Hamilton County’s school district is suffering from a leadership crisis. Over the last decade, HCDE has had four superintendents, three being unable to even fulfill their contracts. This excessively high turnover rate has impeded endeavors to improve student achievement. Without stable and quality leadership, our students are robbed of the superior instruction they deserve and need to succeed in a 21st century, knowledge based economy. Administration turnover adds to the misuse of our educational dollars and creates a lack of community trust in our school system. Our county has faced this crisis long enough, and it has brought our school system down to one of the lowest in the state.
Our students are the first victims of poor and fleeting administrative leadership. Our school system should be seeing growth and improvement with each year, but instead, we have seen a decline in student achievement, particularly in literacy. So many of our students do not graduate prepared for college or career, and this can have serious consequences on their futures.
Additionally, our community has lost trust in our school system to be able to provide a quality education. Many are frustrated parents, teachers, and community members who want their voices to be heard in decisions affecting our education system, but don’t have an outlet to do so. Uniting the community and empowering their voice is crucial for the sustainability of our school system. Research shows that parent involvement is crucial to the success of a school, and so including parents in the superintendent search is important to encourage other types of involvement. If there is no confidence in the system, the system is not going to work, there will be low student, teacher, and family moral, and we will not be able to find a leader that can better our county. Finding a leader who our students can rely on and our community can trust is extremely important in hiring an excellent superintendent. Therefore, the critical question before us is, what qualities should our new superintendent have to better ensure the success of our students and our community?
The superintendent is responsible for everything in our school system. They set the tone, chart the course for the district, and work closely with the school board. They are responsible for hiring and supervising the other administrators in the district, including school principals. The superintendent must respond to the demands of all the other constituencies in the district: the teachers, students, parents, staff, and the community at large. They must consider how to allocate the financial and human resources of the district in order to achieve the best results. Their role for our community is an important one - to make sure our school system can be the best it can be.
The HCDE school board has began the search for a new superintendent of schools by interviewing several search firm candidates, but now we, as a community, need to take steps to ensure our involvement and voice in the process. Community voice in the superintendent selection process is important to our community as a whole because our leaders need to represent the diverse needs of our community and reflect those they represent. To better include the community in this process, we are urging the school board to create policy around four reforms:
1. Make finalist candidate resumes available online for those who may not be able to make it to
central office
2. Live stream interviews of candidates
3. Hold open forum meetings in which all community members, not just those considered “stakeholders” by the school board, will be invited and allowed to submit questions to candidates
4. The creation of a Community Advisory Council made up of a diverse group of representatives from all nine school districts. The committee would work with the school board to host open forums, survey community members, and create interview questions for candidates.
These reforms have been crafted through community input and recommended with the community in mind. While we support our school board in its duty to select our next superintendent and firmly believe they can pick the best person for the job, UnifiEd calls on our school board to adopt all four recommendations to ensure the community gets a voice in the choice. We are now asking anyone who supports these reforms to please contact their representatives urging them to let our voices be heard.
There is much to be done to make sure our school system is the best it can be, but we know that with the right leaders and community empowerment this work is not impossible. Our community has accomplished many incredible things and we are excited to see what we can accomplish now. So, in one of the most important decisions affecting you, your children, and the community, the question is, how will you be involved?
Corey Garrett
Unifi-Ed, Director of Community Engagement