Finalist a seasoned educator
Samuel King unexpectedly rose to the top of the heap in East Baton Rouge Parish’s search for a new superintendent of schools, emerging as the lone finalist from a field of six semifinalists.
In choosing to have King return for a second interview, the board opted for a seasoned educator who has taken the traditional route to what he said is his career goal of running a larger urban school system. It’s the area he views as having the greatest need in public education.
“My previous experience is perfectly suited for East Baton Rouge Parish,” King wrote in his application.
For almost seven years, King has run the smaller, suburban Atlanta Rockdale County school district, located east of Atlanta, with Conyers its county seat. In 2011, he was named Georgia Superintendent of the Year. Before Rockdale, he spent four years as assistant superintendent of high schools in the more urban and much-larger Clayton County school district, which lies south of Atlanta.
King finished ahead of his rivals, in part, because of the weakness of other leading candidates, three of whom had strong pockets of support.
This was particularly true of Herman Brister Sr., current chief academic officer of the school system, and Elliot Smalley, school communications chief in Charleston, S.C., who listed Louisiana Superintendent of Schools John White as a reference.
Brister, however, had trouble overcoming perceptions of being too much of an insider, and Smalley had trouble getting past doubts prompted by his never having taught in a classroom or served as a school principal.
Maria Pitre-Martin, a former East Baton Rouge school administrator who now works with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, had support, too. Her strongest backing, though, came from the same board members who supported Smalley.
In the end, none of them could muster the necessary six of 11 votes to become a finalist.
King, on the other hand, got the nod of 10 of 11 board members.
The only board holdout, Craig Freeman, said he doesn’t have problems with King, but wants someone who has run a larger school district — Rockdale County has just 16,000 students compared to the 43,000 in East Baton Rouge Parish — and Freeman expressed certainty that a renewed search could still produce someone much better.
King came across in his Jan. 18 interview as calm and assured, impressing many board members and many in the audience.
Introducing himself, he described himself as the “proud” son of two teachers — dad taught math, mom taught English — during the years he was growing up in the rural town of Smithville, Ga.
When King went north to Mercer University in Atlanta, he had no interest at first in becoming an educator.
“I had strong experience in math and science because I initially had chosen a pre-med path, determined that I was not going to do what my mother and father did,” King told the School Board. “But this is truly my calling. And as the saying goes, if it’s truly your calling, you can’t avoid it.”
He graduated from Mercer with a bachelor of arts degree in 1984 and spent almost 28 years since as an educator, starting as a math and science teacher in Stone Mountain, Ga. Along the way, he taught math and science in middle and high schools as well. In Clayton County, he spent three years as principal of a middle school before taking an assistant superintendent’s job there, a district with 52,000 students at the time.
In 2005, he became school superintendent in Rockdale County and has remained there since, though during the past two years he nearly landed jobs running first, the DeKalb, and then the Cobb, school districts near Atlanta.
In his résumé, King lists several accomplishments:
- Five consecutive years during which the Rockdale County school district achieved “adequate year progress,” the annual growth targets set by the state of Georgia in keeping with the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act.
- Substantial improvements in elementary and middle school math and reading passage rates during the past nine years, both for all students and those living in poverty.
- About 86 percent of students graduating from high school now, up from about 77 percent when King took over the job.
- Helped win voter passage of a countywide sales tax.
- Helped in 2006 to get up and running a long-in-planning countywide career academy that on its Web page says it educates more than 1,600 students a year. It’s Rockdale’s only charter school.
These accomplishments came as the population of Rockdale County grew from 70,000 in 2000 to more than 87,000 residents counted in the most recent U.S. census. The school system has become more multi-racial as it has added thousands of new students. Now, more than 60 percent of Rockdale students are living in poverty, compared to 30 percent living in poverty in 2000.
Fred Boscarino, president and chief executive officer of the Conyers-Rockdale Chamber of Commerce, said he hates the prospect of losing King.
“He turned the community around,” Boscarino said. “There used to be a lot of comments about the school system, about where it needs to be. You don’t hear about that anymore.”
King’s record is already getting scrutiny.
Noel Hammatt, a former School Board member who now describes himself as an independent education researcher, questioned King during his interview about why several Rockdale schools, despite overall test score growth, are ranked lower now than they were when King took over, suggesting they are improving at a slower pace than the rest of the state.
School Board President Barbara Freiberg said she wants King to say more about his plans for East Baton Rouge, and explain more how his plans relate to charter schools, since Rockdale has so few of them.
“That was something that we didn’t really get to in the initial interview,” she said.