The stories we tell ourselves: Worcester's past 75 years of superintendent transitions

Stories are how we make meaning for what has happened to us; they give form to the past. Sometimes, though, our stories about how things happened once become stories of how they always happen, and we can miss pieces that might make better meaning of the current time.

Thus it is with superintendent transitions.

Thus, here, with my particular gratitude to the Worcester Public Library for having Worcester Telegram & Gazette archives, to whomever scanned decades of Worcester City Council manuals, and to L.H. Larned, whomever you are, are the past seventy-five plus years of Worcester superintendent transitions.

When the Worcester School Committee in September of 2021 declined to renew the contract (running through June 2022) of Maureen Binienda as superintendent, it was the first time in at least seventy-five years that it was the Worcester School Committee, rather than the superintendent, was deciding the length of their tenure. ¹Aside from the death in office of Leo Doherty in March of 1962 (part of why, in 1966, the new high school on Highland Street was named for him), every superintendent dating back at least 1942 either retired or left for a new position, not had the school committee decide they were done.

It thus is perhaps less than surprising that it was also a transition that involved a national search. That is recent enough history that I will leave it aside, save to observe that the question of if there is someone who has the experience to take the position, would be willing to do so, and the Committee trusts to do so, was also, as I said then, relevant then, too. 

As Binienda had begun in May 2016, she thus is shorter serving than her permanently-appointed predecessor, Melinda Boone, who served from July 2009 through the end of November of 2015, leaving to become to take a position in Norfolk, Virginia, with a contract that would have run through the end of June of 2018. 

Boone's Chief Academic Officer, Marco Rodrigues, served as interim when Boone left that November until Binienda took office in May. He was also among the four finalists in what was termed an "internal search" after the newly-sworn-in School Committee voted to scuttle the national search planned to replace Boone. If you want to know more about how much of a "search" that was, you can read my blog posts from the time^2.

Boone's appointment came after a national search, and the newspaper columnists of the time battled out whether that was a good idea, and then debated the relative merits of the finalists, including the lack of inclusion of an internal candidate (sometimes specifically mentioning Stephen Mills, former Worcester School Committee member and then Deputy Superintendent). As Robert Nemeth wrote in a column entitled "Cast wide net for school chief" published March 16, 2008: 

This city has been noted for what is widely known as the "Worcester search" - go for a nationwide search, conduct inhospitable interviews, undercut the outsiders, then appoint the person who has been waiting in the wings all along. This time, it should be different.³

What is particularly telling is that Nemeth's column is largely harkening back to another Worcester search, that of 1993, which resulted in Jim Garvey being named superintendent, in writing about the 2008 process, just as in 1998, when it came time to replace Garvey on his retirement, columnist and Worcester historian Al Southwick wrote about the debate over the process to replace Leo Doherty in 1963. You'll see more of this below. 

Boone served, as noted above, just under six and a half years, making her the longest serving of our last three superintendents. She was directly preceded by interim superintendent (and retired WPS educator) Deirdre Loughlin, who served from September of 2008 to June of 2009, to provide time for the search.

The two were the first women to serve as superintendent in Worcester.

Her permanently serving predecessor was James Caradonio⁴, who was appointed in 1999 on the retirement of James Garvey. He thus served nine years in that role, having come to Worcester as Deputy Superintendent since 1993. Caradonio had not otherwise been a Worcester Public School educator, having served as an assistant superintendent in Rhode Island as well as other positions. That transition is the one motivating Southwick's history lesson from 1963 and among those being referenced by Nemeth in terms of what was seen as from what came before; Nemeth referred to it in his column quoted above as Worcester having gone through "the motions of a halfhearted search."
Caradonio was superintendent during No Child Left Behind, and was not quiet about his opinions about it, giving us such gems as this (from a chapter called "Worcester: Thunderous Clouds, No Rain"):

"That cockamamie approach is based on the insanity that you're saying we want to get all kids to 100 percent [proficiency], but you're not tracking the trajectory of individual kids towards proficiency...Absolutely insane...people [in Washington] just kind of get that wild cowboy look in their eye, they just don't give a God-damned."

James Garvey⁵became superintendent in 1993, (thus another six year superintendent), in a process described in the March 2008 column mentioned above as:

...marred by rancor from the outset...Citizen groups promoting excellence and diversity wanted somebody from the outside. The union used the occasion for bargaining leverage, threatening to conduct its own interviews of candidates and to picket interviews with semifinalists. There were reports of some School Committee members being harassed for failing to back the local candidate. Vicious rumors about the personal life of a promising candidate, Thomas Fowler-Finn of Haverhill, who received four votes in the first round of balloting, ended his candidacy.

