After four-and-a-half tempestuous years at the helm of the Birmingham City Schools, Craig Witherspoon resigned his position as superintendent on the evening of Oct. 7. The resignation was tendered at a special called meeting of the city’s Board of Education.
The resignation itself came suddenly. But unknown to anyone except Witherspoon, at least some members of the school board, and very few other people, its eventuality had been a virtual certainty for several days leading up to last Tuesday’s board meeting. Witherspoon’s formal announcement at the meeting — that he would step down as superintendent effective Dec. 31 — was the culmination of what sources close to the city schools variously describe as “a discussion,” “a conversation” and “a process” that arose out of conflicts between Witherspoon and an apparent majority of the board.
In the days since Witherspoon’s announcement, I have spoken to a fair number of knowledgeable people — elected officials, corporate leaders, nonprofit partners of the city schools, parents of BCS students, other interested parties — about it at length. To a person, their impression was that, in the words of one, “the writing was on the wall” for Witherspoon’s departure, but that it most likely would come in the spring of 2015, at the end of the current academic year. When did they know Witherspoon was resigning? One gave an answer that was essentially repeated by all: “Sometime Tuesday.”
I don’t have any trouble believing that, by the way, partly because I didn’t know anything was up either. Not until precisely 7:01 Tuesday morning, when I received a text message that prompted an early flurry of communication with Weld Editor Nick Patterson and reporter Cody Owens and an even-busier-than-normal print deadline day for us all. This turn of events was especially interesting to me since the precipitating text arrived less than 16 hours after I had sat with Witherspoon in a conference room at the BOE building downtown and had a conversation in which he voiced no hint of what was coming the next day.
But come it did, and with it the inevitable question, Why? The simplest — and, as far as I can tell, truest — answer is that board members differed with Witherspoon over the future direction of the system. They also had some ongoing administrative concerns that were magnified by a series of recent events — unauthorized expenditures, key personnel operating without proper state certification, possible misuse of federal Title I funds — that coincided with the forced resignations last month of the system’s chief academic officer and a supervisor with oversight of curriculum, instruction and federal programs.
No malfeasance has been alleged, but state school superintendent Tommy Bice acknowledged to Weld in September that the Alabama Department of Education was “reviewing” Birmingham’s Title I expenditures. On Oct. 13, a federal complaint seeking a formal investigation into the matter was filed by Richard Franklin, the local president of the American Federation of Teachers; Franklin and the union often have been sharply critical of Witherspoon and the current school board. My sources agree that the Title I issue was not a deciding factor in the board’s growing disaffection with the superintendent, though one added a caveat.
“There’s no evidence that anything illicit was going on,” I was told. “It was just that the whole thing put the administrative issues in the spotlight. You can argue about the reasons why, but [Witherspoon] had lost the confidence of his board, and when you throw those other things on top of that, it’s a killer. It kills the kind of working relationship you have to have to succeed in this gargantuan task of trying to make the Birmingham City Schools work.”
Yes, and isn’t that where our focus should be? On making the Birmingham City Schools work? On facing the fact that if we — meaning the community as a whole, and in all of its many and various segments and factions and alliances of convenience — cannot make the Birmingham City Schools work, then we are kidding ourselves about what our city is and what it can be? On worrying less about finding somebody to prosecute — or persecute — for failures and shortcomings and more about what the school system will look like a year or five years or a decade from now?
What would happen if Birmingham decided that the education of its children was the most important thing on the civic agenda? What would happen if Birmingham got smart?
“I know plenty of people who think the Birmingham schools can be fixed,” one corporate leader told me. “But none of them think it’s going to be easy, or that it can be done without some major changes in the way all of the players interrelate. By ‘all,’ I mean everybody — the superintendent, the board, the faculty and staff, students and their parents, the business community, the nonprofits, City Hall, anybody who cares at all about Birmingham. Everybody needs to be on the same page about this, or we might as well just forget it.”
For all of the valid complaints about leadership in Birmingham — and there are plenty — it is clear that the critical element in getting those disparate interests “on the same page” is the Board of Education. In my view, they seem to have set the right tone at the outset, working with Witherspoon to effect a departure that should have a minimal impact on the day-to-day operation of the system, and no impact at all on its financial bottom line.
Having done that, the board now must begin rallying support from all of those interests — not only to ensure that they make the right hire to replace Witherspoon, but also to take the opportunity to enlist the community in articulating a vision of a public school system that meets and exceeds the needs of Birmingham’s children.
The stakes could hardly be higher. And they only get one shot.
“They have to succeed,” one neighborhood leader told me. “I don’t know how anybody can just sit and take potshots and hope the board will fail, or just wash their hands of it on the assumption that the board will fail. Because if they fail, then we are going to fail as a community. But if they get the right person in and work with all of the stakeholders to give them the support they need, then I think that Birmingham is going to have a real success story to brag about.”