Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 19, 1992 TAG: 9201190092
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: NEAL THOMPSON EDUCATION WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
SCHOOL BOSS TOTA: A TEACHER WHO BELIEVES IN CHANGE
Amid the mingling and elbow-rubbing at a party of Roanoke doctors and their spouses, Velma Seif was struck by the question."Why in the hell don't we get rid of that Frank Tota?" a woman asked Seif, who was then a member of the city School Board.
"Do you know Dr. Tota?" Seif asked. "Have you ever met him?"
"No," the woman answered.
The exchange, Seif says, aptly sums up the reign of Frank Tota as superintendent of Roanoke schools. Tota began his second decade at the helm this past fall, yet few people can truly say they know the man whose ideas and philosophy guide the city's educational system.
He's hardly a back-slapper. Even Tota admits he's a private person and that few people understand who he really is.
"They form an opinion of you without knowing you, which is typical of people in high-profile positions," Tota says. "There's nothing I can do about that. There [are] 100,000 people."
Some regard Tota as the person who has most influenced Roanoke schoolchildren in this century.
Tota is the man who grabbed Roanoke by the hand and led it, reluctantly at times, into something approaching actual racial integration and on into the technologically advanced '90s. In that time, he oversaw the spending of a half-billion dollars, watched nearly 10,000 students graduate, and outlasted 22 School Board members and a dozen City Council members.
How does a person last that long when the time in office of a typical urban school superintendent is less than five years?
Supporters says it's because he's a diplomatic, intelligent and visionary survivor.
Detractors say it's because he's a manipulative dictator who uses scare tactics to keep people in line and himself in his high-paying job.
Others still think of him as that Italian Yankee.
He calls himself, simply, a teacher.
His decade here has left a polarity of vision: one person looks at Tota and sees the class half full, another sees it half empty.
But Tota's contract is up in a year and a half, and he can retire in two years at age 55. Whether he stays beyond that or not, the effects of Tota's personality and philosophy on education will linger.
To know Frank Tota a little better is to know how those traits developed.
Learning to play politics
Frank Tota grew up in Hoboken, N.J., in a crowded neighborhood of Italian immigrants.
The Totas were poor. Frank Tota Sr. worked long days at hot ovens as a baker. They lived in a cramped cold-water flat with no heat.
His dad had reached only the third grade in Italy. "Never got promoted because he couldn't write the English language," Tota says.
But Frank Sr. was bright, even if he wasn't book-smart. That taught Frank Jr. a lesson about the children he would teach: "They're bright in different ways."
Tota also learned about being a minority; it sensitized him and stayed with him as a teacher.
"When I was a kid, we were all Italian, [but had] no Italian teachers or principals in our schools."
Tota's pals - Rocco and Gus - dropped out of school to work. Tota stuck with it and graduated. Then, he used the first real money he made - working a year for an insurance company - and became the first Tota to go to college.
After graduating from New Jersey State College, Tota taught high school English, social studies, speech and theater in Englewood, N.J. He called it a "bad scene," but it exposed him to poor and minority students and affirmed a belief in integration that would follow him to Roanoke 20 years later.
During the five years he taught in Englewood, he earned a master's degree from Columbia University.
His first administrative job came in 1965, when Bedford, N.Y., recruited him to improve morale, leadership and curriculum as head of language arts.
In 1970, he went to New Rochelle, N.Y., and learned the political realities of education.
New Rochelle was "very urban and urbane" and where he learned the importance of politics to his job. The student population was equal parts Italian, black and Jewish. As instructional director, he met regularly with the mayor and often bumped heads with the strong teachers union.
Roanoke educators say Tota learned his lessons well, developing the political acumen that has allowed him to last here for 10 years relatively unscathed.
"I think he is a very good politician and knows how to play the political games," says Walter Hunt, a former deputy superintendent under Tota and later Salem's superintendent.
Three years later, Tota moved on to Rochester, N.Y. With 80 schools, it was New York's third-largest system. With dreadful test scores, a high number of dropouts and rising poverty, it was also one of the worst.
