New chief promises to ease tensions
Tucker knows asking for bond issue may be difficult
The new superintendent of the Douglas County School District will attempt to push the district past a bruising, national fight over school vouchers and into the future. His first order of business will be a plea to taxpayers for nearly $300 million in building needs and teacher pay.
Thomas Tucker will present his plans for a November ballot issue Tuesday that calls for a $250 million bond issue for building upgrades including new roofs, information technology and beefed up security as well as a $40 million mill levy override to pay for higher teacher salaries and more school counselors.
The no-nonsense Tucker, the 52-year-old son of Arkansas sharecroppers, knows asking for more money will be a tough sell in relatively affluent Douglas County, where the last successful ballot issue for schools was in 2006. But that was one of the reasons why the newly minted school board hired Tucker in April to lead Colorado’s third-largest school district, board president David Ray said.
Tucker in 2012 was the first superintendent in Ohio to ask for and later pass an incremental mill and bond issue on a single ballot to the tune of $40 million. “We asked voters what were the top 12 qualities you wanted as a superintendent and one of those was experience passing a bond issue,” Ray said.
“And if anyone can get people involved who are normally not supportive of the district, it’s Thomas Tucker,” Ray added. “Just watching him, he is definitely a bridge builder.”
Tucker, the first of 11 siblings, got his unshakable faith in the power of public education drilled into him as a boy by grandparents who taught their neighbors to read and write. They saw education as the best tool to rise up and be successful in America.
“They knew that public education was a bedrock of our democracy,” Tucker said. “It can improve and save lives. It can boost communities and help people prosper.”
Tucker said he wants to reach as many teachers, parents and district residents as he can over the next several weeks to hammer home the message of the importance of public schools in Douglas County.
“One of the reasons public education has had funding problems in our country is that we have done a poor job of demonstrating how important education is to our democracy, including our business community,” said Tucker, who will be paid $260,000 a year. “We have to do better than that. We have to tell our story.”
Tucker plans to meet with employee associations and leadership groups, conferencing with local business organizations, pressing the flesh with local media and producing regular weekly video messages to schools and the community.
As part of his community outreach, Tucker recently met with several parents at a coffee shop in Parker to informally discuss the district’s issues. Parent Erinn Gilbertson said she was impressed with his willingness to talk face-to-face without fanfare.
“He was happy to talk about just about anything, and I appreciate that,” Gilbertson said. “It’s great he is doing this, but this district still has a lot of room for improvement.”
For the 20 or so parents and residents who showed up for the coffee shop meeting, the district’s controversial foray into school vouchers was a dead issue. Tucker agreed. “School vouchers or the issues around them, is not the reason I came here,” he said. “I am driven by the challenge to improve the
schools here and get people excited about helping the lives of our 68,000 students.”
The current school board rescinded the district’s voucher program when a new majority came into power after the November election. The voucher plan would have used public money to help parents pay for private schools.
The legal battle over the district’s vouchers was waged over the past several years and even reached the U.S. Supreme Court. It also led to huge rifts in the Douglas County community and prompted several teachers to leave the district altogether, said detractors of the program.
Some residents remain steadfast backers of vouchers but Tucker’s lack of connection to the program could be an asset for the district, board member Wendy Vogel said.
“I really think he can move us beyond the voucher issue,” Vogel said. “He doesn’t have the baggage of fighting that program that some of us on the board have, and there are those out there who just don’t trust us.”
Tucker was named National Superintendent of the Year by the American Association of School Administrators in 2016 and the National Alliance of Black School Educators in 2013.
Despite his sterling record, critics say he was hired by Douglas County just to lobby for tax increases for schools. They also say his record of improving schools is spotty at best and point to a state report card that gave Tucker’s last school district, Princeton City Schools in Cincinnati, F’s and D’s in several categories.
“Why would the (board of education) hire a ‘leader’ for our large 68,000student district who had already so dismally failed to improve education in his last district of only 5,600?” Parker resident Joy Overbeck told a local newspaper.
Supporters quickly shot back, saying those letter grades were issued before Tucker took over and that achieving a high grade like an “A” is rare in Ohio. In every district Tucker has served, academic achievement improved dramatically, they said.