Here’s a list of the men and women who’ve worked as public school superintendents in these districts since the start of the 2005-06 school year. In some cases, the superintendent was in the job beforehand.
ATLANTA
Beverly Hall – July 1999 to June 2011.
Erroll Davis – June 2011 to June 2014.
Meria Carstarphen – July 2014 to present.
COBB
Fred Sanderson – December 2005 to June 2011.
Michael Hinojosa – July 2011 to February 2014.
Chris Ragsdale – February 2014 to present.
DEKALB
Crawford Lewis – October 2004 to May 2010.
Ramona Tyson – May 2010 to August 2011.
Cheryl Atkinson – August 2011 to February 2013.
Michael Thurmond – February 2013 – June 2015.
R. Stephen Green – July 2015 to present.
FULTON
James Wilson - June 2005 to May 2008.
Cindy Loe – June 2008 to May 2011.
Robert Avossa – April 2011 to April 2015.
Kenneth Zeff - April 2015 to present.
GWINNETT
J. Alvin Wilbanks - March 1996 to present.
Once a month, about two dozen men and women drive hours to a hotel conference room in Macon to learn how to run a school district.
With the average tenure of a superintendent in large American school districts being just three years, some of them joke about the perils of their quest.
“If they don’t like you, you’ll get fired,” quipped Ed Shaddix, an assistant superintendent in Gwinnett County, one of the classmates in the training program for superintendents.
Georgia is undergoing one of the biggest transitions in public school superintendents in recent memory. Since the start of the 2014-15 school year, nearly 40 superintendents have announced their retirement, resigned to take a job elsewhere or left through “mutual agreement” with the school board, according to research by the Georgia School Superintendents Association. Georgia has 181 school districts. Three of those departures took place in metro Atlanta, and a fourth, the retirement of Cherokee Superintendent Frank Petruzielo, is scheduled in February.
The majority of those leaving are retiring baby boomers, which raises questions about what school districts are doing to produce leaders. School districts are trying to prepare future leaders to be superintendents by enrolling them in a statewide training program as well as operating their own classes for aspiring principals. But the challenges facing superintendents often extend to local politics and knowing how to work with ever-changing school board members.
Some local school districts have a revolving door in the superintendent’s office.
DeKalb County, which has had five superintendents in the past decade, hired R. Stephen Green in July. Fulton County has an interim superintendent after Robert Avossa left in April to take the top job in Florida's Palm Beach County school district. Fulton had seven superintendents between 1997 and 2011. David Dude took over as the city of Decatur's superintendent this month. (Dude's predecessor had held the post since 2003, however.)
“It’s hard to build any consistency or any continuity when there’s constant change at the top,” said Ernest Brown, whose four children attended DeKalb public schools.
The constant changes in some districts have resulted in uncertainty about the district’s direction or hefty buyouts to a superintendent who leaves before the contract is up. Cheryl Atkinson received $114,583 when she left DeKalb’s school district in February 2013 after less than two years as superintendent. The buyout was nearly three times the average starting salary for a teacher in DeKalb.
It can have an impact in the classroom, as policy initiatives aren't carried through. For example, in 2011, Cobb Superintendent Michael Hinojosa announced plans to have "intervention teams" work with four schools that had chronic student disciplinary problems and teacher turnover. Three years later, Hinojosa announced he was resigning to assist his aging parents. The intervention teams are gone, but Cobb officials say there are other efforts to place to help schools encountering such situations. Clayton County started an effort called "rigormeters" in its schools to assess higher thinking during the tenure of Edmond Heatley. The rigormeters were gone shortly after Heatley resigned to pursue a superintendent position in California.
“We threw that away,” said Clayton school board member Jessie Goree.
Funding cuts, school board battles and greener pastures
Area school districts spend big money on superintendent searches that frequently stretch across the nation. Atlanta spent about $150,000 on its search in 2013. The average superintendent makes more than $150,000 a year and, in many metro districts, manages an annual budget in excess of $1 billion.
Educators, experts and some parents put much of the blame for the turnover on state funding cuts to local school districts and increased state and federal accountability standards for schools in the areas of increased testing and guidelines for teacher evaluations.
“Over the last eight years, there’s been so much happening to educators,” said Diane Jacobi, who has two children in Fulton County high schools. “Regardless of what they wanted to do, they’ve had to abandon it to do what they had to do.”
Increasingly, friction with school boards has been part of the reason for some superintendent departures. Some board members run for office because they are frustrated with the current status of the school district and they want change, which can conflict with the superintendent’s vision, said Steve Dolinger, executive director of the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education.
“You have to maintain ongoing communication to understand what are (board member) concerns,” said Dolinger, a former Fulton superintendent.
Goree, first elected to the Clayton board in 2008, said her colleagues have been somewhat reluctant to hold its superintendent accountable because the board has been accused in the past of micromanagement.
She said some school chiefs are constantly chasing the next job.
“A lot of the superintendents are opportunists,” she said.
Goree said she got inquiries about Heatley less than two years after he left Clayton. Heatley, then the education commissioner in Bermuda, was a finalist for the Orleans Parish school system in Louisiana, according to news reports.
Petruzielo, 71, said he survived for 17 years in Cherokee because he built trust with board members by meeting goals he set for student performance. He also reached out to new board members when they took office to build alliances. The strategy didn't always work. Kelly Marlow resigned from the board last year after she was convicted of lying to police about her claim that Petruzielo tried to run her over with his vehicle. The two frequently battled over policy matters.
“You’ll always have a board member in a different pew,” Petruzielo said about school boards in general.
Preparing for the future
Petruzielo said some superintendents have short tenures because they’ve worked in just one area of a school district and aren’t prepared to deal with some superintendent duties. Petruzielo learned about school legal matters and employee health care issues in other school positions, such as working in legislative and legal affairs, before becoming a superintendent.
“I got a chance to learn about all of the aspects of the job,” he said.
Goree said districts take a closer look at candidates within their districts to avoid potential carpetbaggers. Increasingly, districts are looking in-house for future leaders. Several metro districts now have programs to train people to become assistant principals and principals. Many districts pay for the candidates to take the superintendent association’s two-year training classes, which started in 1993 and cost $3,080.
In those monthly Macon sessions, the aspiring superintendents are learning about the various areas of school leadership and about themselves. The two-day November training focused on helping them hone their leadership style and how they’d develop talents in other administrators and principals.
The candidates go through exercises that test their memory skills. One troublesome session is when they’re asked to jot down 10 personal success experiences. Many had trouble boasting of their achievements.
“As a leader, you have to feel good about the choices you’re making because you’re constantly facing challenges and criticisms,” said the instructor, Dori Stiles.
The candidates must be approved for the program by their current superintendent. About one-third of Georgia superintendents have gone through the program.
Despite the potential of a short tenure, Shaddix and the other aspiring superintendents believe that’s the job where they can best help students.
Shaddix said the sessions have taught him that if he’s offered a superintendent job, it must be the right fit before he accepts it.
“It opens your eyes to the bigger picture,” he said.
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