Nearly six years ago I had the pleasure of dinner with Michael Poore. He was in town to prepare to replace the state-ousted Baker Kurrus as the state-appointed superintendent of the state-overtaken Little Rock public schools.
The "progressive" rage in Little Rock at the time was over the fact that Kurrus had been fired for opposing charter school expansion. The "progressive" suspicion was that Poore, coming from the superintendent's job in the Walton Foundation's hometown of Bentonville on the appointment of a Republican education secretary, was a corporate agent of traditional public education's destruction.
I wasn't sure at all that Poore was the anti-Christ. He had long followed me on Twitter. It seemed to me that corporate destroyers of public schools wouldn't normally like some of the tweets he was liking. A friend on the Bentonville School Board was telling me that Poore was a liberal-minded public education champion.
I received an email from Poore's wife predicting that Little Rock people were in for a pleasant surprise.
It wasn't clear to me that Little Rock patrons should distrust the state's judgment about a local superintendent. After all, the ousted superintendent they adored had been appointed by the same Republican education secretary toiling for the same Republican governor.
Yes, Kurrus had railed against the charter-school expansion advanced by the state, properly calling it counterproductive to resuscitating the Little Rock public schools, and had been ousted for that reason. Still, it seemed not necessarily to follow that the same state bosses who had tabbed the heroic Kurrus for a tough job would then tab the devil to dismantle that good job.
At dinner, Poore explained it this way: It didn't matter what he thought of charter schools. The fact, he said, was that the school-choice movement was with us. The way for public schools to navigate the competition, he said, was to engage in it.
I showed Poore a letter that a teacher in Little Rock had sent to Gov. Asa Hutchinson and copied to me. She expressed her fear that Poore was being sent to impose northwest Arkansas solutions on Little Rock, though the cultures are very different.
Poore read the letter and handed it back to me. I pointed out the teacher's telephone number and suggested he call her. He said he might, but that, more to the point, he recognized her commitment and understood his obligation, which was not to call her, necessarily, but "show her" that same commitment.
His goal, Poore said, was to make Little Rock his last job, winning over the people to the point he'd get retained by the new locally elected school board when state control was relinquished.
He worked tirelessly, starting routinely at 5:30 a.m. He worked nights and weekends, attending all manner of school events. He endured steep political, cultural and educational challenges along with the incidental complication of a pandemic.
Through it all, more and more people were saying that they deplored state control but were beginning to think maybe Poore was all right.
Poore calls himself "of average intelligence" but able to mobilize people. It took some version of exceptional skill to navigate a job spanning state control and local resentment. Only once in nearly six years did he tell the state he would quit ... if it forced him to fire protesting teachers.
Then the state restored local control. A local school board got elected. It kept Poore. It gave him a big raise. It joined him unanimously in getting a debt millage extended, in part to build a new high school in northwest Little Rock to compete with the private, parochial and charter schools.
So, last Tuesday, that board, made up of people who'd distrusted Poore six years before, heaped praise on him and lamented his announcement that, having worked himself ragged, and feeling at 60 a need to have a more diverse life, he'd depart at the end of this spring term.
Poore told me this story: He was lined up to appear on CNN to discuss school mask mandates. He let his parents know he'd be on and when.
Afterward, his dad called and told him "I looked like hell, to the point he could hardly recognize me."
His children and grandchildren are leading interesting lives all over the country, and he wants no longer to miss that. His parents are still active. The millage is extended, a good local board is in place, and school improvements are underway. He will stay until June to ease the transition.
Let's hope the new local board can make a hire as good, or at least nearly as good, as the two by the state.
It's more complicated for a local board. Owing to open-meeting laws we shouldn't dare change, it can't privately handpick a superintendent the way the governor and education secretary landed Kurrus and Poore.
Nobody has said for decades that public education in Little Rock is easy.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.