Q&A with Charleston Superintendent Nancy McGinley

It's been a summer of firsts for new Charleston County schools Superintendent Nancy McGinley, and Tuesday will be another - her first time to experience the first day of school as leader of the district.

The district's former chief academic officer became superintendent in June after schools Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson left for the top schools job in Seattle.

While many students relaxed and enjoyed their summer, McGinley worked at least 70-hour weeks. District offices closed on Fridays the past three months, but that didn't stop McGinley from finding her way to 75 Calhoun St.

She's gotten acquainted with her new responsibilities, met with community leaders and hired new leadership. She understands how the schools are performing, and she's focused on getting them where they need to be.

She sat down with The Post and Courier this week to reflect on the successes and controversies she's encountered thus far and what she sees in the district's future.

Q: How has the adjustment been, going from chief academic officer to superintendent?

A: It's been exciting because I've gotten immersed in all the broader aspects of the superintendent's job. The first three years I was here, I focused almost exclusively on the academic areas and was informed about the finances and participated in the community outreach activities, when asked to. But certainly the number of public meetings and community events that I attend has increased quite a bit.

Q: What's been the most difficult part of this new job to learn?

A: Time management because there are so many demands on my day, and even on my weekends, and even on my evenings. Adjusting my already fairly heavy work commitment, having to turn that up a notch.

Q: How much are you working now?

A: I can easily record 70 hours a week. And I hope that decreases when school opens, but we've had so many things. The summer is actually an extremely busy time behind the scenes, because this is when we're hiring principals, this is when we're planning. In the case of coming in as the new superintendent, this is when I have to have all my initial outreach to the community that's added to the already busy workload. So I hope that that 70 hours doesn't continue or I may be aging more rapidly than I would like to (she laughs).

Q: I realize it's been a limited time, but what are you most proud of that's happened since you've become superintendent?

A: Absolutely filling the teacher vacancies is the No. 1 best thing we can do for children. And I'm just extremely pleased about where we are now. And that's not just due to my efforts, that's due to the principals, that's due to Bill Briggman, that's due to the Human Resources team that's made the victory in the classroom a very serious goal that they are working hard on every day. So that's been a win-win for everybody.

Q: How is the district that you inherited different than what former schools Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson walked into?

A: The foundation has been laid. We did a tremendous amount of work during the last three years putting together the building blocks for progress. The coherent curriculum did not exist three years ago. People did not know what MAP testing was three years ago. We were not using data. The finances were not where they are now in terms of being credible. We did not have a fund balance. The building program has certainly come along way.

I think I'm inheriting a district that is in a much better place, and I'd like to think that I had something to do with building part of that foundation. I'm happy that the work we've done in the area of student safety and building security is where it is now because I can give parents a pretty strong assurance that your child will be safe when they come to school. And that's the No. 1 concern of most parents.

Q: What does that mean for your priorities? Are you planning to come out with a longer-term plan?

A: The entry plan is about community outreach and getting the right leadership in place. Because the foundation has been laid in the last three years, we are able to focus on execution. That means we need to not just have the curriculum, we need to make sure the curriculum is being taught in every classroom and that our teachers are challenging students to move to a higher level. So my goal is not for students to be (rated) basic (on the state report card). My goal is for students to be (rated) proficient or advanced (on the state report card). My goal is not just to focus on the low achievers; my goal is to add value to all children and I see the need for enrichment programs. I would love my superintendency to be one in which we bring in extracurricular activities at the middle and elementary level, and not just for students who can pay for those but for all children. Certainly I anticipate we will have within the next several months a high school improvement plan. Some specific things that we will be doing in our middle schools to make sure we are sending children into high school reading and computing where they need to be. Our biggest challenge is our secondary schools. We are doing reasonably well with our elementary school progress.

Q: So you're going to have a Charleston Plan for Excellence part II? Is that going to be something that is developed over time, or are you going to try to set some goals soon?

