Let’s Welcome a New Superintendent

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Editor,

It’s the public’s right to question methods employed by our school board and the search firm it hired, but the board soon will choose a superintendent.  Once it does, we owe it to students and parents to look over the horizon to the future for our schools.

The biggest mistake we could make now is failure to manage expectations, and think any new superintendent will have all the right ideas or answers.  Instead, we should expect a superintendent with professional skills to help sustain our public school success stories, and recommend changes needed to make our schools even better.

To do that the new superintendent must be responsive to the character and values of the community.  We elect our school board to be the voice of the community, ensure public participation, give clear policy direction, and duly authorize the actions of the superintendent who is a senior education administrator not a political leader.

We entrusted the school board to act on our behalf, so we should welcome the new chief educator with a generous spirit of good will. We must make this an opportunity to think ahead and move forward.

No matter what our concerns may have been in the past, we need in good faith to support the success of the new superintendent.

A high performing academic leader will be the first to tell us that the long term ideas and solutions to ensure our schools are ready for the future will need to come from the community itself.  Let’s give this new superintendent every chance to bring out the best in a community that is unstinting when it comes to support for public schools.

Of course, any superintendent is only as good as the school board that provides oversight, and directs the superintendent in managing the exceptional human resources and tangible assets with which our schools are so well-endowed. We need a school board that upholds in its legislative role and public deliberations to the same high standard of rigor and excellence we expect of students, teachers and public school employees.

We need a school board and a superintendent who are literate enough in public affairs to understand that every student, teacher, parent, citizen, taxpayer and voter has a civic and moral stake in enlightened public school governance.

Howard Hills, Laguna Beach

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