Assistant Superintendent Keith Leonard will serve as interim superintendent for Escambia County Public Schools through June 30, 2024.
The board unanimously voted to put him in the interim role after a significant number of speakers voiced support for Deputy Superintendent Shenna Payne during the public forum and questioned if the board violated Sunshine Law in firing previous superintendent Tim Smith.
The vote might not have occurred without an impassioned speech by Payne that seemed to release the tension in the standing-room-only room.
Payne’s moment: School Board member David Williams attempted to make an amendment to the agenda item that would have made Payne the interim superintendent but asked for a brief recess to consult with the school board attorney before completing the action.
When the meeting reconvened, Payne took the microphone and delivered a sermon, taking the board to task for its treatment of Smith, calling for unity for the sake of the students, and closing with an endorsement of Leonard as superintendent.
“I am disappointed because it’s not always what you do, it’s how you do it,” she said. “I thank God for Dr. Timothy Andrew Smith. I thank God for the example that he set. He sat here many a day and many a night and sometimes he was talked to like he wasn’t a son, like he wasn’t a father, that he wasn’t a husband, that he hadn’t worked, so we as a collective being have to do better, I believe.”
Payne then said, “This was not designed, I don’t believe. I believe Mr. Leonard got pulled in, I got pulled in and now we have to find a way to pull together.”
She called on those in attendance to show the same support for the students before she concluded a speech that brought the crowd to their feet for a standing ovation.
“Now let’s show up and show out for the children in this district and then we don’t have to talk about our neighbors because we’ll be the A,” Payne said, “but we can only do that one way and that’s on one accord.”
Leonard’s acceptance: “This is about 45,000—38,000 students and 7,000 employees,” Leonard said. “You can rest assured every day when we come to work that’s who we’re going to be committed to. We’re going to give our students the best opportunity we can, and we’re going to treat and support our employees every day like they are doing God’s work.”
Dig Deeper: Leonard has served at the distinct level for the past 20 years. Former Superintendent Jim Paul named Leonard as the district’s chief negotiator in 2003. Leonard served in that role for four years before accepting the human resources director position and eventually being promoted to assistant superintendent.
Leonard has left his mark in the athletic arena, too. He served as head coach of the Tate football program through 2003 and previously coached its baseball team. He also quarterbacked Tate to the 1980 Class 4A state championship.
Superintendents connected to Tate have held the position for 18 of the past 27 years with the exceptions being Smith and Paul.
Interesting Moments
School Board chairman Paul Fetsko tried to convince the board that Leonord should not have “interim” added to his title.
“According to Andrea Messina with the Florida School Boards Association, the State of Florida does not recognize the term “interim.” Interim is mainly the length of the contract that’s offered.”
Board member Bill Slayton and Patty Hightower didn’t agree, and Leonard is the interim after they showed other districts have had interim superintendents.
Fetsko didn’t ask the Florida Department of Education.
School Board member Kevin Adams waved pages in the air that he said proved Leonard had a plan on how to turnaround the school district.
“The only thing I would’ve mentioned cuz somebody in the crowd mentioned about Mr. Leonard’s plan, I actually have it here. He was totally vetted during that process.
“He has a hundred-day plan that I’m really interested to see if he can actually do this. He has an empowerment schools plan that’s on page eight, which targets those low-performance schools. There is no bigger problem in this school district than those low-performance schools. We got one that went charter. We got 10 that are in that D range right now and are underneath DOE watch.
“So I hope if he takes this job or he’s voted to take this job, I would like to see what he could do in that first a hundred days to get us on the right path to tackle what we know is one of the biggest problems in the school district.”
The school district has a strategic plan that the board has approved and Smith was ready to implement this summer. Will it be scrapped?
CoC Reorganized?
On Friday, May 26, all those parties met to discuss how to plug into the federal government’s strategic plan. Those who attended the meeting shared with Inweekly that John Johnson of Opening Doors – whose organization runs the Continuum of Care (CoC) – was unwilling to share the names of the organizations that comprise the CoC and its board members.
Why this matters: On WCOA yesterday, City Councilwoman Allison Patton said, “The more aligned we are with the federal strategic plan, the more federal dollars will flow to this community. What Friday was all about, is let’s start that discussion between city, county, CoC and providers and talk about what that plan should look like for us.”
What happened: “There was a discussion of an organizational chart, just understanding who all should be at the table,” Patton shared about the meeting. “I think the governance structure is critical. I think we’ve got to get the right governance structure of this process in our community.”
She continued, “CoC board is critical. They should be setting policies focused on creating the best system of care. What was evidence-based effective in other communities, let’s bring it here. And then CoC needs to work to make sure that the agencies that are doing this work are all working from the same playbook and are funded.”
Toasting Mariana Bonifay
There is a monument in the median on Garden Street near St. Michael’s Cemetery that many of us pass everyday. On Monday, I finally got of out my car to read it.
Who is Mariana Pingrow Bonifay? WUWF did a nice profile of her for the bicentennial celebration. Dr. Judy Bense represented Bonifay for the Bicentennial’s Mosaic Project.
She has been called the “Mother of Pensacola,” not because she had 10 children but because she had a successful construction company, a real estate business and a brick company.
Read WUWF article.
Read Lavalle House.
Her will.
A lot of very sordid allegations were made against Smith both orally and in writing to include Fetsko’s two pages of secret notes that are a public record but not yet made public. It might be helpful to set the record straight if the media or a group fact-checked all of them to identify those that are true, half-true, lies and total lies. This morning I ran into a recently retired teacher whom I greatly respect. She was furious at what had happened and said that a lot of teachers who appreciated Smith’s approach were also upset. She told me it was an open secret that Fetsko & Adams had been conspiring to find a way to get rid of Smith and use “a back door” to install Leonard as the superintendent to do their bidding. She openly asked aloud what Williams had been given as his 30 pieces of silver to vote to throw Smith under the bus as if he was solely to blame for the sins of the school district. Escambia County is often the lowest common denominator when it comes to bad local government. The Florida Legislature probably needs to update the Education Code to put in safeguards perhaps requiring board chairs to certify in writing subject to the penalties of perjury that a vote to terminate an appointed superintendent was properly noticed as a real agenda item and perhaps require a super-majority vote (4/5) to terminate a contract. A better option here would have been for the board and Smith to agree to begin a search for a new superintendent while keeping Smith in place. With so many districts having recently appointed new superintendents, or in the process of doing so, there are plenty of people just in Florida looking to be a school superintendent. The board and Smith could have worked out a deal allowing Smith to stay until the new person was onboard and then leave while still getting his full severance. It’s an option in Smith’s contract not considered because Fetsko & Adams want what’s best for them not what’s best for the school district. One very unexpected lesson learned is that Deputy Superintendent Payne is not up to the job of serving as an acting or interim superintendent. I suspect a fuller investigation would find that she was more of a hinderance than a help to Smith. The next permanent superintendent needs to hire a Deputy Superintendent with executive leadership skills. Being the #2 Chief Operations Officer of a school district is a demanding “executive” job. By the way, just FYI, every current appointed, acting appointed and interim appointed superintendent in Florida has extensive school district experience, most a combination of classroom and administrative duties. One has a school district HR background and another had long been the school district’s attorney. See also – https://fadss.org/
For as long as Fetsko has been “serving” Escambia county one would think he could get the fundamentals right, instead of blundering his way through every pop quiz, scheduled test, and final exam in this course called “Superintendent 101.”