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It was midway through her first day at the helm of the Tucson Unified School District, and Elizabeth Celania-Fagen already was making changes.

The former associate superintendent of the Des Moines Public Schools district spent Tuesday morning touring TUSD's internal guts, making small talk, shaking hands and laughing easily with dozens of employees.

But at an 11 a.m. meeting to pull together the kickoff activities for the new school year, the 34-year-old took over, banter replaced by focus and efficiency.

The team in part wanted to talk about a back-to-school conference for administrators, which was looking suspiciously like a good talking-to with a bunch of need-to-know details to pass on about procurement and recruitment and legal updates.

Fagen said she'd like the conference to be more interactive, using breakout groups and teaching tools such as role playing to help observers digest the information instead of just being talked at. That also would give them more choice, she said, so if principals do a bang-up job evaluating teachers, they wouldn't have to sit through a session that wasn't helpful.

Principal Supervisor Ross Sheard acknowledged that the part of him that was an old-school control freak wanted to orchestrate the conference a little more, riding hard on principals to be sure they actually attended the important sessions and walked away with the information they had to have.

Fagen countered that one very big word for her is "empowerment."

"Over time, I really want to see us shift to a professional culture where we don't require adults to do things, but we make it their responsibility," she said.

The key is holding people responsible for results, not for sign-in sheets. She won't tell staffers how they have to do X, Y or Z, but in the end, X, Y and Z will have to be done and done well, she said.

She'll need to believe that staff members can meet high expectations as she takes on a district staring at a litany of challenges.

TUSD has been rocked by budget problems, slumping enrollment and fallout from a failed bid to close schools.

It also is trying to finally get out from under a court order requiring racial balance in schools and is facing a key bond election in November.

Here are a few other moments from Fagen's first day that may indicate how she'll manage the city's largest district.

It's not all about her

Fagen didn't park her hybrid Prius in the reserved superintendent spot outside of central administration, just in case her predecessor, Roger Pfeuffer, showed up.

And when members of her executive team pressed her for the vision they should pitch to the district's staff, Fagen was reticent.

"I have certain core beliefs, but it's not just about me putting together a vision and laying it out there. It has to be a collaborative piece of work so that everyone can see themselves in the conversation," she said.

Fagen said she's working off some general themes, including that education itself is in a state of change and people need to be inspired to consider that things need to be done differently.

"But I just don't believe a mission or a vision comes from one person," she said.

Get down to business

Sure, there were the typical first-day moments, with people popping in to introduce themselves or give her a potted plant or a sun shade for her car windshield. But mostly, Tuesday was about work.

Fagen showed up, armed with a skinny iced cinnamon dolce latte, at 7:20 a.m. It's one of two Starbucks treats she allows herself every week, but she said she's always too busy for the drive-through. "It's so much faster to just park and go in. When I left, the same people were in the drive-through line."

Within five minutes of her arrival, she had ordered a budget meeting with financial staff members and summoned tech staff to make sure her phone and e-mail were working.

"There are 41 e-mails," she said, immediately organizing them into files. "That's not too bad. But still, it is only seven-something in the morning."

Then Fagen went through a small stack of papers with Pfeuffer's handwritten sticky notes. There were no departing words of wisdom. Just things like: "Liz, this could be helpful."

Looking over her daily schedule, she was surprised to see time budgeted for lunch. "That's nice," she said. "Some days it's just a candy bar."

Even so, meetings ran late and squeezed her lunchtime to 30 minutes. She made a quick run to Del Taco.

Free up staff; measure progress

Fagen said she was thrilled when she went to meet custodians and electricians and found none. "That means they're out working," she said.

In a meeting with a few key staff members, she indicated she might try to do away with weekly Friday briefings that were universally despised for the time that went into drawing up reports and making presentations. Instead, she hopes to hold the briefings monthly.

"The question is whether you want your staff spending their time generating documents or whether you want them identifying crucial issues and working on them," she said. "I feel the same way about principals. If you ask them to produce lots of reports, they aren't going to have the time to be in the classrooms."

During a meeting with staff to see how the district is doing on audit recommendations intended to improve efficiency, she was very interested in making sure that each piece was "owned" by a staff member and that staff members knew they had to get the jobs done.

It's too soon to say how she will reorganize central staff, but she said she plans to increase communication and break down the "silo mentality" that isolates departments.

Roll with the punches

Fagen, who arrived in town Saturday, was supposed to have her household belongings by now. But the moving van broke down somewhere in Wisconsin. Now she'll count it a miracle if it shows before the weekend.

The family has four folding chairs in its rental house on the far East Side. The gas is finally being turned on today. She jokes that she asked her construction engineer husband, "How do you feel about camping?" Apparently, the answer was "not great," because they spent the last few nights in a hotel.

A few sympathetic staff members offered to let her borrow their air mattresses. "It's one of those things. You just have to roll with it," she said.

It's been a rushed time in other ways. While getting up to speed on her new job, she was still wrapping up things in Des Moines: The Midwest flooding hit one of her high schools when a levee broke. Then there was the small task of moving halfway across the country with 2-year-old daughter Meredith.

The last few weeks, she said, have been "like drinking water from a fire hose."

Maximize district's strengths

Fagen got to see just how big a business the district is when she spent the morning on a tour of the facilities and transportation complex, which takes up a full square-mile block.

Its staff manages 9 million square feet. Its electricity budget alone was nearly $12 million for the 2006-07 school year. And its 300 buses make more than 1,200 daily runs and use $3 million of diesel fuel annually.

Blue-collar workers have maintained they've been undervalued and understaffed by past administrations, though they're the ones who make the keys for 120 schools, handle air cooling, abate graffiti, build cabinetry and do the welding on site.

By 10 a.m., she'd shaken more than 70 hands.

"It's a very impressive system that seems very internally capable of doing most everything," she said afterward.

Facilities Director Rudy Flores said the tour showed that Fagen will put a priority on valuing and listening to all employees.

But Bruce Slabaugh, who represents the blue-collar union, said he didn't read too much into the fact that those complexes were first on her agenda.

"I don't know that we've had enough time to see if this is truly a change or not," he said. "We hired someone young and ambitious from outside the district, so I'm very hopeful, but we'll just have to wait and see."

On StarNet: Learn more about Fagen and past TUSD superintendents, and see a list of all superintendents dating back to 1886 in a slide show at azstarnet.com/education.