Todd Selk officially begins his tenure as Interim Superintendent of the Crookston School District on Wednesday. Selk is replacing Randy Bruer, who served as interim superintendent for the 2025-26 school year.
Selk returns to the Crookston School District after serving as a teacher and administrator there from 1984 to 1999. Selk’s most recent position was Superintendent of the Fosston School District, but he took the opportunity to return to Crookston and help out the district one more time before he retires. “It’ll be my 41st year this fall in education, and I’ll be ready to embark on, as I stated, a place where that was very good to me, and a real special place in my early part of my career, and looking forward to serving this district in this community here at the close of my career.”
As part of his leadership model, Selk wants to be an effective communicator and listener who can work well with the community and district staff on collaborative ideas for the district. “My leadership style is collaborative, and I want a lot of input. I guess in the end of the day I have to make decisions, and I’m very willing and capable of doing that, but I want to be a listener, and I am a listener. So I want to seek input from a lot of different stakeholders, and that’ll be a focus for the first three, four months here, for sure, getting a feel for exactly where things are at financially, those types of things.”
Bruer has been working with Selk over the past few months to get him acclimated to the district and give him a strong start to his tenure. The two have worked together before, with Selk thanking Bruer for the training and for his leadership in the district during the prior school year. “Randy Bruer has been just exceptional in the transition, and he and I worked closely together when he was at Win-E-Mac and I was in Fosston, and he was kind of a mentor for me to get off the ground running in my superintendent career, so I’ve known Randy and we work closely together, and he’s been really supportive and helpful for the transition.”
Selk re-enters the district knowing some of the challenges ahead, including tough financial decisions, but he remains confident in the school board to work with him on making the best decisions possible. While Selk is ready to go and wants to hit the ground running, he hopes to give staff some time to breathe ahead of the upcoming school year. “It’s going to be a hit-the-ground-running type of situation, which is exactly what I would expect. Much of the administration’s school business is handled during the summer months. It’s interesting to me that I’ll run into people in a grocery store or whatever, and they’ll say, ‘Now, what are you doing this summer? Do you get three months off? Right?’ And I said, ‘No, that first day of school doesn’t just happen because it’s the first day of school. There’s a lot of stuff that happens before that.’ So this is a busy time, though. I do encourage our administrative team to get away as well here over the summer months to get recharged as well, but certainly there’s work to be done here in July and August, and then we’ll welcome kids back here in a couple of short months.”
Selk was selected as Interim Superintendent by the Crookston School Board on March 26 after the board suspended its search for a permanent superintendent.
