Haywood School Board misses an opportunity
When the Haywood County School Board announced that it had chosen Trevor Putnam as the system’s new superintendent, I can’t think of a single person who follows education news in this region that was surprised. People were making that call even before Superintendent Bill Nolte announced his relatively sudden November retirement.
What did catch some off guard, though, was the revelation of a “succession plan” that, according to a couple of school board members, had been in place for at least five years. I immediately thought of the now King Charles and his long-reigning mother Elizabeth. Perhaps the school board fancies itself a kind of advisory council, acting benevolently in allowing the outgoing superintendent to anoint his own successor.
Look, here’s wishing Trevor Putnam the utmost success. He’s been straight up and open with the reporters for this newspaper and has proven as accessible as any high-level educator in the region. My wife teaches for Haywood County Schools and I have three grown children who are products of the system. I’ve lived in Haywood County for 30 years, I own a business here and served on the board of the Haywood County Schools Foundation. I have a vested personal and financial interest in this county remaining a place with a well-educated citizenry where people and businesses prosper. A good school system plays a vital role in a community’s reputation and liveability.
Results of statewide standardized test scores show that Haywood schools do well on tests, ranking seventh in results released in the past two weeks. In private conversations, though, one often hears negative comments in the community about morale and the school system’s direction and leadership. There seems to be an obvious disconnect between student testing success and many folks’ negative feelings about the system’s leadership.
So no surprise at Putnam’s appointment; very surprised that an actual succession plan has been around for five years and this was, more or less, pre-ordained. I was also very surprised that the members of the school board chose to not even conduct a search. Some of those on the board have been there for a decade or more, so surely they were politically savvy enough to know they’d take some criticism — can anyone say “good ol’ boy system” — for not even going through the motions.
And perhaps that is where we should lay the blame for the niggling questions about the direction of the Haywood County Schools — squarely at the feet of the elected school board. It made the decision not to spend the time and money — and yes, a search would have cost some of our tax dollars — to see if some brilliant educator from somewhere else in this country might want to lead this school system for a few years. I mean, people are moving here from everywhere, so surely an opening like this would have had some appeal.
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This is the same school board that supported Bill Nolte’s knee-jerk decision last school year to pull a racially charged book from an English class instead of encouraging discussions about one of the most sensitive and fraught issues facing this country. For the last several years it seems that the school board has not been leading but instead has just been rubber stamping everything the administration brings before it.
Most successful organizations know that processes are important, that final decisions are stronger when the group follows best practices and uses proven techniques. By foregoing a search, school board members left a lot of Haywood’s citizens questioning their decision-making process and, in fact, did the new superintendent an injustice. Their desire for a local that was a known commodity and for expediency won out over a more open, competitive and formal process.
Say a real search had been conducted and Trevor Putnam rose to the top despite having to compete against applicants from near and far. Some school boards have even gone so far as to include parents or teachers in the selection process, showing that those elected officials truly care about what parents and staff think. If that had occurred and Putnam had won the job, the school board would have quieted many of its critics. Unfortunately, that’s not how this played out. Let’s call it a missed opportunity.
(Scott McLeod can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)
