When Patti Brenneman arrived in the Oak Hills Local School District 15 years ago, the suburban Cincinnati system was facing severe fiscal challenges. Schools were overcrowded, roofs were leaking and public confidence was at a low ebb.
The new superintendent took the problems to the people, convening a series of communitywide forums to explore the school district’s plight. With input from a broad cross section of the community, she worked out a plan to stem the bleeding.
That early test became a hallmark of her management style.
Since then, Brenneman has organized numerous public engagement forums on topics ranging from gifted education to the implications of the global economy. She calls the process “concentric squares” — the discussions start out small and widen to include larger and larger swaths of the community, from “grandmas to business leaders.”
“At different times, you bring in different grandmas and different business people,” she says. “When we’re talking about technology, we need the kids there because they’re ahead of the curve.”
Bill Seitz, an Ohio state senator from the area who has worked closely with Brenneman, says a forum she organized on the state’s school finance system “was almost a mini-university for parents and community leaders. … She built a cadre of support that extended beyond just parents in the district. That was pretty shrewd.”
Jan Hunter, a board member and former board president, credits the superintendent with introducing the concept of public engagement to Oak Hills, where it is now an expectation.
Brenneman, 56, says the collaborative spirit has been imprinted on the DNA of the 8,000-student, middle-class district. When that happens, she says, no one person — including herself — is indispensable.
“This district is so full of talented people that they don’t need me here,” she says. “I don’t want to be that charismatic leader that when you leave you have to worry about what happens next.”
The collaboration has extended to the large parochial school community in the area. Cincinnati’s western suburbs are strongly Catholic, and nearly half the children living within the Oak Hills district attend church-affiliated schools. Rather than competing for students, Brenneman has reached out to the diocese, inviting its educators to Oak Hills’ staff development programs.
Brenneman says that only makes sense because children in the parochial schools one year could be in Oak Hills classrooms the next.
“I look at all these kids as our kids, and so do they,” she says. “If one is not doing well, then we all have a problem.”
The superintendent describes herself as a “right-brain” thinker who focuses on creative problem solving. As an undergraduate at Ohio State University, she admits, “I was all over the place,” taking a wide array of courses before settling on a communications major. Her first teaching job, in high school English and journalism, was in Oak Hills, but she soon moved with her husband, an independent retailer, to Gallipolis in southeastern Ohio. There she taught literature, English composition and theater before moving into administration and the superintendency.
When she returned to Oak Hills, she took a pragmatic approach to improving the district’s academic reputation as No Child Left Behind was being rolled out.
“She was very, very adept at figuring out what the state was going to judge school districts on,” Seitz says. “She understood that if this is the way it’s going to be, we have to play by the rules of the game.”
She was quick to align the district’s curriculum to the state’s standards. And to help the district’s relatively large percentage of special-needs children (about 13 percent), she worked with Seitz and others to push the state toward more appropriate alternative testing.
Her work has clearly paid off. Oak Hills has held an “excellent” rating, the state’s highest, for the past seven years. And despite Brenneman’s insistence that she is now expendable, she was named Ohio superintendent of the year for 2007.
Paul Riede is an editor with The Post-Standard in Syracuse, N.Y. E-mail: hoffried@twcny.rr.com
BIO STATS: PATTI BRENNEMAN
Currently: superintendent, Oak Hills Local Schools, Cincinnati, Ohio
Previously: superintendent, Gallipolis, Ohio
Age: 56
Greatest influence on career: Dick Maxwell, former Buckeye Association of School Administrators executive director, was my most influential and inspiring mentor. His lessons went beyond school finance and the politics of running effective organizations to how to work compassionately within the human relations lens.
Best professional day: Days when I witness my colleagues moving toward the danger with courage and conviction to do what is right for children.
Books at bedside: In the Woods by Tana French; A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini; and the Gideon Bible
Biggest blooper: Early in my first superintendency, advising a great board of education to close a school for a financial reason without bringing in the stakeholders to understand and help solve the district’s financial problems.
Key reason I’m an AASA member: Personal and professional growth.