Burlington in 2013. He was at Sun Prairie High School from 2015 until he took the position in Sturgeon Bay.
Nerby became a business teacher after participating in DECA, an organization that has charters in high schools and colleges nationwide. It serves as a springboard for students who wish to have careers in marketing, finance, hospitality and management.
Nerby has a wife and three children. He said he and his family intend to live in the Milton School District because he believes it is essential for him to live in the district where he’s an educator.
“We love the Madison area, and we have an opportunity to come back. There are a lot of people in that area that we are excited to be back around,” Nerby said. “We’ve enjoyed Sturgeon Bay and Door County. Right now, this is the farthest we’ve been from where I grew up.”
Nerby’s biggest goal is to get to know people. Atop his itinerary is to come to Milton for a school tour.
“My experience is I’ve worked with a lot of individual students and staff. I have experiences and I have worked with a lot of different experiences. I am not working to change a lot of different things. I’m looking to work with different strategies for seeing what we can do,” Nerby said.
Nerby likes to analyze student data to learn how to chart challenges and successes, but he says success can’t always be plotted out on a graph.
He said the district has to recognize individual successes and see them “by name and by face.”
“Let’s focus on how we grow those students everyday,” Nerby said. “That’s my passion. How do we do that everyday? How do we meet them where they are?”