Katonah-Lewisboro School Board explains superintendent pick; sets community forum with Paul Kreutzer
Mark Lipton, the vice-president of the Katonah-Lewisboro School Board released this letter late Friday in an attempt to explain the board’s thinking in choosing Paul Kreutzer as the next superintendent and to announce a forum for Tuesday at 7: 30 p.m. at John Jay High School for the community to meet Kreutzer:
Dear Members of the Katonah-Lewisboro School Community:As you may know, on April 26th at a public meeting of the Board of Education, the Board plans on taking action to appoint Dr. Paul Kreutzer as our next Superintendent of Schools, effective July 1, 2011. We are aware that there have been issues raised in the community concerning this appointment and we wanted to take a moment to communicate our thinking so that you understand why we feel as confident as we do appointing Dr. Kreutzer. The community can start to get to know Dr. Kreutzer at a Community Forum planned for that purpose (details at the end of this email).
Paul Kreutzer is a strong educational leader and a committed family man. With his wife Amy (a special education teacher) and six year-old daughter Kennedy, Dr. Kreutzer plans to live in our district. With one exception, his family has always lived in the district where he was a teacher, a principal or the Superintendent. We came to know Dr. Kreutzer as part of a search process that started with interviews and forums with stakeholders including: community members, teachers, administrators, support staff and students and ended with intensive due diligence by the Bard of Education and it’s search consultants. This is the same process that past boards have used for Superintendent searches.
We have become impressed with Dr. Kreutzer as an individual and educator over the short time we have known him. As Board of Education Vice-President I have dealt with Dr. Kreutzer countless times during the interview process, contract negotiations and during an all-day visit to his schools in New Berlin, WI. Each interaction has been filled with his passion for education. He has been a Superintendent for the past 11 years (in two different districts). At 40 years old he has been both the youngest principal (at 25) and the youngest Superintendent (at 29) in Wisconsin. When you meet Dr. Kreutzer you sense his passion for educating students, his love of teaching and learning, his commitment to public education, and his energy and creativity. We want to bring those qualities here.
Of all the candidates we interviewed (44 “qualified” applicants, 7 finalists vetted by our search consultants), Dr. Kreutzer was the only one who kept returning in conversation, again and again, to a focus on our students and their education. His current district, New Berlin, is a little larger than the KLSD. It is located about 15 miles west of Milwaukee and about 90 miles north of Chicago and it is considered a suburban school district. I visited New Berlin schools myself (with Board Trustee Janet Harckham) and met his team: building and district administrators, teachers, staff, PTA President, custodians, district union leadership as well as toured his (VERY impressive) buildings and grounds. I was struck by the varied strategies his schools are using to reach students and the collaborative approach that exists with teachers and staff; I was also struck by the results of those efforts. They continue to make gains in student achievement by being creative and innovative in a time of fiscal difficulty.
In recent days Dr. Kreutzer has been painted by some in our Teachers Union as bad for our district because he stood next to Governor Scott Walker in March at a press conference and said his district supported the Governor’s initiatives to eliminate the collective bargaining right for teachers. He was the only Superintendent on the dais that day with Governor Walker. This obviously made him controversial in Wisconsin, and it has now made him controversial here.
You should know that the Board of Education deliberated extensively on this issue as well as cross-examining Dr. Kreutzer at length on the topic. He is not coming here to do anything other than to lead our district in our educational endeavors with an emphasis on student performance. The political climate in Wisconsin is very different from that in New York, especially in terms of our State’s support for collective bargaining. The Board of Education supports the teachers’ and staffs’ right to collectively bargain; it is appropriate and it is the law of New York State. We would not be talking about Dr. Kreutzer now nor would we have offered him this job if he disagreed with us on this major point or if we did not feel his views aligned with ours. His job in Wisconsin, like it or not, was to be an agent for his Board who had publicly stated that they did not support their staffs’ right to collectively bargain.
That being said, we understand that some members of the community have expressed concerns based on allegations made by our local union as well as our Board’s handling of his introduction to the community. To the extent that we should have done more or a better job reaching out to the community, once we identified Dr. Kreutzer as our top choice, we apologize. However, we did not learn anything new in the last week to change our opinion of Dr. Kreutzer and, in fact, have been impressed with his response to inaccurate statements and accusations. We do recognize that the communications plan we used to guide us through this process needs to be improved. We will learn from this experience as we move forward.
We are looking forward to many years of collaboration between Dr. Kreutzer, the Board, the community and our unions for the benefit of our students. We hope you will make the time to meet him on Tuesday evening. We have arranged a Community Forum for you to meet Dr. Kreutzer, hear about his vision for students and education, get some of your questions answered and so that you can listen and judge for yourself.
Date: Tuesday, April 26
Time: 7:30pm
Place: John Jay High School Cafeteria
Thank you for your time, attention and passion for our students. Thank you also for your continued support of public education in our Katonah-Lewisboro community. It continues to be an honor to serve at your pleasure.
Mark Lipton
KLSD Board of Education
Vice-President
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Is it true Paul Kreutzer got that poor 16 year old pregnant in his last district?
I can accept the argument that this superintendent was only following the agenda of his school board in challenging the collective bargaining rights of teachers, although it doesn’t speak well for someone to go against his conscience on such an important issue.
It concerns me greatly, however, that this man has spent VERY little time doing the work of teaching. He was already an administrator at age 25. He cannot have had much classroom experience or contact time with children.
I believe administrators who have implemented teaching have an understanding of what it actually takes to deliver instruction, manage classroom, evaluate assessments, etc. I believe the best administrators bring that experience into decision and policy making.
What’s the difference? He probably has one of those bogus terminal ed degrees that the teachers get. At lease he is employed as a theorist and administrator, not a teacher sans subject.
Sounds good to me. The unions sole purposes are to protect bad teachers from being fired, and for inflating salaries to the point where people can no longer afford to live in Westchester County. This man should be praised for hanging with Gov. Walker.
educator2 might buy that he was “only following orders” to serve the wishes of his board, but we don’t know if this was with or against his conscience. Being on the hot seat now, he will surely be asked at the forum to denounce Walker’s plan. If he is smart, he will say he can serve the best interest of children whether of not the district approves collective bargaining.
But if he was really smart, he would never have allowed himself to be used by Walker to pitch a highly partisan political plan. This begs the question, why was Kreutzer the only WI schools Supt. to do so? I think the others all had foresight in not bringing controversy and distractions to their district. See Kreutzer talking up Walker’s plan here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmrsboMd9Hc&feature=youtu.be
He wasn’t used by Walker. He was the only superintendent in our state who outwardly and eagerly spoke out in support of Walker’s union-busting ideas. http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/118129759.html
Ron – apparently you have no clue what the role of a teacher’s union is. I’m tired of hearing the conservative right-wing bull about the union’s desire to protect bad teachers from being fired. That’s just ridiculous, and shame on your for being so ignorant that you believe it.
You are so right, Mary. It is a shame that many do not understand the role of the unions. The teachers’ union’s job is, in simple terms, to be sure that teachers are provided with due process in the event that an administrator deems a teacher unfit to work with his/her students. It seems to me that if a teacher is not doing his/her job well, it is the administrator’s fault for not addressing the problem (perhaps via a meeting to establish goals for the teacher to work toward, assigning a mentor, providing training in a particular area, etc.) Do you know any slackers at work who “get away with it”? Is it their fault that you work harder than them or your boss’ fault for not dealing with your co-worker’s disinterest or inability to perform?