Q&A: As school year begins, MCSD superintendent shares lessons learned in COVID
With the Muscogee County School District starting another school year in the COVID-19 pandemic, superintendent David Lewis sees plenty of challenges to keep his work compelling, despite some frustrations.
The average tenure for a school district superintendent is five to six years, according to a 2006 study by the American Association of School Administrators. Lewis has been MCSD’s superintendent for eight years — and he doesn’t intend to leave town for another job.
After the school board hired him in July 2013 from Polk County, Florida, where he was the associate superintendent for learning, Lewis developed a 10-year plan for MCSD. Going into his ninth school year in Columbus, Lewis said he still checks that plan nearly every week to measure the progress.
Whether its graduation rate, college entrance exams or state standardize tests, the metrics show MCSD significantly has improved student achievement and reached all-time highs in some cases under his leadership. The district’s facilities also have been upgraded, funded mostly by successive sales tax referendums approved by Columbus voters.
Lewis wants to continue serving as MCSD superintendent beyond his 10-year plan. At 64, he doesn’t have a retirement date in mind, but he wants to retire in Columbus. The friends and relationships in the community he and his wife, Karen, have made are major reasons, he told the Ledger-Enquirer.
Lewis addressed these topics and more in a recent wide-ranging interview with the L-E. Here are highlights, edited for brevity and clarity:
Q: Understanding you formed a medical panel of local health experts to advise you on COVID-19 protocols, what has it been like for you to be in the spotlight as tens of thousands of people rely on your decisions to help them be safe during the coronavirus pandemic?
A: “It’s been a challenge. This has been the ultimate year of adaptive leadership for the last 16 months. Certainly, I feel the weight of all those decisions. . . . Directly, I impact between 30,000 and 31,000 students as well as 5,000 employees and then, indirectly, virtually everybody in this city at some point by extension of those. . . . But that’s why, early on, I wanted to pull in the expertise of medical experts who work with pediatrics, work with adults, people who have epidemiology backgrounds. All of that was critically important to me, and I feel like, based on the advice they’ve given me, we’ve made the right calls all the way through, . . . and I want to reassure everyone that the safety and priority of all of our students, staff and the community at large is paramount.”
Q: How would you describe what MCSD has gone through and has done to continue educating children during the pandemic?
A: “Fortunately, as part of our plan, . . . we started working with 1-to-1 (computer) devices back in 2017, as a result of the ESPLOST (1% Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax) that we’re so fortunate to have approved by our citizens. That gave us the resources to purchase those devices. … So when the pandemic came along, we’d already started our personalized learning initiative. It’s not about the devices per se; it’s about training kids to start taking agency of themselves, of their own learning, and that had already begun in several of our schools. But as of March 13 of 2020, we had to shift and pivot just like that. And with that, we knew right away we had to be rethinking what we would be doing for the remainder of that school year and likely beyond. … How are we going to get devices out to the kids who don’t have them yet? How are we going to get connectivity (with hotspots) for our students? … But we had to go, as a system, to start training our teachers and move to an online platform immediately. That meant all of our people last summer were spending time preparing professional development for those teachers — a crash course, if you will. … It was just an extremely disruptive aspect as we all experienced. But for our schools, I could not be more proud of the way in which we responded. Was it perfect? No, we all know that. But were we better prepared than most districts or many districts I’m aware of? Absolutely.”
Q: Except for those with medical reasons, MCSD students won’t have the virtual option to start this coming school year. Why did you take away that choice?
A: “Going back to what we learned from this past year and the recommendations we’ve seen from educational institutions, from medical experts and so on, children need to be in-person, if at all possible. … Teachers and school personnel are the first line to be able to determine the safety and welfare of children. Things like DFACS reports (of child abuse) went down significantly over the past year, obviously because teachers weren’t in direct contact with their students. … It’s important from a social-emotional and academic standpoint to be with their teachers. … This is having long-lasting impacts. Just what we’ve gone through in the last 16 months, it’s being projected it will be a three-to-five-year recovery period. So every month and every year that goes by that students aren’t in class, we can just add to that.”
Q: Did teachers tell you they couldn’t sustain the concurrent teaching (in-person and virtual at the same time) for another school year?
A: “I have to be cognizant and aware of the fact that it was a very difficult and challenging thing, and they did it one year. I don’t think it was the right or ethical thing to ask them to do it beyond that.”
Q: You’ve said you check the progress of your 10-year plan almost every Sunday. So give us a report card. How is the district doing, and how are you doing?
A: “I will tell you, I am very proud of the milestones we’ve made along the way. … I am pleased to report that all of the metrics by which school systems are assessed, we have improved and reached all-time highs.”
Q: What’s the evidence?
