Tuesday night's set of facilitated focus-group conversations found Durham Public Schools parents, teachers, staff and community members passionate about a wide range of things they wanted to see the next superintendent continue in the public schools.
Sheet after sheet of oversized Post-It Notes filled on everything from continuing community and parent dialogue, to open communication through Channel 4 and other means, to ongoing investment in programs broad and focused.
When asked to turn to the challenges confronting the next superintendent, though, almost all of the dozen tables' pads began showing many of the same themes:
Unequal outcomes for students. A lack of equity, from exceptional children assignments to differential outcomes by race. Socioeconomic imbalance. Teacher recruitment and retention. The impact of No Child Left Behind and data-driven approaches to learning. Differential parental involvement along class lines. Test scores.
DPS stakeholders, it seems, love a lot of things the schools have in toto, and see the district doing great things in the community every day. But they seem to share concerns over which students seem to get the most benefit from them.
That seemed to be one of the key themes from the discussion, which drew 75 or so participants to the DPS Staff Development Center on Hillandale Rd.
The forum opened with remarks by school board chair Minnie Forte-Brown, who thanked the community for turning out for the forum.
"We hate to lose Dr. Harris," Forte-Brown said, "but we are so excited for him and the impact that we know he will have on educational policies in Washington." Forte-Brown also praised interim superintendent Hank Hurd for his years of experience in public education and signaled the board's faith in his work while the search is underway.
The chairwoman also noted that the board had unanimously voted earlier that day to select the North Carolina School Boards Association to perform a search for the district's next superintendent. She told the assembled crowd that the NCSBA had the advantage of being North Carolina-based; was a fiscally-sound choice; and would still perform a national search (including, as the Herald-Sun notes, finding candidates with Broad Foundation experience) "knowing exactly what we want in a superintendent."
As the meeting's facilitator got the discussions underway, the Durham Committee's Dr. Lavonia Allison raised a point of order, asking whether the different compositions of the tables meant that the teams' outcomes would not sync up with each other. Forte-Brown stressed that this was the "first generic conversation" on superintendent needs, and that later focus groups would drill further into the needs of interest groups like parents, teachers and administrators.
In fact, while the conversations were passionate at some tables at times, there seemed to be a very healthy exchange of ideas between the various groups.
One attendee stood up and noted at the conversation's end that she worked for another local school district that she wouldn't name -- drawing presumptive chortles from the crowd, given the disastrous Wake County school board meeting happening concurrently with the start of the DPS conversation.
She praised DPS for what she saw as a very good two-way communications process. "To see a school board that actually cares what anybody thinks except them is so refreshing," she said to loud applause.
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The caring and listening were obvious -- even if some of the challenges listed were daunting.
As noted above, the differential outcomes reached by different categories of DPS students was the most consistent theme between different tables when asked to identify challenges in the system.
Some tables noted the higher drop-out rates for Latino and African-American students, while another asked about the differential rate of assignment of black students to exceptional children/special education programs. (The latter was a concern school board member Kirsten Kainz made as well in comments to this correspondent during a break in the conversation.)
A third table raised the question of differential parent participation along socioeconomic lines. Others asked about the assignment of resources and support to high-performing versus low-performing schools, or about how to increase mandatory after-school enrichment programs for at-risk students without making it appear like a punishment.
No Child Left Behind appeared on several tables' lists -- as did test scores, the at-times controversial rubric currently used (some would say overused) to determine school progress.
Not wanting to leave anything out, one table highlighted both school bureaucracy and "excessive local control" as issues. At least two others asked about central administrative efficacy and performance.
When asked to say what was important to them to see as characteristics in the new-hire superintendent, a range of themes appeared -- but a few more consistently than others:
- Experience in an urban school district
- Significant experience, in general and ideally with classroom/principal-level assignments
- Interpersonal skills, integrity, and warmth
- Able to resolve conflicts and deal with disagreement
- Willing to be highly visible, in schools and the public eye
- Evidence-based focus -- a seeming sign of desired comfort in a data-driven environment, although in the ongoing NCLB/Reading Street debate, at least one table spoke up on not wanting to "corporatize" the school system
- Supportive of innovation
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