EBR School Board selects interim superintendent
Residential school OK’d
The East Baton Rouge Parish School Board on Thursday picked Carlos Sam, director of magnet programs, to serve as the district’s interim superintendent, ending an eight-day deadlock that threatened to leave the school system leaderless when Superintendent John Dilworth has his last day on Feb. 24.
In an unrelated matter, the School Board narrowly approved an inner city public boarding school called THRIVE Academy set to open in late July with 20 sixth-graders.
After a 30 minute discussion, the vote for an interim superintendent was 10-0 with Board President Barbara Freiberg abstaining.
“We just need to get back to the business at hand,” Sam said after the meeting.
Some board members who have supported the promotion of Herman Brister, the district’s chief academic officer, resisted the urge to push Brister as the nominee again.
“I don’t want to see a circus. This board has been called everything from a three-ring to a monkey show, and I agree,” School Board Vice President Tarvald Smith said.
“Everybody who is a School Board watcher knows what the vote will be,” Smith added. “Five to six, and Dr. Brister not getting the position he deserves.”
The board voted 5-6 on Feb. 8 leaving Brister one vote short of the six needed to win the position of interim superintendent.
Several speakers from the audience urged the board to reconsider and appoint Brister anyway.
Opponents of Brister said he is too much of an insider, and some expressed concern about potential nepotism since several Brister family members hold prominent positions in the school system.
Brister, who interviewed on Jan. 23 to replace Dilworth, said he takes pains to stay out of the education careers of his family members.
Sam, whose name was first suggested on Feb. 8 by board member Jerry Arbour, is a longtime educator who spent several years as principal of Park Forest Middle School before taking over the magnet programs. Sam will temporarily earn Dilworth’s annual pay of about $225,000 and will serve until the School Board finds a permanent replacement to Dilworth.
Sam is certified to be a superintendent, but the motion passed Thursday bars him from seeking the permanent job.
In addition to overseeing magnet schools, Sam’s position places him over the gifted-and-talented and the foreign language programs. For the last few months, Sam has picked up the duties of Adam Smith, the director of Middle Schools. Smith has been serving as the principal of Glen Oaks High School.
Sam said after the meeting that he may have to shed some of his duties, but is not sure, given the district’s tight budget, what he can shed.
“I don’t shy away from responsibility,” he said.
Sam’s selection represented a compromise of sorts between disappointed supporters of Brister and board members who tried over the past week to get enough support to hire an outsider to temporarily run the school system.
Board member Craig Freeman was the most outspoken about seeking an outsider to be interim superintendent, but he didn’t rule out internal candidates. In an interview Wednesday, Freeman mentioned that Sam and at least three other unnamed outsiders were being considered.
But on Thursday, Freeman said, “We have some real consensus that Mr. Sam is a fantastic solution.”
“We think that Mr. Sam maximizes the knowledge and minimizes the disruption to our system,” Freeman added.
After the meeting, Vice President Smith said he was not contacted beforehand that Sam had the votes. Smith said he thinks that board members who wanted an outsider recognized the damage that had been done to the school system’s reputation by rejecting Brister, so they agreed to go along with hiring Sam.
“We had to stop the bleeding,” Smith said.
The board is still discussing how best to reopen the search for a permanent replacement to Dilworth.
In approving the THRIVE Academy, the board overruled both internal and external teams of evaluators who had expressed concerns about the inner city boarding school.
The vote was 6-4 in favor, with one board member abstaining.
The evaluators’ conclusions were contained in a letter signed by Dilworth that questioned whether the charter school will have the money to operate, the lack of a facility, whether the school will meet the needs of individual students, and whether it’s innovative enough besides having children living at the school.
Several students connected with the Baton Rouge Youth Coalition spoke in support of the proposed school, as did a former student of Sarah Broome, the founder and executive director of THRIVE.
“We are very happy, but we have a lot of work still to do,” she said.
THRIVE is seeking private money to run the residential part of the school. It also needs to gain approval to operate at its preferred location, the former Louisiana School for the Visually Impaired on Government Street. Broome said she hopes to use space that hasn’t been pegged by a truancy center that is expected to locate on the campus.
The school plans to grow over the course of eight year from 20 to 420 students in grades 6 through 12. Its proposed budget is projected to grow from $437,000 to $2.9 million a year.
Noel Hammatt, a former School Board member and a frequent critic of charter schools, surprisingly came out in support of THRIVE. He contradicted the evaluation teams and told the board that a residential school is innovative because it’s a way of addressing the unstable home life and out-of-school factors that disrupt student academics.
“You have an opportunity to do something for some kids here in Baton Rouge that is truly different,” he said.