As assistant superintendent for instruction, Tota used what he had learned at his previous jobs to change that.
"He was a very powerful individual and made instruction the agenda," says Mike Robinson, who was a vice principal in Rochester while Tota was there and now is the city's budget director.
Pre-Tota Rochester had misplaced priorities, he says. Bean-counters and administrators carried more weight than the people who taught kids. But Tota plucked young and loyal classroom teachers to join his team and turned the instructional division into the system's core.
"He was forever shaking up the system," Robinson says. With his loyal core, Tota made reading a priority, hired reading teachers, improved teaching techniques and, for the first time, gave each school its own library.
He also gave parents a voice in the decision-making, says Catherine Spoto, an active parent during Tota's tenure and now president of the Rochester School Board.
He was also feared.
"He was a very demanding person," Robinson says. "That doesn't mean he didn't have his enemies."
To get what he wanted, Tota had to breed loyalty and develop power. Those from whom he snatched that loyalty and power resented it.
He also surrounded himself with a loyal cadre. Those left out resented it.
Tota left behind a testament to his canny eye for effective administrators: Eighty percent of the people in top management positions today were brought in by Tota - including Robinson.
"He left his mark here, even though he's been gone a number of years," Robinson says.
Tota operates the same way in Roanoke. A training program prepares teachers for management positions. His inner cadre consists of people such as Richard Kelley, the executive for business affairs who handles finances, and Norman Michaels, whom Tota brought from Rochester to handle instructional concerns.
Tota even maintains a first line of defense outside his antiques-filled office: secretary June Nolley, who since 1983 has taken all his calls and always asks callers the purpose of their call.
A teacher first
In 1980, Rochester began looking for a new school chief. So did Roanoke, after buying out Don Pack's contract after eight years in charge.
Tota was ready to become a superintendent, but Rochester wanted an outsider, a newcomer.
So did Roanoke.
Tota came to Roanoke in early 1981. Even before he was assured of the job, he was thrust before television lights and questioned by news reporters.
To this day, he admits he has never quite gotten used to the glare of media scrutiny.
"I'm really a very private person. . . . I wish it wasn't such a high-profile job."
Media attention to his arrival was nothing compared to the glare when he started demoting and transferring teachers and administrators - 18, 20 and 50 at a time - to pare the system.
Robert Garland, a city councilman at the time, says Tota should have gotten his feet wet first. "When he came in, I think perhaps he tried to do too much too soon."
As one high-level administrator puts it: "I don't think teachers have ever gotten over that."
Former School Board Chairman Ted Feinour thinks the reshuffling was justified because of the "old-boy network."
"I think prior to the time Dr. Tota came, there was a lot of complacency. . . . There were so many people who had been with the system so long, there was no real thrust to upgrade the system," Feinour says.
Tota's attempts to shake up that complacency made for unpopular decisions.
There were death threats. Parents booed him at a concert at the Civic Center. His family received nasty calls at home. School security officers and city police kept an eye on his house when Tota was away.
Tota still blames the news media for blowing the transfers and demotions out of proportion.
The Rev. James Allison, who was on the School Board that hired Tota, says he has no complaint with the way Tota stepped into the job.
Scores of people from all over the country had applied. Of the five finalists, only Tota excited Allison.
"I've always felt that way about him," he says. "I still do."
Allison recalls that, in the early days, Tota would sit Indian-style on the floor with a kindergarten class or would pop in to teach a little Shakespeare to a high school class.
He was the boss. But he was a teacher first, Allison believes.
Tota says being a teacher is what he likes best. That's how he got his start and that's why he's in the position he's in now. He still tries to visit a classroom a day.
Afraid to speak
Although Tota associates himself with teaching, city teachers have been among his harshest critics. They were hit hard when Tota shuffled the ranks in his early years.
Former elementary supervisor Elizabeth Gillis almost became one of those victims.
Tota wanted to demote her from supervisor and make her a principal again - "against my wishes," she says. She retired early.
"I had mixed feelings about him," Gillis says. "I think he aimed to do a good job, but sometimes I thought he moved too rapidly."