A: “The CCRPI (College and Career Ready Performance Index), SAT, ACT. Our graduation rate, for example, when I started was at 72.8; it’s now improved to 89.4. … We want to also show that we’re raising the bar and closing the gap. Our graduation rate, now we’re seeing there’s really no statistical difference between our various subgroups, between white, Black and Hispanic, male/female. That’s showing a commitment to equity. … Our mission statement refers to all students: ‘We will equip and inspire all students to reach their unlimited potential.’ And all means all.”
Q: Has the pandemic made that gap tougher to close?
A: “Our children have experienced, in some cases, trauma and sometimes it’s not always related to socioeconomic (circumstances). Sometimes they’ve lost a parent. They may have lost a relative. … It’s all been exacerbated because the kids who worked well in a virtual environment, the kids who had additional resources, whatever it might be, they’re continuing to move forward. Those kids who had situations where they couldn’t connect, or parents had to work and they couldn’t ensure their child was logging on from an attendance standpoint, you can imagine. … We’re going to have to reassess, realign and recalibrate everything we’re doing. … So people can’t expect us to pick up right where we were with SAT or graduation rate or whatever. … We’ve got some deficits we’re going to have to work through and assess where those deficits are because they’re going to be different for every child.”
Q: What has contributed to MCSD’s improvement?
A: “In my 10-year plan, one of the things I felt we needed to do is openly address the whole north-south divide (in Columbus), and that’s why we divided the district into three vertical regions — east, central and west — and all three regions have north, central and south schools within them. … We also updated our curriculum in elementary reading and math. … We also adopted secondary language arts, math and some science. We’re working on the science as well as social studies. … Instead of students carrying 40, 50, 60 pounds of books on their back, they now have a computer they can take home and all the material is right there to be accessed digitally.”
Q: Just because your plan has been successful, you don’t have to stay. So why have you and (your wife) Karen chosen to stay in Columbus?
A: “When I came here, I wanted to find a place that I felt comfortable and would like to retire from when that time comes. … The people here have been tremendous in terms of welcoming us, supporting us, making us feel part of the community and not as outsiders. . . . Things like our vibrant arts in Columbus are very important to us. We’ve found a church home that we’re very comfortable in and like the people there as well. But also, we see Columbus as a community overall that is progressively thinking forward, trying to make things better.”
Q: When do you plan to retire?
A: “I don’t know. I enjoy what I do. Some days are better than others, but this is important work, and it’s something that I value and put a lifetime into, and I want to continue doing it as long as I can. … This pandemic has given us an opportunity to look at what the future is going to need to be for the workforce. Columbus 2025 with the Chamber of Commerce, there are a couple of initiatives that will be announced in the coming months that are very big for the school district … and preparing our community to be poised and ready for what is coming post-pandemic, and I’m excited about that. … But at some point, I want to make sure I give time for my wife as well. … Nobody can do this job well and effectively if you don’t have a supportive spouse that understands the nights, the commitments, the things you deal with and all the things that come — both good and not-so good — with the job.”
Q: Why do you enjoy the job?
A: “I love the people. It starts with the people. There’s nothing better than being on that podium or that stage at graduation time and seeing the culmination of years of work and years of education with children growing from when they first come into school and going across that stage and then seeing that they’re moving on with their lives … just knowing that you had a part in that and helped them be on that stage.”
Q: What frustrates you as MCSD superintendent?
A: “The added things to public education or education in general. When society feels like they cannot provide for it, they feel everybody’s coming to the schoolhouse, so let the schools do it. That’s a frustration. Like everyone else in this pandemic, we’re frustrated trying to find employees. That’s going to be an ongoing issue. … We have the largest number of people retiring now as a result of the Baby Boom generation, but we have the fewest number of students going into education, so we have an automatic vacuum there. So we’re going to have to be rethinking how we recruit and retain teachers.”
Q: What hasn’t MCSD done well during the pandemic that must improve in the 2021-22 school year?
A: “We do have the need for connectivity in our community and throughout our country. We can have devices for students, we can have hotspots, but if there’s not a way to connect to service, they are nothing more than paperweights. … There is an extreme deficit, an inequality, that has to be addressed. I know it’s being discussed at the federal and state level, about broadband availability and accessibility. That’s something that has to be provided but also the connectivity from the house to the service.”
Q: What’s at the top of your to-do list?
A: “Well, the virtual school that I want to put into place. The personalized learning initiative, I want to see that expanded. The summer program (turning summer school into an activity-filled program similar to a day camp) … I’d like to see how that can continue to move forward. I’d like to see initiatives I can’t talk about yet. There are some things around STEM and STEAM education … as well as post-pandemic planning and training and realigning our curriculum and our system.”
This story was originally published August 14, 2021 at 8:00 AM.
