pinion Manatee Schools Has Its Best Superintendent Candidate In-House

On Tuesday, the Manatee County School Board quickly voted to accelerate Superintendent Rick Mills' retirement effective immediately, while installing Deputy Superintendent of Operations Don Hall to serve in the interim role. What the board does next will be subject of much debate I'm sure, but the best choice for Manatee County students and the taxpayers who support them is already clear.

Board member Dave Miner, who'd been the loudest voice in terms of calling for Mills' head, presumed to speak for the entire board in saying that they would obviously conduct another national search, not unlike the one that led to Mills' selection in early 2013. Board chair Bob Gause seemed to agree. With Miner and Gause in one camp, it's fairly safe to assume that first-term member Mary Cantrell would join their side to give them a three vote majority.

But Charlie Kennedy, a former Manatee High teacher elected last November, asked why the board wasn't considering simply voting to replace Mills with Deputy Superintendent of Curriculum, Dr. Diana Greene. That's a very, very good question.

Dr. Greene was one of the six finalists selected by the board in its last search. She had been in the number two spot at Marion County Schools, a district that was ranked ahead of Manatee County at the time, despite a much higher ratio of Title 1 students. Dr. Greene was the first candidate nominated to be hired by the board. The motion failed 3-2, and in the next motion, Mr. Mills was hired by the same margin. The first person Rick Mills hired when he got the job was Dr. Diana Greene, who he'd only first met during the district's interview process.

The only knock on Dr. Greene at the time was that she did not have as much budgeting experience as Mills. As someone with a very strong finance acumen, Mills seemed the overwhelming consensus to take on a massive budget shortfall amid suspicions that its finances were even worse than they appeared. He was also considered to have a strong leadership style that would be able to take charge of a deeply fractured administration plagued by political alliances.

Mills did just that. Despite learning that the district was in much worse financial shape than he'd been told, he and his team were able to execute an impressive financial recovery that has resulted in its current surplus. This was all done as the district improved in nearly every academic metric including its school district ranking (which rose 10 places) and its Title 1 turnaround schools, which were recognized by the FDOE as being the best in the state.

Time and again, Mills deflected credit for the academic leadership to Dr. Greene, who he repeatedly acknowledged as the engineer of the strategies on that end of the leadership spectrum. Mills clearly gave Dr. Greene broad latitude in this regard, which was further evidenced by the way he would turn over nearly all discussions on academic matters to her at board meetings, workshops and press briefings.

As a result of the way that Manatee County Schools have recovered from a massive financial shortfall, while simultaneously improving its academic standing, both Mills and Dr, Greene are hot commodities in the world of public education administration. Dr. Greene has been a finalist in multiple superintendent searches this year, while Mills can surely write his own ticket based on his achievements with MCSD.

That being said, Mills was not without his detractors. Even those who support him are quick to note that he's unlikely to make anyone feel warm and fuzzy. However, the biggest thing Mills did to earn the ire of those who ultimately did him in was implement a platform of consistent policies that were applied evenly to all employees—a radical departure in a district that had previously determined how matters were handled based on who was involved and where their political loyalties might lie.

Suffice it to say that a majority of those who worked to see Mills gone, would not want to see Dr. Greene installed as Superintendent. Witness the effort that has been made to rehabilitate the former administrators who were ensnared by the Manatee High sexual abuse scandal, to portray those who had been exposed as, at best, incompetent and disinterested, as having been “completely exonerated.” That is a laughable narrative to be sure, but when that narrative is stretched to credit them with the school's successes as some sort of delayed effect of previous policies, it becomes downright asinine.

Nonetheless, go to any school board meeting and you'll hear such tales. You'll also hear the endless invocation of Gene Witt and Dan Nolan, attached to the idea that Mills' supposed failure was tied to his outsider status and an inability to understand Manatee County's unique community dynamics. That's a nice way of saying he didn't get the message that a small good old boy network ran things by shining on a largely disinterested general public, while they looted the half-billion dollar public school system by way of high-paying administrative positions for woefully underqualified lackeys and big money contracts for politically connected vendors.

Witt and Nolan were indeed successful administrators, though what's really being said is that we once again need one of our own at the helm, noting that both came from within the district. Obviously, Dr. Greene is from within, though it's more than doubtful she's not what they're talking about. The idea of the old Manatee County good old boy network supporting an African-American female for superintendent is, to put it mildly, improbable.

Dr. Greene, despite her two years of service and record of accomplishments in this district, is and always will be an outsider in that group's eyes. Nonetheless, she has a broad base of support in this community, which is by no means limited to the African-American population that has long witnessed and been frustrated by a glass ceiling that limits the involvement of minorities in the district's upper level of administration.

When supporters of Dr. Greene argued in 2013 that she was the candidate that should be hired because she was African-American, I opined that race is never an ideal reason to hire a leader. Today, I'd add what I hope would be obvious: that it's never an acceptable reason to freeze them out either.

Two years after Dr. Greene was hired, the district is in a very different place, faces a very different set of challenges and needs to build a tremendous amount of trust before it asks taxpayers to make an enormous financial investment on the November 2016 ballot. Dr. Greene, a known entity with a positive history within our district, is the obvious candidate for the job. If this board ignores the opportunity it currently has to secure her services, they'll have an even more difficult time asking taxpayers to trust them with that blank check.

Dennis Maley's column appears every Thursday and Sunday in The Bradenton Times. He can be reached at dennis.maley@thebradentontimes.com. Click here to visit his column archive. Click here to go to his bio page. You can also follow Dennis on Facebook.