Tribune/Dan McGee - Pedro Martinez, chief financial officer of the Chicago Public Schools, was interviewed by the Washoe County School District Board of Trustees on Monday as they search for a new district superintendent.
The first pool of candidates in the search were interviewed in April, but all withdrew their names, causing the board to reopen the pool and collect a fresh stack of applicants nationwide.
Following are the candidates from Monday’s interviews and their responses to some of the board’s questions.
Heath Morrison
Current position: Community superintendent, Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland.
Experience: Oversees 34 schools, a zone with high levels of poverty, mobility and non-English speakers and 23,000 students. Formerly, Morrison was a principal and social studies teacher.
Trustee Scott Kelley: What plan would you use to lower the dropout rate and improve the overall graduation rate?
Morrison: You have so clearly made this the No. 1 topic. ... The brutal facts are high schools are not working and we can try to keep doing the same thing. The definition of insanity is doing something over and over again expecting the same results. We have the same old factory model, different groups of kids, different experiences, different challenges but the same old model. ... With relevance, (education is) about engaging students in a meaningful way. My high schools belong to a consortium, with programs like sports or magnet schools for science and technology and students get a choice. They get to think about what high school they want to go to and take technology to whole new level. You have whiteboards; that’s the way they learn today. We passed notes; they text. Build college partnerships. You have a terrific community college; bring them in to partner with you and help them. Businesses can audit our curriculum. They’ll say, “Let us help you with internships or capstone projects and build a portfolio and raise the level of relevance.”
Trustee Dan Carne: We’ve joked about having an “S” on your chest (for Superman), but what are your strengths and weaknesses? What are the strengths in (your) person to complement your strengths and weaknesses?
Morrison: You would be taking a chance on a person who hasn’t done the job before. I have not been a superintendent. ... It would be a new role and any time we’re in a new role, we want to make sure we earn the new role. I look at my strengths: I’m very results-oriented, very academic-oriented. I know that I can get results here in this district and I’m very comfortable with academic results. And I see that with the graduation and dropout rates (in Washoe County). I would love the opportunity to get to lead that work. I love being part of the team. What I would look for, and what is very enticing to me, is I think you have one heck of a financial officer (Gary Kraemer). You have weathered (the budget) storm and I don’t think you have gotten credit and I don’t think (Kraemer)’s gotten enough credit.
Karst Brandsma
Current position: Interim superintendent, Everett School District, Washington.
Experience: Thirty-two years in education, career and technology, and a high school football coach for 11 years.
Kelley: What best practices do you believe in and describe them.
Brandsma: I would try to find success in the small things like (English as a Second Language) and Title I and not only working with English language learners. You have to have high expectations; you have those who shoot for the moon and they can’t be underestimated. Part of the solution is this concept of not waiting until the end of the semester to determine whether kids have been successful. You have to have some informative decision assessments on kids that are meeting the standards and redefine them rather than wait to the very end.
Trustee Barbara Clark: It’s very easy to make a decision that the superintendent or the trustees need to level to do the Blueprint for Success, but it’s hard to have 7,000 employees in the district buy into it. How would you get the buy-in from every employee and staff or which leadership style drives their vision throughout the district?
Brandsma: It gets back to people skills. Clearly we need to have high expectations, but sometimes they just have to be clear expectations. To get the buy-in, people have to be visible. Being visible is sharing those expectations and communicating and working together with associations so that they’re also on the same page.
Pedro Martinez
Current position: Chief Financial Officer, Chicago Public Schools.
Experience: Currently manages $5 million operating budget and $855 million capital budget for the third largest public school district in the United States. Oversaw $300 million budget that included various residential and daycare service lines as director of finance and technology for Catholic Charities of the Arch Diocese of Chicago.
Clark: Talk about how you would deal with schools in AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) and restructuring and have you found mechanisms to get them off that?
Martinez: In the elementary schools, we make sure the school has a literacy specialist and rigorous induction for teachers. Now we’re putting a lot more money to make sure teachers have the right induction. We do afterschool programs, which are significant and a popular intervention. In Chicago, we have been very aggressive about closing schools; we’ve closed over 15 schools. (He added that these schools were closed to make way for higher performing schools.) That sounds like a lot, but we have 670 schools and we expect to have 700 by fall. We believe in choice and we open new schools all around because families have to have a choice. We have traditional schools, but we’ve also had teachers that come together and open up a school on their own.
Trustee Barbara McLaury: You’ll be assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the district as whole, but in your entrance plan, how would you go about looking at our strengths and weaknesses beyond the data?
Martinez: The data is a beginning and as much as I’m data-driven, I’m also people-driven. I want to see with my own eyes what it looks like in those buildings. You can go in a building and feel the culture by talking to teachers, having the data, knowing what’s going on and looking for root cause in the central office. We need to ask, “Are we providing all support we need for infrastructure?”
Trustees were impressed by the candidates’ zeal for education, including Morrison’s statement on recruiting the best principals, teachers and administrative staff for the school district.
“In terms of building human capital, I love my title,” he said. “I’m called the community superintendent, and I believe that it does take a village to educate children. And you are very invested here in this county.”
Formal interviews of three more candidates begin today at 7:30 a.m. at the WCSD Administration Building at 425 E. Ninth St. in Reno.
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