A: Charleston Plan for Excellence II where we're moving from planning for excellence to making excellence our standard that incorporates several of the things I've already mentioned about having a secondary school improvement plan. What concrete initiatives and strategies are we going to put in place to tackle the fact that among our blueprint schools the 39 schools that are (rated) below average or unsatisfactory the majority of those schools are middle or high schools? One of the reasons I hired Randy Bynum as the new chief academic officer was that he was a successful high school principal. We need to bring in leadership that knows how to improve high schools.

Q: What would it take for you to call this year a success?

A: Clearly, if we improve on our state Report Card as a district, and if we see some reductions in our below average and unsatisfactory (rated) schools. I would call it a raving success if every school meets their improvement targets that we've put out in the Charleston Plan for Excellence II, where we not only challenge principals to meet these goals but we initiated the mid-year interventions. We've done a number of things to try to accelerate progress. I would call that a major success. And I also would call this year a major success if we continue to attract the bright and talented teachers that we met yesterday. We had the teacher induction program. We had 350 new teachers in there. The tone was just so positive and, in some ways so different, so much more optimistic than it's felt to me the past couple years. I don't know if that's because we're gaining a reputation for excellence or that people are now feeling optimistic. But I felt the energy in the room, and a number of people told me they did too.

Q: Some school board and community members harp on the fact that half the district's schools are below average and unsatisfactory. What do you predict this year's test results will be, and what will the impact be specifically to you if the district doesn't make that progress?

A: My prediction is we are going to reduce the number of blueprint schools. I can't say by how many because we have not looked at the school-by-school data. We'll be getting that very soon. Based on what I hear from principals and based on our MAP data, which is the benchmark data, we have seen growth. There are certainly nuances in how the state calculates the state report card rating that makes it hard to predict how many schools will actually make that progress. But I do feel we will make progress and see a reduction in our below average and unsatisfactory schools. I feel very optimistic that that will happen. If that doesn't happen, then we need to revisit our strategies. And we certainly will because you don't keep doing the same things for three years if it's not producing the gains that you set out to achieve. We've done that type of analysis for the last two years, but we've also been building the foundation. The foundation in my mind has now had an opportunity to show results, and if it doesn't show results, then we need to adjust and make mid-course corrections. And that we will do.

Q: What would you envision those mid-year corrections to be?

A: A non-negotiable is the coherent curriculum. There is absolute evidence that you have to have a curriculum that's based on the state standards, so we will not abandon that. But when I say the other strategies that we've put in place : One strategy that I strongly believe in and that we built for the last three years is teacher coaches assigned to school full time to work with teachers, to model lessons, to provide support, to assist new teachers. If that strategy is not contributing to improvement, then we may want to look at the role of the coaches what they do during the day, how we're using them and we might make adjustments. So that's the type of thing I mean that we would make mid-course corrections. I'm not going to wait until the end of next year and say, "Well, that wasn't working." If we don't see some positive gains on this state report card, I think we will sit down with all the key leaders and we will really do some analysis of our practices and say, "What can we change? What needs to be accelerated? Do we need more resources here?" We don't have time to wait another year. We have to be pretty proactive in making adjustments so that we move the needle up.

Q: You were the instructional leader for the district this past year. The board knows that. So what are the implications for your job security if the results aren't there?

A: I think they would expect me to make changes. They certainly hired me to be the instructional leader, to think through the strategies and to give them recommendations as to what the priorities are in the school district. There is a definite difference between being the person in the superintendency and being the second in command. Although I had a lot of authority over the academic programs as the chief academic officer, in the final analysis, the superintendent called the shots. I'm moving now to have that full level of responsibility. I can not get all the credit for the progress in 2007, but I certainly am responsible for some of it. And if achievement does not occur, I'm responsible for that too. I think they will hold me accountable to some degree for the 2007 results even though I wasn't the superintendent.

Q: Your job is a very political one. How would you grade yourself on the sometimes difficult relationships that you've handled with the board and community thus far?

