Austin schools Superintendent Meria Carstarphen leaving for Atlanta job

July 2009: Carstarphen takes the helm as superintendent, becoming the first female and African-American superintendent in the district's history. Pearce Middle School is ordered closed by the state for chronic low performance. Carstarphen addresses a $15 million projected shortfall for 2009-10.

August 2009: State officials announce that for the first time, the district has missed federal academic standards established by the No Child Left Behind Act. Carstarphen proposes, and the board approves, reducing the number of regular board meetings, which limits opportunities for public comment.

December 2009: The school board approves Carstarphen's strategic plan, which will guide the district's goals for the next five years. Carstarphen proposes, and the board approves, a dual-language pilot program, changing the way bilingual education will be taught in the district.

February 2010: Carstarphen asks trustees to declare financial exigency, or emergency, to give the district more power to cut jobs under contract. The school board declines, instead approving an effort to cut jobs by eliminating or reorganizing programs.

June 2010: Preliminary results of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills show that the district improved dramatically.

February 2011: District declares financial exigency; trustees vote to cut 1,153 positions.

December 2011: Trustees approve IDEA Public Schools, a charter operator, to run Eastside Memorial High and Allan Elementary schools. Students, parents and residents protested outside the board room and marched in the streets. About 85 percent of those schools' students transferred out.

October 2012: Trustees vote 5-2 to extend Carstarphen's contract through 2015.

December 2012: With three new board members elected in November helping to tip the scales, the IDEA partnership is terminated.

March 2013: District officials announce plans to offer benefits to same-sex partners of employees.

April: Atlanta school system launches nationwide superintendent search.

May: Austin voters reject half of an $892 million school bond package.

August: Eleven Austin schools, including four high schools, fail to meet new state academic standards

September: Austin school district enrollment down for first time in 12 years. Many of the about 1,000 fewer students were lost to other area school districts, private schools and charters.

October: Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed suggests using private money to more than double the next superintendent's salary to about $600,000.

December: Austin school trustees deliver Carstarphen's evaluation without an extension of her contract, which expires in 2015. She declines a raise to her $283,412 annual salary.

Thursday: Atlanta Board of Education announces Carstarphen is the lone finalist for the superintendent job. Her pay hasn't been announced.

April 14: Atlanta school board will likely vote to hire Carstarphen.

Meria Carstarphen, who has presided over successes and setbacks as the Austin school district’s superintendent since 2009, was named Thursday as the sole finalist to lead Atlanta’s public schools.

Carstarphen, 44, was the first African-American and the first woman to lead the Austin district.

“As a daughter of the Deep South, I have a personal draw to Atlanta, and it’s deeply rooted in my own upbringing and personal experience in civil rights, having been born and raised in Selma, Ala.,” she said in a statement. She told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she considers the Atlanta district to be in “turn-around” mode. A formal vote by the Atlanta school board is scheduled for April 14.

“I’m not naive about what it takes to turn around a school or a school district,” she said in Atlanta. “It will take some heavy lifting.”

In an email to employees of the Austin district, Carstarphen said she is proud of the progress during her superintendency. “It has been a privilege to serve AISD and to be a champion for public education and Austin’s children,” she wrote.

Under her watch, the district weathered state budget cuts and saw its graduation rates rise. Trustees praised her for those and other successes in December, but they admonished her to build better relationships with the community, including parents and staff members. And, perhaps in a sign that her job security was in question, they didn’t extend her contract, which was set to expire in June 2015.

Gina Hinojosa, a member of the Austin school board, said Carstarphen has blazed an important trail for women, minority groups and the city.

“We all owe her a debt of gratitude for the passion, heart and tireless work she dedicated to this district,” Hinojosa said. “I will be looking for a new leader who is going to build upon the community schools model that this city has embraced that focuses on every child regardless of economic status.”

