I don’t know Devon Horton, the new DeKalb County School District superintendent whose first official day was July 1. I do know he just made his life a lot harder with his $12.2 million proposal to remake and expand the school district’s central office.
Central office staffing is a long-standing sore point with DeKalb parents countywide. Parents have long felt there are too many titles, too many departments and too few results.
Legitimate reasons may exist to spend millions of dollars on new titles and divisions, but Horton would have been wiser to hold off until he shook a lot more hands, attended a few homecoming parades, and built some goodwill in the community.
Horton comes to DeKalb, the state’s third-largest school district with about 93,000 students and 14,000 employees, from a small district outside Chicago with roughly 6,500 students and 1,500 employees. He is DeKalb’s ninth leader since 2010. Like all his predecessors, Horton pledged to be transparent, build on what’s working in DeKalb and take his time to figure out what’s not.
With a proposed reorganization plan in less than two weeks on the job, Horton becomes that new neighbor who says he loves the community and then immediately knocks on your door with a petition to add speed bumps, pickleball courts and leash laws for cats.
Horton’s proposal calls for nearly 90 new positions and changing or moving existing ones. The biggest expense would be a nearly $8 million upscaling of the existing Division of School Leadership, which would get a chief of schools, multiple new executive administrators, and coordinators of culture and climate, early literacy, math, exceptional education, English language learners and mental health.
Likely to rile a conservative state Legislature already at war with wokeness, Horton wants to create a Division of Equity, made up of 12 administrative positions and 35 new “face liaisons” at schools who would serve as mentors for small groups of students. When school board members chose Horton, they cited his track record improving student achievement and championing equity.
Horton was already on shaky ground with some parents after his first board meeting last week where five new hires, four of whom previously worked with him, won approval. (One of the four has since turned down the job offer.) Along with central office bloat, DeKalb parents have also long lamented what they dubbed the “friends and family” hiring propensity.
Now, with the central office restructuring plan, Horton may have gone from shaky ground to quicksand.
In the past decade, the DeKalb County School District has hired a series of new superintendents enthusiastically introduced by the school board as “change agents.” But the only thing that reliably changes in DeKalb is the name on the office door when those school boards eventually spurn their latest savior and start a national search for a replacement.
In 2015, for example, the school board hired Steve Green, praising him as a proven change agent who could, as board member Vickie Turner said at the time, “hit the road running.” By 2019, the only road the school board wanted Green to hit was the one out of DeKalb.
The next permanent superintendent was Cheryl Watson-Harris, whom Marshall Orson, the school board chair in 2020, called “a proven change agent ... with a long-term vision for the district.”
Long-term proved a bit of a stretch as the board fired a blindsided Watson-Harris less than two years later. The board blamed deteriorating relations with her, but it’s likely the pandemic prevented Watson-Harris from forging the community allies and allegiances vital to survive the volatility of a district like DeKalb.
No superintendency lasts forever, although J. Alvin Wilbanks certainly came close with 25 years in Gwinnett. Despite criticisms of equity issues at the end of his tenure in 2021, Wilbanks provided a consistent vision that allowed Gwinnett to flourish even as it grew to become the 13th-largest school district in the nation.
Research suggests that high turnover among superintendents undermines student success because reforms never have time to gel. A Rand Corp. survey this spring found turnover nationally rose to 17% in 2022-2023, from around 13%-14% prior to and at the beginning of the pandemic. The survey also found 79% of superintendents report their jobs were often or always stressful with superintendents of color universally deeming their jobs stressful.
Horton may have just compounded that stress.
About the Author