Tota started a progressive new reading program, but before teachers learned it, he moved on to something else. And he wasn't concerned with teacher complaints and concerns, she says.
"I think he should do more listening to the people under him because we came directly in contact with the teachers and the children, and we knew what was best," Gillis says.
To some who work for Roanoke's schools, Frank Tota has become a tyrant. An effective one, by some accounts, but one who does what he thinks is best and ignores those who disagree. Worse yet, some teachers say he hurts those who disagree.
Many current or former school employees would offer their impressions of Tota only if they were not named.
A middle-school teacher says Tota breeds his administrators as disciples who use scare tactics to keep workers in line. They warn teachers not to air the school system's dirty laundry in public and not to ever embarrass Tota or the system, the teacher says.
She calls the method "Tota-ism."
"If you try to stand up for the kids and against the administration, you're a troublemaker," says former Patrick Henry High School teacher Domino McGuire, who now teaches in Roanoke County.
McGuire says the attitude is: If you can't do it our way, we'll find someone else.
"That's Tota's style of management," McGuire says.
One William Fleming High School teacher, who also agreed to speak only if her name wasn't used, says, "for fear of retribution, . . . I would never ever want my name identified for that reason.
"I try not to do things that will call attention to my name downtown," she says. "I don't want to be known by name by Tota."
Roanoke Education Association President Dorothy Cooper says most teachers feel "the system is out to get them. . . . So there is danger in speaking out."
Some trace that to his roots: up North, where Southern nicety takes a back seat to Northern aggressiveness.
"If he was from South Carolina or Roanoke, he probably would have been better accepted in Roanoke," School Board member James Turner says. "That's Roanoke's fault, not his."
Garland, the former councilman, says he has heard many complaints about Tota, the headstrong Yankee.
"That was one thing they always accused him of: Here's this Yankee coming down here trying to tell us how to run our school system," Garland says.
City Councilman James Harvey once referred to Tota's "New York-style spending."
Former School Board Chairman Allison says the board that hired Tota didn't care where he came from; it just wanted the best person.
But it wasn't that easy. Allison saw the "bigoted antipathy toward people from the North" and received letters and comments - some very nasty - from people angry over Tota being a Northerner and an Italian.
"I was just amazed that in Roanoke that kind of thing would come out, but it did," he says.
Diplomacy or intimidation
Tota is not a guy who shares with you a glass of iced tea and asks about the family before getting to business. He can be witty, but he rarely makes time for jokes. He authoritatively states his business, and those who know him say that can unsettle and intimidate some people.
That could often be seen at School Board meetings last year, when board members rarely ventured out on their own with a decision or proposed action. Instead, they would turn to Tota and ask, "Is that OK?" or say, "if that's OK with the superintendent."
Almost every vote last year was unanimous and in favor of a proposal from Tota.
The new board that took office in July is different. Some members say they're more willing to question Tota's proposals.
Tota admitted that adapting to new board members is one of the toughest parts of his job.
Tota has to mesh with an ever-changing School Board. Only twice in Tota's 10 years has the board had the same members two years in a row.
Some say it is Tota's diplomacy that contributes to his longevity.
When confronted with complaints from parents, he deftly deflects criticism toward City Council or the news media. At PTA meetings, he will soothe angry parents by telling them City Council is to blame for not giving schools enough money, or that the news media are to blame for distorting an issue.
The media have been a thorn in his side since day one, Tota says. He found himself defending decisions and actions more than he'd like. He didn't expect it to be such a volatile position where people call his home - "as if they personally know you" - to complain about their kid's school.
Tota didn't expect to be a superintendent, either.
It snowballed from his days as a teacher looking at the administrators and saying, "I can do better." Then when he became an administrator and looked at the superintendent, he would say, "I can do better."
All of a sudden, he was thrust before 100,000 people who felt they could do better.
Now, after 10 years, he admits it may be time to give someone else that chance.
"I believe in the process of change," he says. "If you're a leader and a believer, you need to practice what you preach."
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