Argonia's New Superintendent Also Runs the High School and Coaches the Football Team

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Three job titles stack under Luke Greenwood's name at the bottom of his emails. Superintendent of USD 359. High school principal. Co-head football coach. Then the district: Argonia Public Schools^↗, in Sumner County, one of the smallest in Kansas.

He took the superintendency on July 1, and he did not put anything else down to do it.

"Having been a teacher, coach, sponsor, and principal, I have a good understanding of what is needed from leadership at each level," Greenwood said in a written response to The KSEdTribune. "The six years I served as a building principal, I worked alongside the superintendent on many initiatives. This helped prepare me for the management side."

Most people describe the move to the district office as a change of scale. Greenwood is describing something he had already been doing in pieces, which is the honest version of how the job works in a district this size.

The Kansas State Department of Education's own staffing file makes the arithmetic explicit. In 2024-25, the most recent year the state has published, Argonia's superintendency was recorded at 0.7 of a full-time position. Its principal line was 1.3. There was no assistant principal and no assistant superintendent. The entire district ran on 20 full-time-equivalent licensed positions and another 10.2 nonlicensed, and the two administrative lines together came to exactly two people's worth of time.

That is not an Argonia peculiarity. Across Kansas, 54 of the 286 districts with a superintendent on file recorded less than one full position for the role that year. The districts that did were small in a consistent way: their median enrollment was 208 students, against 712.5 for the districts carrying a full-time superintendent.

Greenwood succeeds Rustin Clark, who by Greenwood's account led Argonia from 2020 to 2026 and, before him, Julie McPherron from 2001 to 2020. That makes Greenwood the third person to hold the job in a quarter century. Cole Griffin carries the K-8 principalship and the athletic director role; the district's staff directory lists Greenwood over the 9-12 side and names nobody else there.

The district he inherits counted 142 students last school year, 2025-26, the most recent year Kansas has published. That ranked Argonia 264 of the 285 districts that reported a headcount. The state's median district in that published year enrolled 538. Some 38 districts enrolled fewer than 200 students, and together they accounted for about 1 percent of statewide enrollment, which is the usual position of a district like this one: numerous, and easy to leave out of a state number.

The enrollment line has not moved in a straight line. Argonia counted 173 students in 2014-15, climbed to 191 by 2016-17, and then gave that back over the following decade, reaching a low of 135 in 2023-24. It gained 10 students in 2024-25 and lost three in 2025-26, finishing the published window at 142. Across the whole window the district is down 31 students, about 18 percent, against a statewide decline of about 4 percent.

Greenwood has been managing the consequences of that line for longer than he has been an administrator. In 2013, as Argonia's head football coach and a graduate of the high school himself, he took the district's program into a co-op with Attica. Sumner Newscow, which covered the merger that August, reported that Argonia had opened the previous season with 14 boys and finished it with nine, and that the alternative to combining was shutting the program down. The A&A Titans still play eight-man football, and Greenwood is still one of the coaches.

The district made a larger version of that trade a decade later. In May 2023, Argonia announced it was going to four days a week, Tuesday through Friday, starting that fall. KWCH, reporting the change at the time, said the idea had been in the works for more than a year and a half and that discussions accelerated the previous fall after a drop in enrollment and fewer students entering the elementary grades. Clark told the station that other districts had seen two benefits, teacher retention and higher enrollment.

"If parents want to choose a small, rural school, there's lots of really good quality small rural schools in our area, and we're one of those but we're just one of those," Clark said then. "We wanted to have something that would be attractive to give parents one more choice."

Whether it worked is not a question this data can answer. The first year on the four-day calendar was 2023-24, the same year Argonia hit its window low of 135 students. It added 10 in 2024-25, then gave back three in 2025-26. Three points on a line in a district whose most recent published count was 142 students cannot separate a schedule change from a graduating class, a family moving, or ordinary noise, and nothing in the state's files tests it.

The district still leads with the schedule when it makes its case to families, alongside its small class sizes and Sunflower Station, the on-site daycare it opened for the Mondays that school is now closed.

There is a limit to how much further the state's data goes here, and it is worth saying plainly. Kansas withholds any row covering fewer than ten students, and in a district Argonia's size that catches nearly everything. The state publishes no grade-by-grade counts for the district in any year of the available record, and no racial or ethnic breakdown either. What survives is the district total, a count of 68 students approved for free or reduced-price lunch in 2025-26, about 48 percent of that year's published enrollment, and a 2024-25 special education child count of 29 students. The lunch share moved between about 38 and 50 percent across the published window without settling in either direction.

Asked about his first year, Greenwood started with whether students want to be in the building at all.

"I believe students need to feel a real connection to school to be successful," he said. "We want to continue to build on our relationships with our returning students and create new relationships with our new students. I believe this starts with providing the students with a safe atmosphere to learn in. I want to push our staff to build these relationships while also providing the rigor to help students learn how to think independently."

His second priority is about the adults.

"I also want to get the teachers what they need to be successful in their classrooms," he said. "One thing I would like to work on is better communication and transparency with our parents and community. I want them to feel like they know what is going on at their child's school."

Communication is a particular promise coming from a superintendent who is also the high school principal. He already holds the job that puts him closest to one set of families in the district. What he is proposing is to do the same thing district-wide, from an office the staffing file records as a fraction of a job, in a year when he is also running a building and a football program.

Asked what the community should understand first about how he leads, he answered with the sentence that ties the rest together.

"I very much believe in leading by example," Greenwood said. "I also believe in hiring high-quality staff members and letting them do their jobs. It is my job to get them the tools and support they need to be successful. I think it is very important for any staff to have collective accountability. It is especially crucial in a small district like Argonia."

Twenty licensed positions is small enough that collective accountability is not an aspiration. It is a description of what already happens: every adult is visible to every student, and there is no layer between a decision and the person carrying it out. Greenwood is choosing to call that an obligation rather than a constraint.

The test arrives in ordinary form. Argonia's seven-member school board sets its budgets against a headcount that has moved up and down within about sixty students for a decade, and that last landed at 142. Whether Greenwood can build the district-level communication he promised, while holding two other jobs, is the question his first year will answer.

Enrollment, staffing, free and reduced-price lunch, and special education child count figures come from the Kansas State Department of Education files covering the 2014-15 through 2025-26 school years. Kansas published no district headcount file for 2019-20, and staffing figures are from 2024-25, the most recent year available.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Argonia Public Schools - EdTribune KS - Kansas Education Data

Argonia's New Superintendent Also Runs the High School and Coaches the Football Team