Schools head inherits board in transition
The president of the Columbus Board of Education told incoming Superintendent Talisa Dixon last week that the sevenmember board that hired her in late September will have a new leader come January.
“She wasn’t happy about it,” said Gary Baker, who has been president since January 2014 but decided not to seek reelection to his fourth term.
Since prevailing in a national search to lead Ohio’s largest school district, Dixon has seen four board members resign or announce they will not run for re-election, and a fifth apply for a seat on the Columbus City Council.
“It was the hardest discussion that she and I have had so far,” Baker said of informing Dixon of his decision Tuesday not to seek another four-year term on the board after having served 12 years. Baker said he had been prepared to run but changed his mind just before the filing deadline Wednesday.
“She and I have developed a relationship,” he said of Dixon. “I know that she and I would have worked very
well together. We’ll have the better part of a year to work together,” Baker said, because he plans to serve out his term, which ends in January.
“But it is what it is. She’s going to do an outstanding job.”
Dixon, currently superintendent of the Cleveland Heights-university Heights City Schools near Cleveland, will transition full time to the Columbus post early next month.
Dixon told The Dispatch on Friday that board turnover “doesn’t concern me.” She expects a large number of community stakeholders to step forward “and help lift this work.”
“It’s a community effort,” Dixon said. “I don’t take it as a negative.
“There’s still an excitement to do the work that they’ve chosen me to do. Change happens, and we understand that. I understand that.”
No one predicted how unstable the board would become starting just hours after it selected Dixon at a late-night meeting Sept 20.
The next afternoon, board
member Dominic Paretti resigned as The Dispatch prepared a story reporting that he was under an administrative investigation as a Democratic staffer at the Statehouse for sending lewd text messages to female co-workers.
In December, board member Mary Jo Hudson resigned, saying she had had it with Baker and his board allies for dismissing a proposal to close buildings that a citizen task force had worked on for half a year. Hudson went even further, threatening to launch an outside effort to change the structure of the board, but thus far she’s been