Calloway is choice to lead schools
Resume: http://www.freep.com/assets/static/pdf/2006/12/dps_calloway1213.pdf
Endorsement likely to get board's vote
March 2, 2007
A Detroit Public Schools search committee voted 4-1 Thursday night to recommend Connie Calloway as the next superintendent of the 119,000-student school system.
The full board is to vote at its regular meeting March 8 on whether to offer her a contract. And she appears to have the six votes needed to get the job.
Four board members voted to recommend her. Annie Carter, who said earlier that she would consider voting to start a new search, said Thursday she supported the endorsement.
Marvis Cofield also expressed faith in the search committee's decision, and President Jimmy Womack said he would support Calloway if he saw enough "excitement" from the community.
Calloway, 56, is superintendent of the 5,700-student school system in the St. Louis suburb of Normandy, Mo. She beat out current Detroit Superintendent William F. Coleman III and Doris Hope-Jackson, school board vice president of the 1,300-student district in Harvey, Ill.
"I'm very excited," Carla Scott, chairwoman of the search committee, said before calling Calloway a "change agent and exactly what we need."
But Reverend David Murray, who cast the lone no vote on the committee, said he believes Coleman, whose contract expires June 30, is the best choice because he's a financial manager.
"I think it's ludicrous ... to change management in light of the deficit-elimination plan," Murray said.
"I respect what she could bring academically," he added of Calloway. "But Mr. Coleman ... can provide the financial management to get the district stabilized."
Calloway could not be reached for comment Thursday night. She has a doctorate from Ohio University, a master's from Harvard and briefly was a director at a charter school. She is divorced with one grown daughter.
Womack said that when the board visited Normandy last month and met with parents, educators, business leaders and others to talk about Calloway, some of them called her direct and arrogant. But he said that could be interpreted as a lack of tolerance for mediocrity.
The committee members who voted to recommend Calloway were Scott, Joyce Hayes-Giles, Tyrone Winfrey and Ida Short.
Chris White, a parent who attended the public interviews in December, said that the board needs to put aside its divided feelings about Coleman.
"It's not about how we feel about the person who's in the seat," White said. "It's about who's the best person to lead us in the next few years."
Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick voiced concern in December that the superintendent can be fired by a simple majority and suggested that to attain some leadership consistency, it should take more than six votes to fire the superintendent.
White said he thought Calloway's ideas about solving urban school problems were unrealistic.
"She said she walks through the schools, and you can't do that here," White said. "It wasn't realistic."
But White said Calloway chose all the right words in her public interview.
"I knew that she was going to be the one," he said. "Quote a little Bible ... talk about the struggle and you can do anything in this town. ... You don't have to have the right track record, just say the right things."
Deborah Hunter-Harvill, president-elect of the National Alliance of Black School Educators and principal at Detroit's McMichael Technological Academy, said that a superintendent's skills are more important than his or her experience in large districts.
"She's going to have to have a team of people that believe in her mission and her vision," Hunter-Harvill said. "If she is a change agent, then people are going to have to change."
Contact CHASTITY PRATT at 313-223-4537 or cpratt@freepress.com. Free Press education writer Lori Higgins contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2007 Detroit Free Press Inc.
No comments:
Post a Comment