A: I'll separate out the two. I think I've had very positive relationships with the school board, and I think I'm pretty fortunate with board I have. I feel the board members that we have at this time are in sync with my belief that we have to be advocates for children. So I would say my relationship with the board has been a B+ so far. I'd like to say an A, but I don't want to be overly optimistic that they would view it that way. But I think that has been positive.

In terms of outreach with the community, I know I have made a good effort to be as accessible as humanly possible. And to not only personally be available and be out there as much as I possibly can, but also to make some key decisions about appointing people and establishing roles and putting in place some expectations. I expect that we will get back to people in 24 hours. And so the director of community outreach, who unfortunately has a medical emergency in her family and has been out for a couple of days, she is helping to do that to make sure that we're responsive.

Same thing with the coordinator of parent relations and volunteer services those are areas that I'm committed to. I think people understand that the idea that I have put in play with the principals are significant parts of what I believe we have to do with the district in terms of the 60-second expectation. What I've directed our principals and all of our administrators to do is to communicate the expectation that 60 seconds after people walk into our building or offices, I want them to be greeted. I want someone to say, "Good morning." I want someone to direct them to the office or say, "May I help you?" What I want to change is how we involve parents, how we send a message of respect and how we forge partnerships. Partnerships are not forged by saying at the superintendent level, "I believe in partnerships." Partnerships are forged at the building level, at the office level, when people welcome people into the schools and treat them with respect. When I have spoken about that in my community meetings, that kind of an attitude resonates with the community and they feel, in some cases, that they haven't had that kind of respect and that that type of attention hasn't been paid to the true nature of partnerships that occurs one person at a time, not written in a plan that says "We believe in partnerships," but it doesn't happen when you walk into an office or a building.

Q: So what grade would you give yourself?

A: I would give myself an A for effort.

Q: What's been the most difficult situation you've had to deal with thus far as superintendent, and what did you learn from it?

A: There's a lot of difficult situations that you deal with as superintendent because when problems don't get solved at a lower level, they go through many, many steps before they get to the superintendent. So there are many difficult meetings that you must go into, and you learn very quickly that there's a difference between being smart and being wise. You learn that as a superintendent. And you also learn that as you get older in life that there's a difference between being smart and being wise. But probably the most public issue that I have had to work on has been the (Charleston Charter School for Math and Science) issue and the fact that there are different perspectives in the community on what relationship the school district should have with public charter schools. So what I've learned from that is that it's very difficult, and in some cases, it's impossible to make everybody happy. And that I rely on the same internal compass that I relied on as a principal, and that is be an advocate for children, and to do what I think is in the best interest of children and to always do my homework, which I do to the nth degree. I will research. I will talk to as many people as possible. And I will make sure that when I make a recommendation, that it is consistent with the best interest of children academically and it's consistent with my responsibility to safeguard the assets of this community and be responsible to taxpayers because I'm a taxpayer too.

Q: What is the biggest challenge facing the district?

A: The biggest challenge facing the district or one of the biggest challenges is our financial viability. We still need to have a long-term solution to the funding formula and how funds are distributed in South Carolina. Because every year, we cannot wait until the spring and have a $10 million deficit and try to figure out how we're going to make ends meet because costs go up, energy costs more, salaries go up. We must have some assurance that there will be a fair funding formula that Charleston can rely on going forward.

Q: That's one of the things people talk about here. Not the state funding formula, but the way the district funds its schools. Even you heard it at the county school board meeting last week, that people say it's not equitable. The board committed to come up with a weighted student funding formula. Is the district not the state equitably funding its schools, and what do you see the new formula looking like?

