A year in, Good has won fans with style
Superintendent who tackled challenges has mayor’s backing
A year ago, Dan Good was about to retire as superintendent in Westerville schools and was taking a three-day class to become a teacher evaluator. Across town, Ohio State President E. Gordon Gee suddenly announced that he, too, would retire.
Dominoes started falling. Good’s cellphone rang.
It was Mayor Michael B. Coleman’s office asking whether Good would consider becoming Columbus City Schools’ interim superintendent. The man slated to run the troubled district, Joseph A. Alutto, had instead announced that he’d move up from provost of Ohio State to take the job of interim president of the university, replacing Gee.
Good got up, walked out of his class and drove to meetings that day with Coleman and schoolboard leaders. Three weeks later, he was running Ohio’s largest school district.
“It was almost like fate lined it up for him,” said Columbus Board of Education Vice President Bryan O. Steward.
Although Good was supposed to be with the district for only one year while the board searched for a permanent leader, the board extended his contract for another year and dropped the interim from his title.
“Dan has been very good for the district,” Steward said. “He has been a much-needed change agent and has been a pleasure to work with. He’s been
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very forward-thinking.”
Scores for first-time test takers on the Ohio Graduation Test this spring show that students made improvement in all areas except math, where scores were flat. Some of the largest gains were among minority students.
“You can’t say it’s enough,” said Dan Williamson, Coleman’s spokesman. “We’re not at all where we need to be.”
But Coleman believes that Good is the right person for the job, Williamson said.
Good “has set a tone of not downplaying bad news, not trying to explain away bad news, but kind of taking ownership of it,” an “approach that unfortunately we didn’t hear enough of” under former Superintendent Gene Harris, Williamson said.
A year ago, just before Good took over, the district was in the midst of a data scandal. Harris had retired. The same night that Good was hired, the district launched a levy campaign that would overwhelmingly fail in November. And Coleman was pressuring the board to cut spending, share property taxes with charter schools and rely more on technology to teach kids.
Amid all this, Good jumped into the frying pan.
“I didn’t look at it that way, really,” Good said on Thursday, hours before the end of classes for the 2013-14 school year, his first leading the district. “I just kind of felt like things were unfolding for a reason, and I was supposed to do this at this point.”
The learning curve on steering the district bureaucracy has been big, Good said, but he has been impressed by what he’s found.
“It’s an amazing district;
“I ... felt like things were unfolding for a reason, and I was supposed to do this at this point.” — Columbus Superintendent Dan Good
it truly is,” he said. “To many outside the district, they underestimate the dedication of the employees here. They’re highly professional. They come, and they stay here.”
Good said he has made progress in changing a culture in which many employees learned to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. When he arrived, few would share their views about problems.
Today, he gets lots of feedback — without the fear, he said. He thinks there is more openness, honesty and shared accountability than when he took over.
“They understand that they can express those concerns,” Good said. “People don’t just come with a complaint; they come with an idea of how to improve.”
Good said his biggest “misstep” was the botched April rollout of changes to the district’s gifted and talented program, which led some parents of gifted students to threaten to keep their kids out of state proficiency tests.
The district had sent letters to parents informing them that some kids would have to switch schools to continue receiving gifted services, and giving them only about a week to decide. Some parents alleged that their gifted children were being shuffled to new buildings to boost test scores in those schools. Not true, Good said. “It wasn’t about the report cards,” he said, but rather to offer services to more students more efficiently.
But he acknowledged that parents didn’t get enough notice. The district halted the changes for one year, and “I think we learned things from those missteps,” he said.
Good has made strategic changes to the Downtown staff that Harris built over a decade. He has made 40 changes to the nonschool administrative staff, demoting eight administrators, transferring two to equal assignments, making seven hires from outside the district, promoting 15 people and eliminating the positions of eight.
Harris’ No. 2, John Stanford, is not included in that list, even though Good removed him as chief operating officer in charge of all nonteaching employees. Stanford remains deputy superintendent and was recently given a one-year contract extension.
Stanford is to help find new positions for the employees who were at the five schools that the district closed for good this week to save money, and he is to work with the school board on drafting new policies, Good said.
Good cut tens of millions of dollars from next year’s budget as a result of voters’ defeat of the levy, but the district’s finances are now solid for several years. Still, officials haven’t abandoned the idea of pursuing another levy, he said.
There has been a lot of “conjecture and speculation” as to why last year’s levy failed, but without hard polling data, Good can’t say whether it was a lack of trust in the district, the size of the increase, anger over the data scandal or something else.
“There was something in that levy for everyone to love and everyone to hate,” he said.