After months of wondering whether Milwaukee’s new school board superintendent would leave Milwaukee for greener pastures, Superintendent Thornton has been recently telling school board members and others that it is time for his wife to move to Milwaukee and seek employment here. So the story in Tuesday’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Thornton just might leave Milwaukee might be a bit behind the times (unless the MJS knows something it isn’t telling the rest of us.
From the very beginning of the selection process, critics of MPS were telling the public that the school system was so dysfunctional that it couldn’t possibly get a qualified superintendent. Of course, some of these same critics were alleged to have been calling prospective candidates and told them not to apply for Milwaukee. When the list of candidates was finally published, all were trashed as being seriously flawed. Speculation was that, if the school board couldn’t hire anyone qualified, this would be proof positive that MPS had to be taken over by the mayor.
When Thornton was announced as the MPS choice, the trashing continued perhaps in a desperate attempt to prevent him from taking the job. Now that Thornton is superintendent, he has been elevated to be some miracle worker if only the school board would get out of his way and let him do his job.
So is it true that the school board had difficulty in getting qualified superintendent candidates? Our local paper has been running a “Truth-O-Meter” column on what local dignitaries say, so let’s turn the tables and look at just what happened to the MPS semi-finalists for superintendent.
The clear winner has to be semi-finalist Joshua Starr who didn’t even make the finalist MPS cut. He has been just appointed superintendent of Montgomery County Schools, Maryland, just outside of Washington, DC. This school system is twice the size of MPS and considered one of the top superintendent positions in the country. Montgomery County wins national awards for the quality of its educational program.
Charles Hopson was another semi-finalist who has landed a big school district superintendent position in Little Rock, AR. Pulaski County Special School District is smaller than MPS but it does have multiple high schools with big city challenges.
Edward Velasques was a semi-finalist who has moved on to be the superintendent of Lynwood, just outside of Los Angeles. Lynwood has four high schools. Velasques was sued by a former special education supervisor in his previous district of Mentabello for sexual harassment, but the Lynwood school board didn’t see much merit in the case and hired him anyway.
Finalist Stacy Scott has moved from an assistant superintendent position in Montgomery County to become the superintendent of Dracut schools, a suburban district just outside of Lowell, MA. Scott is seen as an up and coming big city superintendent candidate, but he needs to prove himself in a smaller district before he get such a position.
Only Robert Alfaro is in the same position he was in a year ago as a regional superintendent in Los Vegas.
None of these changes in positions will tell us just how good these candidates were when they applied for the MPS superintendent position, but at least most were seen as good enough candidates to land other superintendent jobs in other districts, both smaller and bigger, and some more highly prized, than MPS. Gregory Thornton wasn’t picked simply because he was the best out of a flawed group of candidates. He was picked because the school board thought he could do the job.
