Superintendent candidate Jessica Huizenga speaks at a public forum at Bromfield, Jan. 11. On Jan. 14, School Committee Chairwoman SusanMary Redinger announced that Dr. Huizenga had pulled out of the race for “personal reasons,” resulting in the school committee’s decision to table discussion until Jan. 18. (Photos by Lisa Aciukewicz)
Superintendent candidate Scott Carpenter speaks at Bromfield on Jan. 10. He currently is the superintendent/principal at Lincoln-Sudbury High School.
The School Committee’s long-anticipated vote for a new school superintendent Monday night was derailed when one of the two candidates suddenly dropped out of the race. Early in their Jan. 14 meeting, School Committee Chairwoman SusanMary Redinger announced that Dr. Jessica Huizenga had called around 4 p.m. that afternoon to say that she was withdrawing her application “for personal reasons.”
Instead of voting on a final choice for the superintendent’s position, members tabled the discussion and agreed to post a follow-up meeting for 1 p.m. Friday, Jan. 18, to decide how to proceed.
“We were all taken aback—we were all quite surprised,” Redinger told the Press the following morning. “I’m sure many minds are racing this morning, trying to figure this out.”
Last June, the School Committee decided to manage the search for a new superintendent itself, in collaboration with the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, rather than employ a professional search firm. At the time, former School Committee Chairman Keith Cheveralls said, “I believe we as a committee can do this on our own, and I believe we would get a better product.”
In late September, the School Committee appointed a 13-member search committee, which went to work advertising the superintendent’s position, surveying the Harvard community for its preferences, and gathering applications.
By its deadline in mid-November, the search committee had received 31 applications, which it winnowed to eight semi-finalists and then to three finalists. The search committee then sent the names of the finalists to the School Committee for reference checks, site visits, and final interviews.
Those finalists were Huizenga, currently interim superintendent at the Freetown-Lakeville Regional School District; Scott Carpenter, superintendent/principal at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School; and Judith Paolucci, superintendent of schools in Yarmouth, Maine. Paolucci quickly withdrew from consideration in Harvard, accepting instead the position of superintendent in Leicester, Mass.
After checking the references of the two remaining candidates, the School Committee sent a delegation (Redinger, committee member Patricia Wenger, Hildreth Principal Linda Dwight, and Finance Director Lorraine Leonard) to visit their schools. Late last week, both Carpenter and Huizenga came to Harvard and took questions from the public in the Bromfield School library. Each also answered additional questions during interviews with the School Committee that were broadcast on local cable television.
In both sessions last Friday, Huizenga appeared enthusiastic about the prospect of coming to Harvard as superintendent. She praised Harvard’s “tremendous reputation [and] great faculty” as well as the broad-based support for education in the community. She noted that Harvard was among the highest-performing schools in the state and said she wanted to “continue the excellent legacy of Harvard’s schools.” But she also noted that improvement was a necessity in all schools.
“I believe everyone, in their heart of hearts, wants to improve,” she said.
Huizenga fielded questions from parents, students, teachers, and committee members for nearly two hours. Some questioners appeared to be uneasy with the decisions she had made at her current school, while others were impressed by her record of accomplishment, energy, and articulateness. She had undertaken a major turnaround at the Freetown-Lakeville district, which was a newly formed district with a range of educational and financial problems. The district is facing a $2.1 million budget deficit, leading to many difficult decisions, Huizenga said.
Fifth-grade teacher Rob Cullinane, who had been a search committee member, challenged her for proposing teacher layoffs in response to the budget deficit And one parent, who said she had two children in Harvard’s special education program, expressed alarm that the percentage of students in the special education program at Freetown-Lakeville had dropped sharply during Huizenga’s tenure. In a telephone interview with the Press after her withdrawal, Huizenga said, “At the end, reflecting on the process, I concluded that Harvard needed a different skill set from what my strengths are at this time … I don’t dismiss the idea of wanting to be a candidate again in Harvard when I have a little more experience, especially on the political side, that will let me be effective there … Harvard is an established community with very high expectations, and I’d want to be prepared to meet them.”
Huizenga said she had received many emails and messages from Harvard that had moved her almost to tears with their warmth and encouragement.
Huizenga’s withdrawal leaves Scott Carpenter as the only remaining finalist proposed by the search committee.
In his public question-and-answer forum, Carpenter noted that he would not come to Harvard “with a list of changes.” His first step, he said, would be “to listen and learn.”
However, he said that he was also comfortable making tough decisions, citing his choice to lay off a Metco director in Lincoln-Sudbury so as to free up funds for educational support for Metco students in elementary school, which he said had been lacking. He also noted that he had laid off an administrator to save teaching positions.
Carpenter is a former science teacher who says he still enjoys working with science clubs, especially on robotics. Asked how he would increase girls’ participation in science, he said he had noticed on his visit to Hildreth Elementary School that there were no girls in the after-school Lego group. He said it was sometimes necessary to “create new avenues to encourage participation.”
Carpenter said one of the most rewarding activities that he does with students is to go once a year with a student group to work on a project with Habitat for Humanity. He acknowledged that he really prefers being in jeans and a T-shirt to a suit and tie.
Asked about his vision for technology in the schools, Carpenter responded that young people often have more facility with new devices than their elders. He jokingly pointed out a student in the back row who was working on his Mac at the moment. More seriously, he emphasized that schools needed adequate infrastructure so that several hundred kids can log onto the Internet at once without crashing the system.
School Committee member Bob Sullebarger asked Carpenter why he thought he was a good match for Harvard. Carpenter said he saw Harvard as similar in many ways to Lincoln-Sudbury, with the same concern for academics, even though Harvard is smaller. Although his own background is all at the high-school level, Carpenter said that he sees himself as connected to the elementary and middle grades through his children, who are in elementary school, and his wife, who is a school psychologist at a middle school.
The School Committee must now decide how to proceed—whether to hire Carpenter as the last remaining candidate, reconsider some of the semi-finalists, reopen the search process, or pursue some other course of action.