The other two candidates were James A. Connelly, superintendent of Bridgeport (CT) and Clifford B. Janey, one of the "zone" superintendents in Boston. Garvey was the principal of South High School at the time, characterized as "a man of action," as the May 25, 1993 Worcester Telegram & Gazette article profiling him as a finalist said in the title of a piece that also related a story about his chasing down students who were skipping school in Hadwen Park. Literally.
Written of Garvey in a February 21, 1999 piece ("Retiring school chief leaves his mark") upon his retirement: 

He is the product of a school system in which being a loyal team member is a key to success; it is a philosophy from which he has clearly benefited, and one that he has practiced as superintendent.

Garvey replaced John Durkin, who you may recall reading about when he died in 2022. He became superintendent in 1980, thus serving thirteen years as superintendent. He was appointed interim upon the retirement of John J. Connor, having been supervisor of program development in the district. He had been a principal and a teacher here. I suspect he's best known, due to the time he served, as the superintendent who oversaw the district coping with the outfalls of Proposition 2 1/2, which included a myriad of cuts, including Worcester closing schools.

Connor was appointed in 1967, thus serving 13 years as superintendent.⁶ He'd been a finalist in 1963 to replace Leo Doherty, when serving as assistant principal of Commerce High. When John B. Davis, who'd been appointed in 1963, left Worcester in 1967 to become superintendent in Minneapolis, he was then appointed to the position.

John B. Davis, Jr., appointed in 1963, served four years as superintendent, but as outlined by Al Southwick's December 18, 1998 column "John Davis made 'outsiders' acceptable" 

The eventual selection of Davis as superintendent of schools broke new ground for what had been a somewhat provincial, parochial community...The Worcester School Department had long been run by a close-knit bureaucracy of like-minded people, sometimes referred to as the "Irish Mafia."

There was much drama, involving even an attempt to draft then-City Manager Francis J. McGrath as superintendent, ⁷ until the School Committee used their decision-making authority: 

In February, five of the seven School Committee members voted to ask four Worcester college presidents - Howard B. Jefferson of Clark, Very Rev. Armand H. Desautels of Assumption, Very Rev. Raymond J. Swords of Holy Cross and Harry P. Storke of WPI - to study the records of the three candidates and make a recommendation, which the five agreed to follow.

Davis was far the most experienced candidate, and the recommendation from the four college presidents was unanimous in his favor. The Committee followed his recommendation.
His move to Minneapolis was to lead them during desegregation. His obituary quotes him as saying:

Great are the problems of our nation. Absent, I think, are great voices of leadership motivating us to act intelligently and in the spirit of individual sacrifice for the common good.

But for all of the confusion and the uncertainty and the absence of clarion voices, one thing seems clear to me: that public education is the great equalizer of life’s chances, the balance wheel of the social machinery.

The same piece says he was "the man to get your institution back on track."

Interesting, per the City Council manual of the time, there was not a superintendent in the time from Leo T. Doherty's death in office in March 1962 to the appointment of Davis in 1963; there were two assistant superintendents. Clearly, the requirements of the time were different ones.

Leo T. Doherty was appointed in 1956, succeeding Thomas F. Power, who was appointed in 1942.⁸ Doherty was a graduate of North High, and the only of all those listed here as permanent superintendents, to be a Worcester Public Schools alum.
Brian Allen thus becomes the first Worcester Public School alum since Doherty⁹ to be permanent superintendent of the Worcester Public Schools.

My point? The process--and even the right process--can vary according to the needs of the district and the people who can be considered. Worcester's even has. 

____________________________

¹something I did not know until I wrote this blog post
²This one, entitled "Not with a bang but a whimper," posted the morning of the vote, sums up a lot. My own main memory is being gaveled out of order during my public testimony. 
³This and all other quotes from non-linked sources are in the archives via the Worcester Public Library. 

⁴You might note who does and doesn't have facilities named after them throughout.
⁵yes, like the Parent Information Center
⁶Not directly relevant to anything here, but researching this led to learning of his daughter's murder, along with her husband, in Texas in 1972, in something that sounds like someone's bad dream of the 1960's.
⁷I swear I am not making this up.
⁸When I wondered when Power succeeded his predecessor Walter Young, I was given a hand by the original owner of the 1942 City Council manual that the city has scanned, L.H. Larned, who helpfully offered this:

⁹coming forward, those from Massachusetts high schools are: Davis, Tilton Prep; Connor, Newburyport High School; Durkin, St. John's High School; Garvey, St. John's High School; Binienda, Marian High School. Caradonio grew up in Texas, Boone in Virginia, Monárrez in California