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When it formally kicked off its hunt for the next New Orleans superintendent in late January, the Orleans Parish School Board outlined a three-month search process intended to culminate in early April with public interviews of the top candidates and, in quick succession, a vote to extend a contract to one of them. 

From community listening sessions to a plan for advertising the post, each step was standard operating procedure except one: An asterisk at the bottom of the PowerPoint laying out a timeline stated that the board reserves the right to stop the process at any time and simply appoint someone. 

That note did little to quell concerns among leaders of the city’s schools — all but one of them independent public charter schools — who are still reeling from the fractious events that led up to the abrupt November departure of Avis Williams. The former superintendent resigned after a series of missteps that included an accounting error that obscured a deficit of at least $36 million.

Separately, district leaders have asked a court to enforce the terms of a $90 million settlement in a 2019 lawsuit filed against the city of New Orleans. The suit argues that the city illegally skimmed up to $150 million in taxes owed to schools. Among other things, at stake is an initial payment of $20 million, which district and board leaders planned to use to offset some of the $36 million budget shortfall. 

Williams became superintendent in the sixth year of New Orleans’s experiment as the nation’s only all-charter district. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the city had rebuilt its entire school system — at the time, one of the nation’s worst — into a totally new kind of system in which every school lived or died according to its performance contract. This autonomy-for-accountability bargain has led to better outcomes for students, even as it remains controversial. 

A year ago, Williams — who had no prior experience with charter schools — mishandled a school closure, reversing her own decisions several times and leaving families scrambling to find alternatives. Critics argued the chaos was the result of her lack of understanding, two years into the job, of how NOLA Public Schools’ unique system worked. In the end, she solved the problems created by the botched process of revoking the charter of a failing school by replacing it with a traditional, district-run school — a move some board members had been pushing for. 

The challenges left unresolved — including the budget crisis, an overdue downsizing and longstanding problems with the district’s centralized enrollment system — will make the next superintendent’s job even more daunting, some members of the charter community say. They believe this makes it imperative that the next district leader is very familiar with the issues and the system’s capacity to address them.

Typically, the initial vetting of superintendent candidates is not done publicly. But two names circulating widely in New Orleans’s tight-knit education community potentially present a stark choice between a native of the city who helped to create the current system and a veteran administrator who was hired two years ago by Williams. 

The first, Sharon Clark, is a charter school network leader who played a prominent role in developing the city’s charter system and an elected member of the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. She is the principal of Sophie B. Wright High School, which had just become one of the city’s first charter schools when Hurricane Katrina hit. Clark was able to reopen the school within months, to serve the children of first responders. Last year, the high school earned a B overall on state report cards but an F for student performance on state exams. 

The second, NOLA Public Schools Interim Superintendent Fateama Fulmore, is a seasoned administrator who had little charter experience before being brought on by Williams two years ago. She has held top jobs in Omaha, Philadelphia and North Carolina, and last fall was a finalist for two other superintendencies. 

The members of the board that might or might not let the search play out have conflicting visions for the future of the school system. Some want the district to return to operating schools traditionally. Others are more concerned about downsizing and the financial crisis — uncovered last fall by charter finance officers — that threatens the schools’ ability to provide quality services. 

Board member Olin Parker has said Fulmore would be a very strong candidate to lead the district on a permanent basis. But Caroline Roemer, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, says Clark is a better pick, particularly given the urgent issues before the district. 

“We need someone with zero learning curve when it comes to relationships — community relationships, school relationships,” she says. “What is important now is to have someone from New Orleans.”

According to a report in The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate, most community members who attended a January public meeting told the board they wanted a native of the city who grasps the complexities of the district’s decentralized structure. 

Outside of people who have worked in the schools, precious few truly understand the unique nature of New Orleans’s system. The NOLA Public Schools leader’s powers are limited by state law, so the superintendency is not a job for a conventional leader looking to make a mark. There are also complicated racial legacies. 

All this makes filling the district’s top job a tall order.   

When Williams was appointed in 2022, she was given contradictory mandates by board members and failed, despite repeated entreaties, to forge relationships with the charter network leaders who have long worked with the district to troubleshoot common issues. 

By law, the district is constrained from dictating how individual schools educate students. So NOLA Public Schools leaders have fewer, but more distinct, responsibilities than administrators in typical districts. They distribute local, state and federal funds, which schools may spend as they see fit, and they monitor whether individual schools are performing well enough to merit renewal of their charter. 

When Williams was hired, she was asked to tackle an ambitious list of novel problems that included figuring out how to downsize the district in the face of declining enrollment — a process that necessarily would require the cooperation of charter operators. She also was charged with fixing a centralized system for matching students with schools and confronting rising absenteeism and mental health issues. 

From the start, the New Orleans education community questioned whether Williams could make progress without collaborating with people whom traditional superintendents view as subordinates. Most of her daunting to-do list remains unfinished. 

A year ago, after a series of missteps involving the expected revocation of the ​​Lafayette Academy Charter School’s permission to operate, Williams ceded to pressure from then-board vice president Leila Jacobs Eames to open a traditionally operated school in its place — something the superintendent had previously said the district was ill-equipped to do. 

During an October meeting with district administrators, a number of charter school finance leaders realized NOLA Public Schools had miscalculated the amount of tax revenue it was set to receive from the city by what would later turn out to be at least $36 million. Williams resigned in November.

A month later, the broadcast outlet Fox8 discovered, via a public records request, that the board had approved a $335,000 settlement with Williams, which both parties had agreed not to disclose to the public.  

The CEO of Crescent City Schools, Kate Mehok helps coordinate the School Leadership Forum, a network of charter operators who have long met regularly to hammer out solutions to common problems. Many of New Orleans’s most effective innovations were hatched by the network.

Mehok says school leaders have told board members that they would like to meet with the candidates. “We’re hoping they choose to do this so that it’s clear to whoever becomes the superintendent that we’re an important constituent group,” she says. “Our thoughts about it matter, so we have asked to be formally included in giving feedback to the board.” 

Dana Peterson, CEO of the school improvement and policy group New Schools for New Orleans, says he has told board members that they should spend time now clarifying what they want the next superintendent’s priorities to be. 

“Maybe [Williams] didn’t have the right set of experiences, maybe she didn’t have the right disposition towards our system,” he says. “But it was also true she was unclear on what direction the board wanted her to go on certain things.”

Applications for the position are open until March 16. Four days later, the board is scheduled to decide whether to interview any of the candidates. If finalists are selected and the process continues as planned, public interviews could take place at board meetings over the following three weeks.

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