Fraud and waste. Public trust. Academic struggles.
At a public forum on Thursday night, DeKalb’s three school superintendent candidates faced questions reflecting problems that have engulfed the metro Atlanta district over the past year.
Attempting to put leadership scandals and other controversies behind it, Georgia's third-largest school district gave community members their first chance to meet the finalists and ask them how they would manage the district's most visible challenges.
Arthur Culver, a finalist who is currently superintendent of an 8,900-student district in Champaign, Ill., said he saw opportunity in DeKalb.
“I see this district as a gold mine," he said. "It just depends on how you look at it. It’s about the right leadership, the right focus."
Each of the finalists are sitting superintendents from small districts. Joining Culver are Gloria Davis of Decatur (Ill.) Public Schools, with 8,700 students, and Lillie M. Cox of Hickory (N.C.) Public Schools, with fewer than 5,000 students.
One will be chosen soon to run a 99,000-student system and replace former DeKalb Superintendent Crawford Lewis, who was fired in April last year and later indicted on charges he ran a criminal enterprise at the school system.
The forum was a structured question-and-answer session in which the candidates had a few minutes to introduce themselves and almost an hour to answer a series of questions pre-submitted by the community.
Enrollment size was a reoccurring theme in the questions. People wanted to know how the candidates would handle a jump to a district as large as DeKalb.
Culver stressed his experience in larger districts and with different grade levels. As a teacher, he worked with emotionally disturbed students, and taught in Houston, the seventh-largest district in the country, and worked as an area superintendent in Fort Bend, Texas, which has 56,000 students.
Davis, superintendent of Decatur, Ill., Public Schools, said knowledge and expertize were more important than size. She highlighted her success in getting community approval for a sales tax referendum, and described herself as a “data” person who relies on numbers to make decisions. She also offered her early impressions of the DeKalb school district, saying some cuts might be needed.
"We have too many layers, from what I can tell," she said.
Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, said in a phone interview that there’s fewer than 50 districts in the county that measure up to DeKalb in enrollment. Of the nation’s 13,689 school districts, the median size has 2,000 students. That means there’s only a couple of hundred districts in the country that have more than 10,000 students, he said.
“In most cases, the person moving into the district is moving in from a smaller environment," he said. "It happens all the time, and it happens successfully."
Cox, of Hickory Public Schools, said she brings experience in larger districts, and a knowledge of professional development and curriculum. Cox was a high-ranking administrator in Guilford County Schools, a North Carolina district with 73,000 students.
With all the attention to problems at the top level, Cox pointed out, the focus in DeKalb is no longer on what's happening to children.
"We need to get our focus back into the buildings," she said. "If we take our eye off that it will slip. That is the role of a school system. Those things at the top level should be happening automatically."
Kim Ault was a parent who attended the event and took notes. She wanted to remember the promises made by the candidates so she could hold them accountable after they were hired. Davis was the candidate who won her over at the event.
"She really impressed me," she said. "She said school is not a place for adult public employment, but for the children. I loved that."
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