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Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Bye, Bye: Clayton Superintendent On Her Way Out
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Rumors had been swirling for weeks that Clayton County Superintendent Barbara Pulliam was on the way out after three years of tumult in the South Side school system. Now, we know the scuttlebutt was true.
According to a story by my colleague, Eric Stirgus, Pulliam tendered her resignation during a closed-door meeting of the Clayton Board of Education last night. Spokesman Charles White told Eric that Pulliam was leaving for “personal reasons.”
I suspect, as always, that there’s much more to the story.
I covered Clayton schools for a short time a couple of years ago — back when Pulliam and the board decided to bring hand-held metal detectors and drug-sniffing dogs onto campuses to try to cut down on the substantial incidents of crime and violence. My impression then of Pulliam, who had cut her teeth in the tough inner-city schools in Chicago, was that she was a no-nonsense administrator. There was no way she was going to put up with hooligans attending her campuses.
But, from the beginning, it seemed she had an image problem — not just with teachers and other employees, but also with the community. Many felt that Pulliam, who had come to Clayton in 2004 from a tiny school system in Minnesota, was unyielding in her management style. They seemed to resent an outsider coming in and telling them how they were going to teach their students and run their schools — even though they initially had welcomed her with open arms.
Pulliam walked into a less-than-ideal situation when she was hired as Clayton’s first black female superintendent. Infighting among board members had created such an untenable situation that the system — now Georgia’s fifth largest — was in danger of losing its accreditation.
It seems her tenure was ill fated from the start.
So I can’t help but wonder: With all of the problems that Clayton has been facing in the past few years, would it have been different for anyone else?
UPDATE: As some of you already have noted, Clayton’s interim superintendent has a bit of a checkered past. In 1996, Gloria Duncan was fired from her job as principal at North Clayton Middle School after she gave teachers vocabulary words from a standardized test — before the exam was administered. But four years later the school system hired her back as an assistant principal at Riverdale Middle School. Upon her re-hiring, Duncan told the AJC: “We’ll do everything straight by the book. I’m more seasoned. I know a lot more. I think you only grow when you learn from your mistakes.”
