South Beloit Superintendent Scott Fisher to retire

SOUTH BELOIT — South Beloit School District Superintendent has an announcement to make and he promised that it would not be followed by another.

The 56-year-old Fisher, who has worked for the district for 25 years, the past 15 as superintendent, will retire at the end of this school year.

“The joke is when will I announce I’m running for mayor,” Fisher said this week when discussing his career.
Two of the last three elected South Beloit mayors, Mike Duffy and Ted Rehl, were retired school superintendents from South Beloit and Prairie Hill.

“I have no immediate future plans, but I will say I will never run for mayor,” Fisher said.

Fisher, a Milwaukee native, started his career in education as a third grade teacher in Rockford, Illinois. He was looking to go into administration when his first child was on the way and then-superintendent Mike Duffy hired him to be principal at Riverview Elementary.

“I had a couple of opportunities, but I just really hit it off with Mr. Duffy,” Fisher remembered. “Plus, my mother-in-law taught kindergarten in South Beloit for 37 years and she said I’d really like the area.”

Fisher said his immediate goal as superintendent was to stabilize the district budget.

“We don’t have a very large local tax base in South Beloit and we were always on state financial watch lists,” said Fisher, who took over as superintendent in 2010 at the very depths of the Great Recession housing crisis which halted several development projects in South Beloit.

Like many districts in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin, the district’s enrollment has been declining. According to Illinois State Board of Education data, there were 1,022 students in the district when Fisher took over in 2010-2011. In 2022-2023, there were 884 in the district’s five schools.

Knowing additional revenue would be hard to come by, Fisher focused on the various partnerships the district had in healthcare, vocational education, mental health and technology.

It was a task he was uniquely suited for. Fisher’s bachelor’s degree from Rockford University was in economics and his first career was investigating financial fraud for the Internal Revenue Service.

“I was able to evaluate correctly what we were paying for versus what we were receiving,” Fisher said. “In some cases, we created ways to provide the service ourselves or we found different partners.”

The second thing he’s especially proud of is the district’s increased focus on dual-credit and career readiness course opportunities.

“Everything with No Child Left Behind (an educational program created in 2001 during the George W. Bush administration) focused on test scores. We got away from a well-rounded education,” Fisher said. “Now, our students are taking classes in manufacturing and healthcare at Blackhawk Tech and have access to all of the Rock Valley College classes. We really work hard to give kids a running start to their career.”

Duffy said the 55 students that graduated this past spring earned 591 college credits while in high school.

Duffy said that focus will continue under his successor. This year, South Beloit brought in Nik Butenhoff as assistant superintendent and he will take over next year. Butenhoff was a career academy coach in the Rockford School District and director of career readiness for the Belvidere School District before spending last year as superintendent of the Dakota School District.

“Our board really believes in career readiness and the person who sits in this chair has to believe in it,” Fisher said. “Nik has a great background in that area. I’m excited to see where he takes us.”