LITTLE ROCK — The Little Rock School Board will turn once again to retired educator Morris Holmes at a special meeting today to be interim superintendent of the 26,000-student district, multiple sources who asked not to be named said Wednesday.
Holmes, who was interim superintendent in the 2003-04 school year, is the board’s choice to replace Superintendent Linda Watson, the sources said.
Watson is leaving the job at the end of this week after the board approved in December a separation agreement that included the buyout of her contract that would have otherwise expired June 30.
School Board members are to convene at 5p.m. for a regularly scheduled agenda-setting session and the special meeting.
They will vote on Holmes’ appointment to the interim post, consider a resolution describing how to approach the search for a permanent superintendent and hear a presentation from the McPherson and Jacobson superintendent search firm based in Omaha, Neb., the sources said.
Contacted at his home Wednesday evening, Holmes said he had talked to the each of the board members in recent days.
He said he did not know what action the board would take tonight.
“If they voted to ask me to come in for 5 1/2 months, I wouldn’t be surprised, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t ask,” Holmes said.
He also said: “I have indicated to them that if they needed me, I would come in and help them. That’s the way I put it. If they really wanted me and needed me, I wouldn’t say ‘no.’”
School Board President Melanie Fox declined to comment on the identity of any candidates for the interim job.
“I went through a process with the board,” Fox said. “My goal was to make the selection a board decision. I know it may seem like we dragged our feet and that there were even rumors that we couldn’t find a candidate. But we wanted to be diligent and thoughtful. I think the process has worked. I think everybody had input.”
The board did not solicit applications for the interim job but, in a series of executive sessions in December and this month, it discussed potential candidates, some of whom did not even know they were being discussed, Fox said in an earlier interview.
To be eligible to hold the interim job, Fox said, candidates could not be current district employees nor could the person in the interim position be a candidate for the permanent job.
Holmes, now 71, is a former superintendent in New Orleans. He also worked as an assistant superintendent in Fort Worth public schools.
He started his career in Little Rock in 1961 as an English teacher at what was at the time Horace Mann High School. He was an assistant principal at the now-closed West Side Junior High and at Booker Junior High, which is now a magnet elementary school. His first principalship was at the Gateway Opportunity School, a former alternative school in the city. He went on to principal positions at Forest Heights Junior High School, now a middle school, and then at Central High from 1974-79.
After Central High, Holmes worked as an associate director in the Arkansas Department of Education and then as an associate superintendent for curriculum and instruction in the Fort Worth public schools. In both of those jobs he worked for another former Little Rock and Arkansas educator, Don Roberts. The Little Rock district’s newest elementary school is named for Roberts.
Holmes became superintendent of the 70,000-student New Orleans district in 1993 and left in 1998 when he and the School Board in that city negotiated a buyout of his contract.
Although he was successful in 1995 in persuading voters to pass a $175 million bond issue, his final months in that job were dogged by controversy in matters including employees’ supervision of school funds, officials’ monitoring of equipment that was lost or stolen, and employees’ impropriety in the administration of standardized tests.
In 2004 remarks to Little Rock community members, Holmes defended the job he did in that city, noting that when he started the job the district had a $15 million budget deficit and when he left, the district reserves were as much as $30 million.
“For five long years, I faced them day after day,” he said about that district’s problems. “It took 16 hours a day. Eight hours a day I devoted to instruction, and eight hours I devoted to business and lawsuits. Little Rock holds no light to the difficulty of running the New Orleans schools. I learned more in New Orleans than a superintendent could learn in a lifetime.”
He said there was some culture shock.
“Coming from an Arkansas background, I didn’t know that people would absolutely, unequivocally cheat and steal,” he recalled in those 2004 remarks to Little Rock residents. “It was chronicled in the press - cheating in New Orleans. It undermined all the steady progress made on many fronts. It was bad, and I fired half of them for doing it. I didn’t know that such pervasive cheating could go on.”
After the New Orleans job, Holmes returned to Arkansas, where he taught at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia and then entered the rental management business in Little Rock, an endeavor that he has continued.
In late July 2003, after then-Little Rock Superintendent Ken James had resigned in the spring and then-interim Superintendent Don Stewart asked to return to his job as the district’s chief financial officer, the Little Rock District School Board selected Holmes to be the interim superintendent for the 2003-04 school year.
During that year, the board - with the help of a superintendent-search firm - sought a person to fill the job on a permanent basis.
Holmes applied for the long-term post but was not one of the finalists for the job, to the dismay of some community members and some board members who supported Holmes for the position.
Roy Brooks from Orange County, Fla., was hired for the job in 2004 and held the position until 2007, when a divided board ultimately bought out his contract.
Katherine Mitchell is the only current School Board member who was on the board at the time Holmes served as interim superintendent.
Holmes, who is married to Sammie Holmes and has three grown children and four grandchildren, is from Kiblah in Miller County. He graduated from the former Booker T. Washington High School in Texarkana and has a bachelor’s degree in English from Philander Smith College in Little Rock.
His master’s degree in counseling is from the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, and his doctorate in educational administration is from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
In addition to naming an interim superintendent today, the board is to vote on a resolution describing its approach to search for a full-time superintendent to take the job by or before the 2011-12 school year.
The resolution calls for the board to immediately establish an advisory committee to work with the School Board on getting community advice about the search and to assist in developing screening criteria and formulating interview questions for the job applicants.
The resolution also says the board will manage the search process but will engage a search firm to assist and guide it to ensure that the board has the opportunity to consider the broadest, most diverse and most capable group of candidates possible.
The resolution includes 10 characteristics that the board would like in a new superintendent.
Those include, for example, “the ability to build bridges and to work to bring the Board, the schools, teachers, parents, students and the Community together to improve public education,” and “The ability to plan an effective course of action and carry out the plan to completion.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 01/13/2011