On Sara Consalvo

I discovered last week that when I don't post¹ about things, I get asked, so, in advance of the Worcester School Committee taking up the administration's recommendation of Sara Consalvo to the (recommended for re-creation) position of Chief Financial and Operations Officer, let me just say:

Worcester, you may well not know how very lucky we are.

While Ms. Consalvo's been second in command (arguably) in the WPS finance office for years, she is a talented, skilled, and highly respected school business official in her own right. She's served on the Massachusetts Association of School Business Officials board, and she's a 2017 recipient of the Friend of MASBO award for her work with them. She's been the point person for the adoption and implementation of Workday in the district. She trains others on payroll and other financial items.
She's not only been the budget point person in the school and district level behind the Meritorious Budget Award for (again) years; she presents to other school business officials on how to attain it. She has written about that process at the national level. 

We've been lucky to have and to have kept her in Worcester. I am certain she's been offered other options. 

Worcester has been very very lucky in having and retaining the financial leadership it has had, so we haven't seen, locally, the state and national lack of school business officials. It is really hard to find school business officials at all, let alone good ones. Districts at this point most often are recruiting good SBOs away from each other when they find them.

Something Mr. Allen has been excellent at (which seems to have gone largely unremarked) is building a bench; if you haven't noticed any shift in WPS transportation since John Hennessey retired, you have seen one example of that. Recruiting good people, retaining them, ensuring they grow in their current position, and then are also prepared to take the next position is a skillset of the next superintendent.

The Worcester Public Schools have another chance to benefit from that tonight and going forward.

Lucky us. 

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¹This was said in reference to the incoming superintendent in Worcester, for which, see here.