ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, January 30, 1997 TAG: 9701300010
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
ANNETTE Perkins, chairwoman of the Montgomery County School Board, suggests it may be a good thing if the county never keeps any one person in the school superintendent's post for long. With frequent turnover, ``you get new ideas, new approaches. Sometimes it's important [to change] so we don't become stagnant.''
Sure . . . up to a point. But the county's reputation as a revolving door for school chiefs - seven have passed through in the past 20 years - could also dissuade well-qualified educators from applying.
Those with good ideas for educational improvements and reforms usually prefer an opportunity to see their efforts through to fruition. Not many are masochists whose career goals include a bruising experience and a pink slip.
In the case of Superintendent Herman Bartlett, the School Board's decision not to renew his contract in June may have been inevitable.
Bartlett has been a lightning rod for controversy and criticism practically from the day he started in 1993. Deservedly or not, he's been seen by many parents and teachers as the puppet of a myopic Board of Supervisors that has penny-pinched on school improvements. Whatever effectiveness he might have had was compromised by this perception.
At the same time, Bartlett can hardly be blamed for all the infighting on the county's School Board, which preceded his arrival. And his term in the job has not been without accomplishment and good effort, including plans to introduce advanced communications technology in the schools, and a demonstrated preference for budget realism over political wish lists.
Unquestionably, the infamously contentious School Board makes the lot of school superintendents, Bartlett included, harder than they might expect or deserve. Not for nothing do Montgomery school-system insiders joke that new superintendents enter vertically and depart horizontally.
In part, the board's fractionalization mirrors the county's: rural vs. citified; a traditional, low-tax conservative base resisting takeover by more progressive-minded interlopers. In part, too, it's the result of transition from an appointed to an elected School Board. (Currently, some members are elected while others are the supervisors' holdover appointees.)
Whatever explanations might be offered, the county isn't well-served when the School Board seems more preoccupied with special interests, minutia and conflict than with assuring the best possible education for the county's schoolchildren. Montgomery County's diversity notwithstanding, School Board members need to focus on the direction the schools - all the schools - should be headed in, and try to march together in that direction.
As it deals with budget matters and the search for a new superintendent, the board itself needs to try "new approaches" to avoid becoming "stagnant" - which is to say mired in old, debilitating political dispute.
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