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August 2008

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Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2008 > July > 04 > Entry

Meet Kurt Stanic, interim superintendent

By selliott | Friday, July 4, 2008, 12:12 PM

(Kurt Stanic is sworn in as interim superintendent Tuesday.)

On Tuesday, the Dayton school formally introduce and swore in Kurt Stanic as interim superintendent. And for the first time, I got to speak with him face-to-face.

It was an interesting conversation. Here some first impressions:

—Style. Personality-wise, Stanic strikes me as an interesting mix. He projects a very calm, approachable demeanor. At the same time, it’s clear he has a type-A personality. I jokingly asked him what he had against retirement, since this is the third time he has unretired to take a superintendent job.

He gave a reflective answer. Stanic said he really should have thought out the process of stepping down from a superintendency. He said he found it difficult to move on suddenly from a high energy, high profile job like superintendent.

So not long after he retired from North Olmsted schools after five years in 2007, he got a volunteer job to keep busy. But this was not a typical old-guy retiree job like seating people at the local theater or policing a golf course. Stanic managed the re-election campaign for the mayor of Euclid, the city where he lives. After managing so many school levy campaigns through the years, he said he was intrigued by the challenge of managing a candidate and the mayor was an old friend.

—Accessibility. From my point of view as a reporter who writes about Dayton schools, I was impressed that Stanic did not hesitate to give me contact numbers and an email address right off the bat. This may not sound like much, but you might be surprised at how often folks in leadership positions are squeamish about access to the press.

He said communication with the community and the staff is among his highest priorities and he believes improvement in that area could help the levy effort this fall. Stanic also described himself as something of an old school communicator, noting he is not a big fan of e-mail and prefers to do business face-to-face whenever possible.

He also said he and his wife are spending some time looking for an apartment to rent this week and he believes they are close to settling on a place to live locally.

—Priorities. Stanic talked a good game about teaching and learning, a mantra he repeated several times as his primary focus. He gave the strong impression that when it came to educating he had ideas about instruction, not just management. He doesn’t have much time to affect change in that area if he is only staying for a year.

And instruction is the purview of Deputy Superintendent Debra Brathwaite, who has made it clear she wants the permanent superintendent job here and declined the opportunity to serve in the interim role before Stanic jumped at it. How the Stanic-Brathwaite relationship plays out will be interesting to watch. Will they become close partners like Mack and Brathwaite were, or will they act like rivals?

Dayton’s budget. After having been in a couple of DPS finance meetings this week and seeing the money people sweat their way through the end of the fiscal year, I asked Stanic if he had seen the budget for Dayton.

“I have seen the budget and I cried all weekend. It’s a sad story,” he said jokingly.

Then he got serious. He said he had confidence in the district’s financial management and he was convinced of the need for a tax levy to generate more operating money.

“This district has done an especially good job of holding down increases in expenditures or they would not have been able to go 16 years without a levy,” he said. “If you have seen one financial forecast you have seen them all. When the amount of money you generate remains the same and the cost of business increases, that causes problems.”

—Connections. Because of his long tenure as a superintendent in Ohio (20 years in three jobs), Stanic is well connected. He dropped the names of several local superintendents he knew during our conversation.

He also mentioned he was a leader in the 1990s in the statewide push for more equitable funding in Ohio. When I asked him if he was hopeful about Gov. Ted Strickland’s promised overhaul of K-12 education, Stanic reacted like someone who has been through the wars. He basically said he’d believe it when he saw it and noted he had been disappointed four times before, referencing the four Ohio Supreme Court decisions that failed to bring dramatic change.

—Future. This was interesting. I asked Stanic if he was interested in the permanent job here. He paused for a very long moment and said that wasn’t the first time he had been asked that question. Then he made a short speech about the opportunities he and his wife had to do things together after he retired last year and he said he had promises to keep to her.

But I noticed he never actually said he was not interested in the permanent job. At age 56, Stanic is the same age as Percy Mack. He is certainly young and vibrant enough to run another school district for five to seven years. The press clippings on his departures from Lorain and North Olmsted were very positive — he remained well liked upon leaving those places after pretty long tenures.

If Stanic impresses in his year here, will he emerge as a candidate for the permanent job? Stay tuned.

—A curious note. I hesitate to even point this out. But did anyone notice Dayton just named its first white superintendent in more than 20 years?

This is interesting to me because it has been such a non-issue. Race, in the past, has been a key factor in the selection of superintendent candidates.

Beginning with Franklin Smith in the mid-1980s, Dayton schools have had four consecutive black superintendents — Smith, James Williams, Jerrie Bascome McGill and Mack.

By the 1980s, Dayton’s enrollment had a strong majority of black students and through that decade the board also became majority black. For most, if not all, of those superintendent hires, the board’s desire for minority candidates was a pretty high priority. Some on the board felt black children in Dayton needed a role model in the superintendent’s seat who looked like them.

But as time has passed, black school leaders are no longer a rarity. Heck, we even have a black candidate for president. So perhaps all that has reduced the urgency for a black role model at the top for Dayton schools.

And, with time, circumstances and priorities change.

Back in 2002 when the district resolved its desegregation case by mutual agreement with the NAACP and the state, I was talking with a then school board member about the danger that schools could resegregate, making all-white schools in some neighborhoods and all-black schools in others.

If that happened, would the danger exist that resources could again be doled out unevenly, which led to the first desegregation order?

The board member responded by pointing at the school board. At that time, a strong majority of the board —- five of seven board members — and the superintendent were black. The board member said this made the possibility of discrimination remote. When I noted that things can change, the board member said the demographics of the city didn’t suggest a significant change in the future.

Hmmm. Let’s look at the situation today. A slim 4-3 majority of the board are black and the district has a white superintendent. Who would have expected that in 2002?

Let me quickly add that I’m pleased to say I don’t believe race is a factor at all in the the choice of Stanic or in hiring decisions at DPS these days. I just thought the shift was worth noting, given the city’s difficult experience with integration and racal politics in schools over the past 40 years.

Note: I corrected this entry to reflect that Stanic lives in Euclid where he was previously superintendent and ran the mayor’s campaign last year, not Lorain.

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