The Superintendent Stranger in a Strange Land

I remember the situation as if it happened yesterday. My new school board president and I met for breakfast at the Blue Fountain Diner on a Saturday morning before I was to begin my new position as superintendent of Neshaminy School District, my first in Pennsylvania. “If you see 200 people in the parking lot on Monday, it’s probably not a welcoming committee” he told me.

I asked the board president for clarification. He said the word on the street was that the teachers’ union would call a strike. I had been a superintendent and a public school educator in New Jersey for more than 33 years and had grown up in New York — two states that outlaw public employee strikes. On rare occasions, strikes did occur but never two in one year as I would learn had happened in my new district during the previous school year.

That was just my first “we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto” moment. The labor laws in differing states can be quite dissimilar, and that difference often sets the tone and culture for a school district.

A Startling Difference

In Pennsylvania, the history of steel and coal unions has migrated into the public sector so that the state’s Labor Relations Board sees no difference between professional and nonprofessional unions. My adopted home state of New Jersey never would permit the negotiation of class size, but in Pennsylvania, most union contracts restrict class size as a matter of terms and conditions rather than management prerogative.

Perhaps the most startling difference when I first moved across state lines from one superintendency to another was not so much what I didn’t know, but how much I used to know.

As a long-tenured district administrator, it was not unusual for colleagues to call and ask me questions or seek my advice. One neighboring superintendent in Pennsylvania called to ask me a question about some new statewide requirement within my first few months. I listened and said, “You do know who you are asking, don’t you?” (Silence) “Oh yeah” came the response. “I forgot.”

When you have been around in one place, you rely on your connections, your associations, your network. As a superintendent, you fully recognize the lay of the land, and you, of course, understand statehouse politics. Even interviewing prospective candidates for administrative positions was easier in my earlier posting because I not only had relevant knowledge of the districts they were coming from but probably had a connection to their current superintendents. All that changed when I made the eight-mile trip across the Delaware River to my new office in eastern Pennsylvania.

The good news is algebra is algebra, biology facts don’t change from one state to another, and kids are kids. Plus, for the most part, so are the other bits and pieces that we call school. But then there are the state assessments.

New Jersey was aligned with the Common Core’s PARCC. In Pennsylvania, we have our own assessments. New Jersey tests are timed, and Pennsylvania tests are untimed. New Jersey sends back writing samples to school districts fully graded, but Pennsylvania did not — until I persuaded my fellow superintendents to press the state department of education, resulting now in writing samples being returned to the local districts for teacher use.

It took some time to acclimate myself to the new language of the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment and the Keystone exams. I have a capable staff so that helps, but the culture change from one state to another still presents some awkward moments at town hall meetings when I’m asked questions and feel caught between my past and present.

Learning Overload

And so the learning curve continues. Certification requirements, budget and accounting rules, construction nuances, pension payments and risk insurance are just a few of the many departures that await the itinerant superintendent. And don’t overlook the disparate athletic eligibility rules across state lines.

For those superintendents who have made a career of multistate changes, this professional exercise probably borders on humor. But for anyone who has committed most or all of a professional career to a single state, the culture shock can be jarring. My advice: Your colleagues will help immensely. And as an AASA member of longstanding who almost always attends the National Conference on Education, I have made friends from around the country. I have no problem calling on them for assistance. So if the time and circumstances seem right for an interstate job change, by all means make the journey.