Finding Carstarphen’s successor is “going to test a board that doesn’t like to make decisions,” said Drew Scheberle, senior vice president for the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce. With five of the nine trustees up for election in November, he recommended that the board pick a strong interim superintendent but wait until the new board is in place to select the next superintendent.

During a news conference Thursday in Atlanta, Carstarphen indicated that she has been talking to the Atlanta district for some time about a job.

“I want you to know, starting not just today, but many moons ago, when we first started having these conversations, that I was feeling myself getting committed then, but I’m absolutely committed now to ensure that I do my part to help set all of this in a better place so you have the outcomes that you hope and dream about,” she said.

She mentioned that she would be staying in Atlanta through the weekend and would return “as often as possible” before the board’s vote.

Carstarphen’s style in Austin has been decidedly hands-on. Last summer, during a visit to Doss Elementary, she danced with students to a Wii game.

She wasn’t always so adept at the more challenging ballet of community relations. One of her most difficult moments came in 2011, amid discussions about possibly closing 11 schools to save $11.3 million. Hundreds of parents protested that notion as well as the district’s approach, which they decried as opaque, and the idea was dropped.

Carstarphen approached her job with a sense of urgency, and that sometimes clashed with Austin’s affinity for lengthy public discussion, said Mark Williams, who was school board president when she was hired.

Vincent Tovar, an East Austin parent and leader of the activist group Pride of the Eastside, said Carstarphen had a top-down leadership style that trickled down to campuses, frustrating teachers and parents alike. Her departure promises to give parents, students and staff members — especially teachers — a greater voice in school affairs, he said.

Carstarphen’s get-it-done approach drew praise from the business community. The chamber’s Scheberle noted that graduation rates are up, more students are graduating ready for college, the bond rating is strong, and national tests rate Austin as a top urban district. Carstarphen brought in a solid team, and “we hope a lot of them will consider staying,” he said.

The district’s graduation rate reached an all-time high last year with 82.5 percent of students earning diplomas, up from 75.6 percent when she started in 2009. Carstarphen also oversaw an increase in the attendance rate, which translates into millions in additional revenue.

Carstarphen succeeded in launching a number of nontraditional initiatives, including “early college start” programs at Reagan and LBJ high schools. She shifted away from a traditional bilingual program to establish a dual-language program at such schools as Becker Elementary. And she blended social and emotional learning into the curriculum

Open to the concept of charter schools, Carstarphen picked charter operator IDEA Public Schools to run troubled Eastside Memorial High in 2012, but that decision was immediately criticized by community members who complained that the district hadn’t involved them in the decision. The school board later terminated the arrangement.

Another disappointment for the superintendent came in May, when voters rejected half of an $892 million bond package. Once again, critics emphasized what they saw as a failure to communicate, complaining that Carstarphen and her staff didn’t explain how all of the money was needed.

Some of the progress under Carstarphen was mixed with continuing challenges.

For example, the graduation rate for African-American and Hispanic students rose several percentage points but still lags that of the district’s peers statewide. Just 79 percent of the 2,400 economically disadvantaged students in the Austin district’s Class of 2012 graduated, a lower rate than that of any other large urban district in the state. In 2013, four high schools — Eastside Memorial, Lanier, LBJ and Travis — didn’t meet new accountability standards, in part because too many students opted for an easier path to graduation.

Carstarphen’s successor will have plenty of challenges, among them: deciding what to do about underenrolled schools, securing a permanent funding source to raise teachers’ pay and thereby avoid defections to the suburbs, and stabilizing enrollment after losing 1,200 students last year with projections for continuing declines.

For Carstarphen, students past and future, as well as her own career arc, seemed to be at the top of her mind Thursday in Atlanta. She is married, and when asked if she had any children, she responded: “Just the 86,000 in Austin and the 47,000 here in Atlanta.”

Having started her career as a teacher in the Selma middle school she had attended, she also sounded a returning-to-roots theme: “I think it’s kind of time, after working all over this great country of ours, and spending a lot of time trying to learn and also be part of the reform and the improvement of American public education, that I come home.”