HOW A KATY ISD SCHOOL BOARD HIRED THE SUPERINTENDENT IN 1995:
HOW A KATY ISD SCHOOL BOARD HIRED ONE OF ITS SUPERINTENDENTS -
February 20, 2006
By Mary McGarr
Katy ISD has an interesting track record
when it comes to superintendents. When I moved
here, the superintendent was Gordon Brown. Mr.
Brown ruled the school district with an iron hand.
Everything was geared toward letting the interlopers from the suburbs pay for
whatever those who lived in the City of Katy thought they needed in their Katy schools.
It was a scenario not unlike that played out whenever the suburbs intrude on what
has been for years a sleepy little town.
The Board was pretty much controlled by
local Katy citizens because the suburbians weren’t organized at the ballot box well enough
to make changes. School board elections are to
this day always held on the same day as City of Katy elections so that the electorate can
be directed to the school election ballot box if necessary.
As we all know, Katy High School
athletics are primary to academic educations, so that matter took precedence.
When upstart Taylor High School came along and started to have
a winning football team, Mayde Creek High School was built long before it was
needed so the population at Taylor could be decimated. [Twelve hundred students in 9
through 12th grades in 1987-88.] Then when Taylor still managed to go farther one year in
post season playoffs than Katy High School (small population and all), all of a sudden the
next year the Taylor winning football coach, Donnie Laurence, was gone!
It was the same scenario that played out when Cinco Ranch High School started
getting too good. But I digress.
Superintendent Brown was good at keeping
the locals happy, and they were pleased with him. [In retrospect, he was a good
superintendent, I thought.] Unfortunately for him, he created his own demise, and he and
his new wife, the former Assistant Superintendent, left for Huntsville where they happily
reside. It cost the school district many
hundreds of thousands of dollars for his exit.
Next up, after some interesting board
elections, was the hiring of Linda Woodward.
Dr. Woodward was a very nice lady, who I believe really tried to do her job.
Her mistake, in my opinion, was telling people what she thought they wanted
to hear, and it’s only 10 miles between both ends of the district, so that didn't work out
too well. In an effort to save her job, I ran
a petition drive to secure Single Member Districts, and actually acquired the necessary
signatures to cause the change, but mysteriously my best friend’s car was stolen with a
large number of the petitions in it. Stranger
still is the fact that the car was found unscathed in a scuzzy downtown Houston
neighborhood, with nothing missing but the petitions!
Think this stuff isn’t serious?
After the school board ran off Dr.
Woodward (and she got paid handsomely for her exit too, and I was of the opinion
that she deserved the pay-off), the board started a new search. I had
lived in the Katy school district for a while by then, and I recall going to one of those put-up
meetings where they ask for “parental input.”
I gave them mine, but it did little good.
Soon it was announced that Dr. Hugh Hayes
had been named as the superintendent. The
announcement in one of the papers piqued my interest when it said that this man, according
to someone who knew him in Odessa, had a “bad temper.”
What a strange comment, I thought at the time.
Dr. Hayes came to town, made some cosmetic changes and settled in.
He was obviously here to do the bidding of the Texas Education Agency and spent
much of his time in Austin. Skip Meno, who was
brought in from upstate New York by Governor Ann Richards to implement the Outcome Based
Education/School to Work agenda that was coming from the Federal Government, sent
instructions out to the local school districts, and Dr. Hayes, in my opinion, complied
with most all of them.
In the mean time, I got myself elected to
the school board, and started to be a thorn in his side, countering all his "school to work"
initiatives with some of my own which were more basic and traditional in scope.
Dr. Hayes didn’t like my opposition, but he was not able to stop me from saying
what I wanted to say. I really tried to work with him and explain the reasons for my
opposition, but he was obviously convinced about the reform agenda.
In the summer of 1993, Dr. Hayes made a
huge mistake when he inserted the Texas Penal Code definition for "public lewdness" into the
Discipline Management Plan that is distributed to all students on the first day of school.
Parents and students are required to sign a statement that assures that they have
read the document. Parents were outraged at
the inclusion of the rather unsavory sexual language that was included in that definition.
Dr. Hayes tried for a week or so to blame the inclusion on the Board, but when I
brought forth my draft copy which is what the Board had been given to approve and the
Penal code definition wasn‘t in it, the rest of the Board realized that we had NOT
approved the inclusion of the questionable language, and Dr. Hayes was stuck with sole
responsibility for his lack of good judgment.
