The job is both high-profile and high-risk, but applicants should have no question about what Atlanta Public Schools wants in its next superintendent: honesty and openness to new ideas, a person who is approachable, listens to others, embraces diversity and knows how to build teams, according to the position’s written profile.
In their first interviews since the announcement, two of the three women presented last week as finalists for the job said they got the message loud and clear: “People have been nothing more than hospitable in saying they want the right person,” said Bonita Coleman-Potter, deputy superintendent of Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland.
That includes someone with a steady hand and nerves of steel. None of it surprises Coleman-Potter or another candidate, Superintendent Cheryl L.H. Atkinson of Lorain City Public Schools in Ohio.
“I can tell you, it does not scare me,” said Atkinson, who took her job in 2007 as Lorain was laying off nearly 250 employees, almost a third of the district’s teaching staff.
The third candidate, deputy schools Superintendent Barbara M. Jenkins of Orange County, Fla., declined to be interviewed by the AJC. Her boss, Orange County schools Superintendent Ronald Blocker, said in an interview that she was “a phenomenal leader. Extremely intelligent. Very polished. Driven; she believes in results.”
Atlanta, with 49,800 students, has potential but faces challenges that confound even the system’s biggest boosters. School board members are locked in controversy that ignited again Monday over the pending leadership resignation of Chairman Khaatim Sherrer El.
Members have spent five months trying to fix governance issues that put them on probation with the district’s accrediting agency. The agency’s head warned them early on that it would not tolerate a split vote among the board’s nine members to hire a new leader. A review of the system’s progress comes Sept. 30 with the threat of full accreditation loss.
Current Superintendent Beverly Hall leaves in 11 days, and several of her top staff have taken jobs elsewhere, leaving the district with a looming leadership void. There’s an ongoing criminal investigation of alleged cheating on student achievement tests.
City school board members expect to soon name an interim schools chief to fill the gap after Hall departs. Their naming of the finalists now would seem to indicate a final hire is not far off.
Already, not everyone is sold on whom the board has picked.
All three candidates are graduates of the California-based Broad Superintendents Academy, a training program that critics call too corporate.
“The Broad Foundation is clear in its mission to disrupt public education as we know it today using market-driven methods such as competition,” said Ed Johnson, who ran for the Atlanta board twice since 2000. “The school board has had an opportunity to step away from urban school reform [as advocated by Broad], which has shown itself to be horribly damaging,” he said, pointing to the cheating scandal.
In Lorain, Atkinson is the first to admit that her tenure has not been without controversy.
The layoffs she faced in 2007 were but one sign of a financial crisis that involved school consolidation and programming cuts. She successfully pursued a portion of Ohio’s Race to the Top school reform funding from the federal government. She started a new technology program to give every sixth- through 12th-grader a laptop loaded with e-textbooks.
“She has made a lot of very critical decisions that a lot of folks didn’t really want to bring to the board,” Lorain board President Tony Dimacchia said.
Still, the 7,600-student district is dwarfed by Atlanta’s district.
Atkinson does have big-city public school experience, including in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., and Kansas City, Mo.
In the 127,000-student school district of Prince George’s County, Coleman-Potter perhaps has the benefit of working more behind the scenes. Hired as deputy superintendent by the Maryland school district in 2009, she previously spent most of her career in Jackson, Miss.
She started as a local middle school teacher, got into policy work, took a job with the Mississippi Education Department and eventually rose to become associate state superintendent.
“I loved doing the policy work, but I missed the kids,” she said of a subsequent move back to the Jackson public school district, where she worked before she took the job in Maryland.
She has added applications to her iPhone to track information about Atlanta schools, and has read through board policies and district reports, including everything related to its accreditation.
She is impressed by the city district’s strong foundational support, no matter its current problems.
“I just don’t think they’re insurmountable,” she said. “I’ve never shied away from a challenge.”
Staff writer Rhonda Cook contributed to this article.
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