A: In terms of is the district funding schools equitably, yes. The district has a formula that applies to all schools for the basic student formula. In any middle school around the county, you divide the number of students by a factor of 22 to determine the number of teachers. There's certain factors and allowances that tell us how many assistant principals a school gets, or how many counselors, or how many positions. But then over and above that basic funding formula, there have been additional allocations based on the type of school or the needs of the school. So it's a difficult question to answer in a simple way because the fact of the matter is that many of our magnet schools get some additional resources, and you could argue that's unfair to the schools that don't get additional resources. However, long before I came, the school board made a decision that it was in the best interest of the community to have magnet schools which are usually specialty schools that require additional teachers or additional resources to be effective. So the approach to how a district funds its schools is really a reflection of the values of the community and that is ultimately not by the superintendent but by the school board.

What we will be doing is bringing the school board what they requested. And that will be a blueprint for a weighted student formula. A weighted student formula is a way of distributing money or resources based not soley by the number of children, but based on the needs of the children. The mechanics of doing this is something that's fairly academic. I mean, I could lay out how you would do a weighted student formula probably in the next 20 minutes if you asked me to because I've read about it, I've researched it, I've been part of districts that have explored doing a weighted student formula, so I know how to do it. What is the more difficult piece of moving to a weighted student formula is defining the impact and in some cases, not having as negative an impact. Because when you have a weighted student formula, there will be schools that gain and schools that lose. And how the board will want to approach that is really their call. Because we can show them how we would approach a weighted student formula, but in terms of whether this matches the values of the board and values of the community, that will end up being their call.

Q: You mean, schools in wealthier areas such as Sullivan's Island Elementary wouldn't get as much? How the board would approach handling those schools?

A: Yes, and smaller schools. And, in a simple way, schools that have a more homogeneous population that have students with a lot of additional needs, whether they are exceptional children, or English language learners or gifted children because you could argue that gifted children need the same resources as challenged learners need. But if a school does not have a lot of exceptional children, then they would probably be getting close to the base formula. Whereas a school that had a number of English language learners or exceptional children, they are going to get more money. So what a weighted student formula will ultimately do is redistribute the resources in the district and again, some schools will gain and others will lose.

Q: But ultimately, it's the most equitable way of doing it, right?

A: Yes, it's the most equitable way of meeting students needs because it generally costs more to educate someone who has exceptional needs.

Q: Your predecessor called Charleston the most segregated and racist place she'd ever lived. Would you agree? And why or why not?

A: I would not agree because I came from Philadelphia, which was a city of neighborhoods that were mostly ethnically diverse. The neighborhood housing patterns would give you a picture of segregation. I think that the issue of inner-race relations and integration is not unique to Charleston. I think it's an issue all across America that people are struggling with. I think there's more people of good will and good intentions in Charleston than there are people who want to keep barriers up, at least that's been my experience. I have many, many people who have reached out and supported equity and diversity and see the benefits of that both African-American and Caucasian families who want their children to be educated in a diverse setting because they know their children will inherit is a world of diversity. Most people that I know value diversity as an asset and a strength, not as something they want to divide us. So I think there are challenges here. There most definitely is a history here that we have been separate. We have not necessarily talked about race, but I think there is now an atmosphere that that past is not how we want to define the future.

Q: So Charleston is no worse?

A: I don't know. I've only lived in two places, Philadelphia and Charleston. I think there's challenges everywhere.

Q: How has the legacy of slavery affected this school district?

A: I've read a lot about the history of this area. Part of why I'm so committed to opportunities for all children is because I think there are negative residual feelings of exclusion and broken promises. I think it's time to change those dynamics and put Charleston on the map as a place where we are overcoming the achievement gap and where all children have opportunity to learn. We can not change the past, but we can do something about the future. And I think that's what our goal is under the Charleston Plan for Excellence II. To change the future and not have race or income determine how well you do in school.

Q: Former schools Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson said her race didn't make her job harder, but it affected the way people treated her and made it a distraction and took away time from what she was doing from superintendent. Being white, do you feel that's affected what you're trying to do in that same way i.e. creating other issues or distractions?