After that, Superintendent Hayes decided
that he needed to move on. Because of the
circumstances, the Board did not have to buy out this superintendent’s contract, and he
left the district.
At that time, the Board began to
interview prospective head hunters. The process took a while.
One week when no matters regarding this search were scheduled, I went to Dallas
with my husband on his business trip. I notified
the Board president that I would be gone, and asked him specifically and as a courtesy to
me NOT to schedule a board meeting while I was gone.
Of course, the minute I left town, he scheduled a meeting to pick the headhunter
and failed to notify me. The Board picked Bob Thompson for the job.
Bob Thompson is/was an education teacher at Lamar Tech.
He moonlighted on the side as a superintendent headhunter.
[He actually gets a huge grant from the State of Texas to run his "superintendents'
academy."] He had a stable of candidates that he touted around the state. He
had just been paid to find the Alief superintendent.
He was not the headhunter I thought we should get, and the Board president denied
me my opportunity for input with his actions.
Mr. Thompson was pretty incompetent, in my opinion, as he was not able to even write the
prospectus in a satisfactory manner. It had to be re-written by the Board before we could use it.
Of more importance is the fact that I
discovered much later that Bob Thompson was the chairman of the committee formed by Skip
Meno, the Commissioner of Education and head of the TEA which implemented the School to
Work agenda in Texas. He was in the thick of
things and now he was out making sure the “right kind” of superintendents were
placed in one of the twelve targeted school
districts where School to Work was going to be tried out on children unbeknownst to their
parents.
Mr. Thompson got lots of quality
applicants from all over the place, but none of them got past him, and I only found out
about them after the decision to hire Leonard Merrell had already been made.
What Mr. Thompson brought to the Board
were four candidates who were, in my opinion, ill-suited to carry out the wishes of the
Board or the citizens of Katy.
Before the candidates were solicited,
however, the Board sought public input. At the
time, I truly believed that the Board was genuinely trying to do the right thing.
Naďve as I was, I would never have believed that the whole process of engaging the
public was phony. I was wrong. We held meeting after meeting, and parents came out in
droves.
An old clipping from the Katy Times
on October 30,1994 describes what a group of people picked by the Board offered up as the
“top 10 qualities for a superintendent”:
“insures good communication with parents and news media, accessibility and open access at
the district and campus level, deals with student population growth and a controlled
building plan, tries to eliminate large class sizes (such as 35 students in one class in
secondary schools), supports safe environments and safety, has high expectations for
students and administrators, opposes federal and state mandates, Emphasizes non-athletic
more than athletic activities, emphasizes basic education from elementary to secondary,
will dismantle Outcome Based Education Activities, and supports only three levels of
administration middle management.”
Several more meetings were held, and here
are the items picked by Bob Thompson to include in his brochure advertising the open
position:
“The following criteria have been adopted
by the Board to serve as guidelines in selection of the new superintendent.
The new superintendent should be [and
notice that all the OBE buzz words are in this list!]:
*A person who can administer a
challenging, accountability-based academic program.
*A visible, accessible person who
effectively communicates with district personnel, the community, state and national
decision makers, and all other publics who have a stake in or impact on the district.
*A person proficient in involving the
community in decisions that affect and enhance the content, quality, standards, and
direction of the district’s academic, vocational and extra-curricular programs.
*A person who has comprehensive
management abilities regarding business, staffing, and planning functions in a large,
rapidly-growing district.
*A strong leader who will take a stand on
issues of importance to a child’s education and who will establish high standards of
academic excellence and discipline.
*A person capable of creating a climate
of cooperation within the district.
*Must be certifiable as a superintendent
in Texas. A doctorate is preferred but not
required. Experience as superintendent or
assistant superintendent is preferred.
Conditions of employment
Salary:
$100,000 - $140,000 range
Fringe Benefits:
Negotiable
Contract:
Term length is negotiable
Travel:
In-district: Negotiable
Out-of-district: All reasonable expenses
Professional Dues:
Reasonable fees and dues
Residence:
Must reside in district
Moving Expenses:
Negotiable
Medical: Must pass physical and psychological exams prior to employment and an annual physical thereafter.