Superintendent's days numbered?
Questions surround White's tenure at Gallup-McKinley County schools

By Bill Donovan
Staff Writer

GALLUP — Karen White's days may be numbered as county school superintendent.

Two months after Annie Descheny and Genevieve Jackson were voted in as board members, questions of White's future as superintendent of the Gallup-McKinley County School District have been spreading through the school district.

No school board member has publicly called for White's firing or resignation, but both Jackson and Descheny have indicated at board meetings that they do not like the way the district has been run under White.

Jackson, in a phone interview Tuesday, said she sees within the school district a "culture of fear and intimidation," and Descheny blames the district's leadership for implementing a system Baldridge that forces teachers to spend most of their time doing paperwork and not enough time actually teaching.

A third member of the board, Johnny R. Thompson, has also been critical of White in the past for not doing enough to hire more Navajo teachers and to promote Navajo history and culture in the classroom.

That's three of the five school board members who are critical of White's leadership, but if there is any talk of buying out her contract or hiring a new superintendent, it's been behind closed doors.

Both Jackson and Descheny indicate that the major reason for their concern over the way the district has been run has been the scores that the schools have posted in the AYP, the Adequate Yearly Progress reports that are given out annually as part of No Child Left Behind.

AYP is supposed to measure how well schools are making progress toward meeting yearly goals, with these goals being raised each year. In the last AYP measurement period, only two schools passed, and both were elementary schools.

White and others in the district have pointed out that schools can fail AYP for a number of reasons including low attendance and to understand how well the school district is doing, one must look at the overall testing for the past two or three years and see if the schools have shown any progress.

But Thompson has indicated at school board meetings that the scores posted by Native American students in the tests among the lowest of any ethnic group in the district are nowhere near what they should be.

Descheny said that she believes a large part of the blame for this should rest with the decision by the district to go with the Baldridge Systems Approach, which requires teachers to prepare a binder on each student in the class and work with them on a one-to-one basis to meet goals.

This and other things required under Baldridge, Descheny, said require so much paperwork that one teacher told her that she gets to spend an average of one hour a day actually teaching. The other five hours are taken up with paperwork.

White was asked on Tuesday if she feels if all of this criticism in the past few meetings makes her apprehensive about continuing as superintendent and she replied, "no comment."

Bruce Tempest, chairman of the school board and probably White's biggest supporter on the current board, said that it takes more than one or two board members critical of the administration to force out a superintendent.

"If it happens, we have to do it as a group," he said.

It's obvious, he said, that the dynamics of the school board meetings and the relationship between the board and the superintendent has changed in recent weeks, but he thinks that may be due to the board members getting used to one another.

He said he has seen this before when new board members come on with attitudes created by the campaign trail and not understanding what a board can and cannot do.

It takes time, he said, for a board to begin working together, especially when some of the board members may not have a complete understanding of what went on before.

The ironic thing about all of this is that just before Jackson and Descheny were elected to the board, White underwent an evaluation, and all but Thompson approved giving her a good evaluation.

White's contract with the district came up briefly at the special meetings this past Saturday when Jackson asked whether it had been extended just prior to last February's board election.

Tempest explained that the board did not extend her contract at that time. The contract extension came up last July at which time White's two-year contract was extended another year.

What the board did in January, Tempest said, was rehire White after her revaluation. This is routinely done at that time, he said, because if a decision is made not to rehire her, the board has six months to find a replacement.