A: I cannot live in somebody else's skin or have their experience. My experience in terms of my race, my gender, my family background, where I grew up has shaped who I am and what I believe. And how I am treated or how people respond to me, I'm sure is maybe very different from how Dr. Goodloe-Johnson encountered people. I do not wake up every day with the awareness that I have to exhibit certain behaviors because I'm a certain race. I wake up every day thinking about what I can do to level the playing field and address the issues I believe in, which are educational opportunities for all children. As the superintendent, do I think about issues of diversity in terms of do I want a diverse leadership team? Absolutely. I do want a diverse leadership team. I wanted a diverse leadership team when I was a principal because I want my team to be reflective of the community in which we live. I think that's just part of being a leader and part of responding to your community and the children in your school district. So I don't wake up every day thinking about my race or the fact that I'm a woman. I do my job, and I think about the outcomes I want to achieve.

Q: It's interesting that she perceived that to be a factor in her superintendency. True or not, it was her perception. It's just interesting how it's not an issue for you.

A: Her perception may have been her reality. I'm not saying that it wasn't. If someone is rude to me, I don't necessarily think they were rude to me because I'm a woman. I might just think, "That's a rude person." Now maybe they were rude to me because I am a woman, but that's not how I react to rudeness. I said from the beginning, you cannot trust people that you do not know. So what I have to do as a superintendent is give people the opportunity to get to know me. I am more than happy to spend time dialoguing with people, being in conversations, talking about my perspective. Because when you really get beyond the superficial, most reasonable have a similar perspective on the world. They care about children. They want to live in a nice community. They want to live in a safe environment. They want to have a life that contributes to the betterment of society in some way, shape or form, and that's true whether you are white, African American or Hispanic. So it may sound hokey, but I believe most people are good. I believe a very small minority of people are not good people.

Q: What could be done to help the district that's not being done?

A: Absolutely the child welfare issue is near and dear to my heart. It's not near and dear to my heart for any reason other than the fact that we can not get to the academic issues unless we address some of the broader issues in our community. And I'm talking about the fact that we have a serious challenge where 21,000 of our children live in poverty or near the poverty level. There are things that I can not solve alone that the district can not solve alone. I'm talking about nutrition, I'm talking about affordable housing, I'm talking about pre-natal health care and vision screening and medical care for children. That is not the sole responsibility of the school district. So what we can do as a community, and what I am very anxious to do with our political leaders and other public agencies, is to join hands around a child welfare agenda that really says no child will be hungry in this community. No child will fail in school because he doesn't have glasses and he can't see the board. That's what our community can do. And that's why think I'm pretty fortunate to be in a community that wherever I go, I was just at the Rotary, I was at the Chamber, they are asking me what can we do. I'm saying the same thing. We all need to work together. It's not just the school district's problem. It's not just the churches problem. It's not a DSS problem. We have to all join together and say we're going to do a better job than we have ever done before to take care of children. We can have the best academic program in the world, but if a child is sick or hungry or can not do his homework at night because he's living in a homeless shelter, we are not going to succeed. So that's my biggest wish that in five years from now, we can say we've all come together around the issue of children. It's not a political issue and it's not a race issue, it's about what can we do as the adults in this community to take care of the children. That's my biggest wish.

Q: What did I not ask you today that you wanted me to ask or that you wanted to say?

A: I have a lot of faith in the teachers and the leaders in this school district. And I really want parents to have faith that if you could send your child to any school, that you should have the confidence to send them to one of our schools because we have been very diligent in picking the best principals we could find. I've interviewed all of the new principals that are coming on board this year. We have great principals. We have great teachers and I think that the negative perception of this school district are something that will start to change because we will demonstrate that parents' trust and the community's faith in us is well-placed. Another one of the things I'm doing is starting a student advisory committee where high school students will meet with me every other month. I think that the students who have been in school for 11 or 12 years have a lot of wisdom to share about what's working or what's not working in our schools. So I think that's going to be interesting. It's not going to be a one-shot deal. I did it once already. They suggested that it become a regular thing. And I thought it was a pretty good suggestion because they have a lot of important observations, and they were very honest.