Memphis-Shelby County Schools hears from new slate of superintendent finalists

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Chalk Beat

The Memphis-Shelby County Schools board interviewed five finalists for superintendent Friday — including one candidate from the district — as it tries to wrap up a tortuous search that began more than a year ago.

The finalists are:

The start of the interview process is a significant step toward hiring a new leader for Tennessee’s largest school district, which has been operating with interim Superintendent Toni Williams in charge since August 2022, when Joris Ray resigned under a cloud of scandal.

The search for Ray’s successor appeared to be nearing an end in the spring, only to collapse as some board members balked at an initial slate of finalists selected by search firm Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates — and the process that produced them.

Whoever emerges as the next leader has a challenging job: Like other public school districts, Memphis is projecting a large budget gap as federal pandemic relief funds expire, leaving leaders to decide which academic programs and personnel they can afford to cut or keep. Plus, the current administration has launched a major facilities overhaul that could involve school consolidations and closures.

The new leader will also have to deal with direct challenges to local control from state leaders and lawmakers, who have stepped up the pressure on public school systems. New policies from the GOP-led state government include restrictions on classroom instruction, changes to school evaluation criteria, and an expansion of private school vouchers.

The five finalists who interviewed with the board Friday emerged from a group of 22 applicants who sought the job this time around, down from 34 applicants in the previous search attempt. Max McGee, president of Hazard Young, said the search drew candidates from outside Tennessee but also included “strong local interest.”

“I am especially impressed with the breadth and depth of the applicant pool,” McGee said in a statement released by MSCS in November.

Feagins, Jenkins, and Whitelaw also applied in the earlier part of the search process, according to a partial applicant list released at the time, and Jenkins was one of the initial finalists. Brown and Proctor appear to be new applicants.

If the interviews ultimately lead to the selection of a candidate who wins board approval, it will be the first successfully completed national superintendent search since the district was formed in the merger with Shelby County Schools just over a decade ago. The two previous leaders were internal candidates who got promoted: Dorsey Hopson in 2013, and Ray, who took over for Hopson in late 2018.

The board is expected to choose a permanent superintendent early in 2024, and that person would start the job by July 1.

The first attempt to find Ray’s successor unraveled in April amid a board dispute, partly over whether Williams, the district’s former finance chief, was qualified to take the superintendent job. The board agreed to restart the process.

Since then, the board has largely avoided controversy and maintained the revised timeline it laid out in June.

Williams’ contract spells out the ways she could stay with the district when her term as interim chief ends: The next superintendent or the board could reassign her to her previous role as chief financial officer, or give her a chance to stay on as a consultant.

Tomeka Hart Wigginton, a former school board member who helped the board get the search back on track this summer, is expected to play a role in the next phase of the search as well, said board member Joyce Dorse-Coleman, co-chair of the search.

Hart Wigginton will tally the board’s scorecards after this first round of interviews, and announce the results at a public meeting next Tuesday. At that point, the board will narrow the slate to three finalists, using their own evaluations and evaluations from community members to guide their decision.

Those three candidates are expected to be in Memphis in the new year for more extensive interviews in a process that will include more community engagement.

Meet the five finalists for MSCS superintendent

Memphis-Shelby County Schools board members asked finalists six questions, corresponding to a rubric that evaluates candidates on student achievement (30%), business and finance (20%), governance and board relations (20%), staff relations and leadership (15%), and community relations (15%).

Yolonda Brown has spent her 30-year education career in Atlanta Public Schools, beginning as a teacher and climbing the ranks to become the district’s chief academic officer in 2020. In this role, she mapped the district’s academic plan through the pandemic and recovery by focusing on early literacy and extending the school day, she wrote in her application. When the district makes decisions about its school buildings, Brown is at the table, she told board members. The Atlanta district has given her a lesson in navigating the politics of school districts, she said, and her three decades there show “how strident I am about supporting communities for a very, very long time,” she said.

Marie Feagins works in Detroit’s public school district with high school academic programming, and acts as a liaison for the district with the mayor’s office and state education department, she wrote in her application. Feagins pointed to gains in graduation rates and FAFSA completion, plus decreasing dropout rates. Before coming to Detroit, she was a principal in Cleveland, and got her education career started in Alabama. She made the repeated appeal to board members that “the right leader at the right place at the right time changes everything.”

Carlton Jenkins retired as superintendent of Wisconsin’s Madison Metropolitan School District over the summer, where he secured passage of a $350 million referenda and led the district through the pandemic. He became the district’s first Black superintendent in 2020, after two previous superintendent stints at smaller districts in Minnesota and Michigan, according to his application. Jenkins has been eyeing Memphis since its merger a decade ago, he told board members Friday, in an interview where he stressed a need to elevate student performance beyond proficiency. “Growth is important … but let’s not stop there,” he said.

Cheryl Proctor has been a top academic administrator at Portland Public Schools in Oregon for two years, roles she assumed after a five-year administrative career with Philadelphia’s public school system. Before that, she was a school principal in Florida schools, she wrote in her application. Proctor explained ways she has examined existing school programs and then suggested and implemented changes. Her recent experiences also include engaging teachers and the community on key, contentious district decisions, such as a revamp of a historically Black high school. As a leader, Proctor strives to balance inspiration with high expectations, “all the while creating the conditions for success for our staff (and) our students.”

Angela Whitelaw is a career educator and administrator in the Memphis school district who was one of two acting superintendents in summer 2022. She has since returned to her post as deputy superintendent overseeing academics, and touted the district’s academic growth in the wake of the pandemic in her application. In that post, which she has held since 2019, Whitelaw explained how she worked with community groups to more effectively communicate with families about their student’s performance. Whitelaw began her career as a teacher then principal in Memphis schools, and becoming superintendent would be a “dream job,” she said. “I know all the things that we’ve tried, all of the things we didn’t get right, all the things we started, we stopped, we should have continued.”

Laura Testino covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach Laura at LTestino@chalkbeat.org.

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