Duffie tapped to lead district
Jacksonville gets 3rd schools chief
JACKSONVILLE — The Jacksonville/North Pulaski School Board on Monday selected Bryan Duffie to be the district’s next superintendent, effective July 2017, putting Duffie in line to be the third schools chief in the district’s brief history.
Duffie, 46, whom the district hired in March to be an assistant superintendent over support services, said after the meeting that he’s focused on growing enrollment, staffing classrooms with the “best talent” and overseeing a multimillion-dollar facilities upgrade.
The 3,927-student district is in its first year of operation after being carved from the Pulaski County Special School District.
“From Jonesboro, I had been watching this develop,” Duffie said of what drew him to the district. “Just the whole concept of what was being done here really intrigued me. It’s the uniqueness and the opportunity to, you can be part of building a system totally from scratch and build it the way, in essence, the way you want to build it. You build it with your staff and your community with the way
the community has framed it on needs they have.”
The School Board voted 7-0 to hire Duffie after coming out of a 30-minute executive session focused on broader personnel issues. Board member Carol Miles was absent. Board President Daniel Gray said details of Duffie’s contract “will be finalized and worked out” over the next several days.
The board “agreed in principle” with Duffie to terms similar to those of current Superintendent Tony Wood, who makes roughly $160,000 per year over three years, Gray said.
Wood, 66, announced in November that he would resign at the end of the school year, effective June 30. Wood, who was briefly commissioner of Arkansas Department of Education and a former deputy commissioner, became the district’s superintendent July 1, 2015, replacing interim Superintendent Bobby Lester.
“We knew he was a hired gun,” Gray said of Wood, praising him for overseeing the hiring of district employees and crafting a long-range facilities management plan worth tens of millions of dollars. “This is more of a longterm hire.”
Five people applied to the job posting, which called on applicants to have at least five years superintendent experience and stated that candidates with a doctorate degree would be preferred. The School Board on Nov. 28 interviewed Duffie and Robert Ross, superintendent of the Mansfield School District since 2011.
Duffie arrived at the Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District earlier this year from the Westside Consolidated School District in Jonesboro. He had been the Westside superintendent since 2010 after serving for a year as principal of the district’s high school and three years at the middle school.
Duffie’s employment in the Jacksonville/North Pulaski district earlier this year marked a return to central Arkansas. Duffie worked from 1993 to 2005 in North Little Rock High School’s East Campus as a math teacher.
Duffie earned his bachelor’s degree in math education and master’s degree in school leadership, management administration from the University of Central Arkansas. He earned a doctorate in 2010 in educational policy and leadership from Vanderbilt University. He graduated from West Monroe, La., High School but had previously attended Jonesboro High.
The Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District won approval of a 7.6-mill tax increase in February and next summer will start building a new Jacksonville High School that will open in August 2019, Wood said. The district is also in the early phases of building a new elementary school that will open in August 2018.
Aside from the bond funding, the district anticipates the state Department of Education to share in some of the construction cost on the projects, estimated to total more than $80 million, Gray said.
The projects are part of a broader facilities master plan that includes rebuilding, upgrading or consolidating the district’s five other elementary schools and its middle school by 2035.
Upgrading school buildings is one of the steps the district must take to achieve unitary status as part of federal court desegregation monitoring of school districts in Pulaski County, Duffie said. Until the district achieves unitary status, it cannot become a “School Choice” district and enroll students from outside its boundaries.
“For now, that’s not an option,” Duffie said. “People have to move in to go here. So my projection would be that enrollment is stable and we don’t lose ground.”
Duffie said principals and Jeremy Owoh, assistant superintendent over curriculum and instruction, are working toward adding programs that would distinguish Jacksonville/North Pulaski from neighboring districts in the fields of technology and career education in anticipation of becoming a School Choice district.
Duffie, who will continue to oversee support services until he takes the helm July 1, said he plans to work closely with Wood and Owoh during the transition. Duffie doesn’t anticipate major changes, he said.
“There’s always going to be tweaks but nothing comes to mind at the moment,” Duffie said. “Of course, not every decision can be made by committee, I understand that, but I really do my best to garner, especially on major decisions, lots of input, lots of feedback.”