by Thaddeus Flint
The Berlin Central School District held a Meet the Candidates night on June 28 allowing residents to meet and interview the final two candidates for the District’s Superintendent position.
The finalists in the search are Virginia Keegan of the Owen D. Young Central School District in Herkimer County and Stephen M. Young of Lindenhurst Public Schools in Suffolk County.
The public either didn’t know of the meeting or didn’t feel like sitting in a classroom with their prospective Superintendant on such a nice summer’s night. There were only around eight people in the room, most of them faculty and staff of the Berlin Schools. The Board of Education was represented by Board Member John Nash, and Board Member-elect Jim Willis.
Keegan was interviewed first. With so few in attendance, she and the members of the public could all sit together at one table and speak freely. Keegan studied first at SUNY Albany where she received first her Bachelors and then her Masters of Science. She then went on to get a certificate of Advanced Study at SUNY Cortland in 2004. She holds New York State certificates for District Administrator, School Administrator/Supervisor and Business and Distributive Education. She is currently the Superintendent, Principal and Water Commissioner for the Owen D. Young Central School District. Keegan spoke of how the size of her district is even smaller than Berlin’s; Their budget was only $5.3 million. But being from a small district allowed her to get to know both the students and the parents. As she is also the Principal at her school, she had daily interaction with not only the teachers but the kids as well. She explained how she had implemented several programs to improve the district, adding reading, math and academic intervention services. Responding to a question on what 21st Century teaching should be like, she detailed how she personally worked to update the school’s computer technology and then started long distance learning programs using online classes to allow students to receive an even more diverse education than they could at Owen D. Young. Keegan was open and relaxed as she was questioned. At one point, while talking about the State’s Regents exams and the State’s handling of education in general, she even went as far as to say, “I think New York State is a mess…”
The interview session with Young was more like a classroom experience, and one could easily see him as he once was, a science teacher in the Bronx. Young sat at a desk at the front of the classroom, the public in the little chairs. Young took names like a roll call. Thankfully nobody was late. The interviewers wondered if Young knew what it was like to work in a district with a higher than average poverty rate? Young asked what percentage of students at BCS received free lunch. The answer was thought to be around 40%. “Well in the Bronx, at one school, we had 100%, that is every single kid on free lunch,” said Young. Young studied biology in the Bronx, getting a Bachelors from Manhattan College, and then a Masters at Fordham University. In 1998 he received a Masters in Education from the College of New Rochelle. In 2008 he received his Ph.D. in Education Leadership, Administration and Policy from Fordham University. He has taught at Grover Cleveland High School in Queens, Intermediate School 116 in the Bronx, The Bronx High School of Science and Benjamin Cardoza High School in Bayside, NY. Currently he is interim District Administrator at Lindenhurst Public Schools, a District far larger than Berlin, having over five thousand students and an astronomical budget of $137,091,637 for the 2010 – 2011 school year.
Young spoke of the need to bring the towns that make up this district together, almost echoing the words of the District’s previous Interim Superintendent, Dr. Brian Howard. When questioned as to his thoughts on what a 21st century education meant, he said that a student could “successfully leave Berlin, pick up a news paper and read and understand everything in it, that a student could go into the workforce and work together with teams from all over the world.” But Young also stressed the need for an education that is not overly focused on technology. Students are plugged in, computer literate “but some kids don’t know how to change a tire.”
Young then turned the tables on his interviewers and asked them a question: “What is it about Berlin that is special, that makes parents want to send their kids here?” Dianne Mosher, a Berlin teacher, answered right back. “We really care about the kids,” she said, and the others in the room agreed with her.
The Board was scheduled to meet July 11 to further discuss the candidates, as well as the input from the public. “When the Board selects the next superintendent then we will need to sit down and work on an offer and a contract,“ said Acting School Board President Bev Stewart. The contract could pay as much as $135,000 a year. “Of course, this does not mean we would necessarily offer that because it would depend on experience, benefit package etc.,” wrote Stewart.
How does this compare to what Keegan and Young were making in similar positions? According to the website SeeThroughNewYork.net, a site built and maintained by a non-profit, non-partisan research center called the Empire Center which keeps track of New York State expenditures, Young was making $154,375 when he worked for the Blind Brook-Rye Union Free School District in 2010. There are no records of his pay at Lindenhurst as he was an Interim Superintendent there. The same site reports that Keegan made $119,600 in 2010 in the Owen D. Young District.
A final decision from the Board is expected before the end of the month. In the meantime the District remains without a leader, as Dr. Howard departed Berlin to the Troy City School District at the beginning of July.
