Being Baker Kurrus

Try to imagine being Baker Kurrus. Or let me take a stab at it.

You have been fired as superintendent of the state-run Little Rock School District. The firing has been executed unceremoniously by the governor and his education chief.

They have banished you from the job they asked you 10 months before to do. It's a job they say you performed heroically. The governor even called you the "balm of Gilead," meaning a great healer.

Yet they have announced that you will be replaced by a fellow named Michael Poore, who has been running the Bentonville School District.

They say Poore is the academic whiz and that you, a lawyer and businessman and longtime school board member and community resident, were perfectly suited only for the job you were given. That was to set right the organizational and financial mess besetting the district when the state took over.

You know that's not so. You know that the hardworking people you've brought in to rescue the district's distressed schools have put in place a strong academic plan that is already showing signs of success. Baseline Elementary--take a look at what's happening there. It doesn't look like a matter of budget and organization alone to you. It looks like a valiant academic undertaking.

You know that the notion that the education commissioner has implied--that you wanted all along to work only for a short time on budget and organization and then move aside for a real school leader--is not accurate.

You know that you plainly asked the education commissioner whether he intended to renew your contract. It is true that you neither got down on your knees and pleaded with that education commissioner for continuation nor grabbed him by the bangs on his forehead and demanded it. But obviously you wanted to stay on. Who couldn't see that?

You have watched both with sadness and gratitude the strong community backlash against your firing. You've beheld the community's equally strong fear. It is that the state fired you for opposing the charter-school expansion that you believe to erode regular public education and to re-segregate by race and economic status.

So you take a short and overdue vacation. And you see from that vacation that the governor has given an interview saying he wants and needs you to stay engaged in the district, either by formal or informal arrangement.

Then you return from vacation to see that this new superintendent-to-be, Poore, whom you've never met, wants to get with you post-haste, man to man.

So you meet with him, just the two of you, for two hours. He tells you he needs you, that the district needs you, that your community needs you, and that no one has the command of all the moving parts of this school district that you do.

He tells you that, if he can convince you that he is a public school champion just as you are, then you and he would make a great team. He says he doesn't want to get ahead of himself, but that he's thinking about chief operations officer, or something like that.

Your head spins. These thoughts whirl:

• If I'm so vital, why was I fired?

• You, Mr. Poore, seem like a nice-enough man. I think that, yes, you may be strong on curriculum. But I can't convince myself at this introductory point that you and I are so fully in concert in our intentions as to make a team, especially on the matter of charter-school expansion, a position on which you're clearly evading. It's revealing that Poore is telling you he hasn't seen the data you worked hard to compile showing the damage to public schools from charter expansion. Why the heck not?

• Could this possibly work or would it present the district with two bosses, and thus no boss?

• Do you, Mr. Poole, really want this supposed expertise of mine that you and the governor extol? Or are you only wanting to use me for the convenient political appearance--to bail you out against the angry backlash in the community?

Through it all, there's really only one determining factor.

It's that you have spent decades fighting for what you think is best for this school district, sometimes practically alone on the school board, and you are not going to stop now no matter whether you have a title or a paying job.

So it comes down to this question: Would your agreeing to work in a formal role for and with this new superintendent--who may not himself be the enemy of that which you seek, though maybe a tool, even unwitting, of those enemies--amount to the best thing for the schools?

You will fight for the schools, as you always have. But will the right fight come from without or within?

You simply don't yet know.

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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 05/01/2016

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