Raising the bar in Palm Beach County
New schools chief hopes to boost security, reading skills, teacher pay
Donald Fennoy, Palm Beach County’s new schools superintendent, says his low-key, gentle manner will help usher in a new era characterized by stability, collaboration and security.
His predecessor and mentor, Robert Avossa, is credited with improving student achievement and advocating for improved publiceducation funding, But Avossa was also known to text reporters to criticize their news coverage and sometimes scolded public officials, such as the teachers union president and a school board member, with quicktempered attacks.
“I’m a much calmer presence, I’m not as fiery,” said Fennoy, 41, whose contract was approved by the School Board on Wednesday. “I sit back and let things happen.” Among Fennoy’s priorities: Security after the Parkland massacre. He has been meeting with school board members to figure out how to better protect students and staff. High school parents, some in tears, begged the school board on Wednesday to improve security at Spanish River High in Boca Raton. “Communities to the south have been severely impacted,” he said. “How do we make them feel normal
again?”
Improving third-grade reading skills. In Palm Beach County, the thirdgrade reading proficiency rate hit 54 percent last year, an improvement from the previous 52 percent but lower than the state average of 58 percent.
Increasing teacher pay. “Teachers are still underpaid as far as I’m concerned,” he said.
The School Board approved a contract paying Fennoy, who since 2016 had been the district’s chief
operating officer, $290,000 a year for the next five years. That’s less than Avossa’s $325,000 salary, but Fennoy has never been a superintendent before.
“I always wanted to be a superintendent of a large urban school district,” he said.
Palm Beach County’s school district is the 10th largest in the country, with 192,000 students, a $2.5 billion budget and 22,000 workers, making it the county’s largest employer.
Fennoy is the district’s first African-American superintendent. About a third of the county’s students are white, a third are Hispanic and 28 percent are African-American.
Avossa resigned Feb. 5 after less than three years on the job to work for LRP Publications, a Palm Beach Gardens publisher of educational materials. He said he wanted to spend more time with his family. The stress was showing: He said at a school board meeting in December that he had to increase his blood pressure medications from one to two.
School board members said Avossa did a good job making sure a voter-approved sales tax is wellspent and improving educational advancement among schools’ diverse racial groups. The district graduation rate is now 85 percent, higher than the state’s other urban school districts.
But some say Avossa hired too many colleagues he worked with when he was a superintendent in Georgia, ignoring Palm Beach County teachers and administrators who are training for leadership.
“We want Fennoy to develop local talent, and I think he knows that,” school board member Debra Robinson said. “We don’t want in-district people to be passed over.”
Board member Erica Whitfield said she wants Fennoy to “learn from the mistakes of Dr. Avossa,” who she believes spread himself too thin by attending too many meetings and working long hours.
“He tried to be everywhere,” Whitfield said. “We don’t want Dr. Fennoy to burn out.”
Fennoy said he has watched Avossa closely over the 15 years they have worked together and will try not to make the same mistakes. The night he was hired by the school board, he said his new job will be “the first time in 15 years I’m not under the shadow of Dr. Avossa.”
Avossa first hired Fennoy in 2004 as an assistant principal near Orlando, and Fennoy joined him at several other posts before they came to Palm Beach County.
Fennoy was born in New Mexico and said he has also lived in England and South Carolina. He got his bachelor’s degree at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, and his master’s and doctorate at the University of Central Florida.
A father of two, he has been married for 16 years. He said he and his wife have been thrilled with his son’s school in Wellington, and that was part of the reason he decided to apply for the superintendent’s job: They’re here to stay.
As the district’s chief operating officer, he supervised school police, transportation, food service, maintenance, planning, environmental services and business diversity programs. Now, he will have to get to know an assortment of constituents and their issues.
He noted several communities he was looking forward to meeting with, including south county parents concerned about school safety, families in the Glades worried about poverty and hunger, and immigrant groups such as Haitians and Guatemalans, whose populations form majorities at many schools.
“This district is humongous,” Fennoy said. “The challenge will be getting to know everyone.”