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JOHN BRUMMETT: Dinner with Michael Poore

At dinner at Cafe Bossa Nova in Little Rock's Hillcrest neighborhood on Tuesday, I handed the man from Bentonville a letter from a Little Rock public school teacher.

It was addressed to Gov. Asa Hutchinson and education commissioner Johnny Key. The writer, Mary Shollmier, a choir teacher at Parkview Arts and Science Magnet School, had mailed a copy to me.

She probably hadn't expected me to hand it to Michael Poore, the incoming state-appointed Little Rock School District superintendent sent to take over from the rudely replaced and locally heroic Baker Kurrus.

Read it, please, I said to Poore. I told him that nothing I would ask could more aptly capture the passionate local storm into which he was plunging.

Shollmier told Hutchinson and Key in the letter of her "shock, anger and regret" and "outraged helplessness" over Kurrus' sudden removal by Key with Hutchinson's approval. She said she and her fellow teachers felt like "pawns at the hands of a secret few with no oversight."

She wrote: "You can't put [all Little Rock kids] in charter schools and you can't create North Arkansas in Little Rock."

Poore read the letter, then handed it back to me. I invited him to keep it and suggested he call the teacher. He said he would keep the letter, and might call her, but that he really didn't need to talk to her.

"She's clearly a dedicated educator," he said. "So all I have to do is show her."

What did this man from the Bentonville School District superintendent's job have to say about his relationship with the Walton Family Foundation, with its advocacy for school reforms resisted in traditional public schools?

And is he being dispatched by the Waltons and Asa and Key to turn Little Rock into a charter school district?

And is he also sent to break the teacher union?

And is he also sent to close schools?

In that order:

Poore said he likes studying education ideas and that the Waltons have many. He said he'd partnered in the Bentonville schools with Wal-Mart--"I'm saying the word"--on a computer career path program. But, no, he said, the fact is that the worst thing for Jim Walton's school reform agenda is to have a guy from Wal-Mart's Bentonville thrust into Little Rock to stir up the state's largest and capital city against him.

His attitude toward charter schools is to compete with them. "You can't back away," he said. "But I believe in holding everyone accountable, and I mean everyone," including bad charter schools. The goal, he said, is for kids and their parents to become so happy with their public schools "that they become advocates to have other kids come to their school."

Would he, like Kurrus, have risen against recent charter expansion as racially re-segregating? "I don't know," he said. "I haven't seen the data."

Did he consider himself working for Key and Hutchinson or for the Little Rock schools? "Everything I've been told is that I work for the Little Rock schools, although I have accountability to the state, of course."

His attitude toward teacher unions "has never been to dismantle, but to work with."

And, yes, Key told him when he offered him the job over dinner a couple of weeks ago that he might have to close schools.

What else did Key tell him?

"To get the schools turned back to local control," he said.

Poore also said he got the false impression in that meeting with Key that Kurrus had only wanted the superintendent's job temporarily and that there might even be a peaceful public passing of the baton. "That miscommunication might have been mine," he said.

Poore was to have a private meeting Wednesday morning with Kurrus. He said he would love to hire Kurrus because "everybody says this guy has a rare knowledge of how all the pieces fit together."

Poore said he'd never actually met Kurrus, and that it seemed presumptuous for him to be thinking of Kurrus as something like a chief operating officer. But that, in fact, was what he was thinking. The main thing, he said, was for the two men to get a feel for each other. "But I wouldn't look for white smoke tomorrow," he said.

Was Poore seeking Kurrus' alliance to defuse local fury or because of Kurrus' skills? Would he have sought out Kurrus absent the fury? "I'd like to think I would have," he replied.

If Kurrus' services are so coveted, why replace him in the first place?

I continue to have no good answer.

I found myself liking and resenting Poore at the same time.

Poore said the ambition of his "entry plan" soon to be unveiled will have me doubting his ability to accomplish so much so quickly.

He also said that, at 55, he permits himself to think of Little Rock as his "last job" and to aspire to have the reinstated local school board choose to keep him on.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 04/28/2016

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