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Profiles in Education

By Matt Stringer


If you played word association with you child’s school, you’d probably think of one word first: teacher. Teachers are great. Teachers are on the front lines of your child’s education. But, one person usually shapes the direction any particular school is moving at any one time: the superintendent. They’re the generals who make sure your children receive the education they deserve. They’re the ones who battle, sometimes bitterly, over bonds, taxes and referendums to make sure the school district is doing everything possible to further the great cause of education. Not to sound cliché, but children are the future, and, in this light, Curious Parents decided to get to know a couple of your superintendents a little better, so you could get to know them too.


Cherry Hill School District

Mort Sherman, Cherry Hill’s former superintendent, left the district in December to pursue other opportunities in Tenafly, N.J., as, take a guess, a superintendent. Sherman was also superintendent of South Orangetown Central School District in New York. Even though Cherry Hill has a brand new superintendent, Dr. Tim Brennan, who brings an impressive resume with him, full of superintendent positions, Curious Parents hasn’t yet had the opportunity to meet with Dr. Brennan, but we thought we’d share with you some of Sherman’s accomplishments at Cherry Hill.

The first thing you’d notice upon entering Sherman’s office is several dated, patriotic and framed posters supporting Liberty Bonds. The bonds were a way of supporting the Allied cause during World War I. Sherman just liked the way they looked. At the foot of his desk, a kindergartener’s chair of a pale white color, reminiscent of time’s past, sits. It reminds Sherman of what his mission is: “The most important job is to be a champion for the kids,” Sherman said. “That kindergartener’s chair reminds me every decision I make is for an individual child.”

During Sherman’s reign as superintendent, things did change: Kids, who might otherwise be left behind in a bureaucratic haze, received a chance they wouldn’t have had before Sherman; they could be accepted into AP classes.

“The level of competition of getting into college is tougher then ever,” Sherman said. “SATs are one indicator [of student competence], but another is does your school offer tough choices.”

The number of kids taking AP courses has tripled. It isn’t because Cherry Hill found a magic potion that makes students smarter; they eliminated all prerequisites for students who want to enter AP classes.

“If a student or parent say, ‘we’re going to work hard in this course’ we say ‘welcome to the course’,” Sherman said.

Not only did they give students who wanted a chance to prove their potential an opportunity, but they also recruited students they identified as being apt and able to compete and thrive in top-level courses. “Most of these kids wanted to be noticed and acknowledged,” Sherman said.


Mount Laurel School District

“I know more about sewage pipes than I ever thought I’d know about sewage pipes,” said Antoinette Rath, superintendent for the Mount Laurel School District. You wouldn’t think an administrator would have to descend to that level of gritty detail, but the superintendent has many responsibilities and when a school floods that’s just one of the many issues that raise to the surface. “You’re the conduit between the Board of Education and the schools, between the community and the schools, between the politicians and the schools.”

But, more than anything, Rath describes the job as being “the consummate advocate for children.”

The children who attend one of Mount Laurel’s schools come away with two fundamental skills: critical thinking and problem solving. There’s no course that teaches it; it’s integrated into the very curriculum.

“In math, we will have an open-ended problem that is real-life based and presented to the students and have the students discuss or write in terms of the processes they would use to begin to solve that problem,” Rath said.

Rath is taking that approach to learning to the next level, or, more precisely, the next galaxy. She visited a Challenger Learning Center, which simulates a NASA facility, and soon, Burlington County College’s Mount Laurel Campus will host one of the Centers.

Rath visited one of the Centers last year in Virginia and said students are divided into three groups for a mission: Houston, Mission Control and Astronauts.

“You literally take an elevator up and don these outfits and you walk out and you’re in space. Everyone is given a role. The overall objective is stated. In our particular case, there was an unidentified constellation. We had to identify what it was.”

Simulated problems even arise: You may lose oxygen. How do you get rid of waste? What do you eat?

“Imagine being a fifth-grader, sixth-grader or seventh-grader going through it?” Rath said. “Within 10 minutes of going into this, you can see a transformation in some of these kids where they really believe [they’re a part of NASA].”

Rath added when the mission ends and it’s successful [every mission is], the children literally break into a celebration. “There’s this recognition of accomplishment, this celebration of success. That’s hands-on problem-solving,” she said.

When the Center is completed, it will be available to students from across the region to learn and grow into future astronauts. Mt. Laurel is at the edge when it comes to new technology: they have the ACTIVboard, which is an interactive whiteboard that is wired to a computer and allows a teacher to take education and enrich it in a way that was not possible before. “It literally opens up windows to the world,” Rath said.


Evesham School District

Patricia Lucas, superintendent of the Evesham School District, organized a team of volunteers in her first year as superintendent to develop a courtyard, which had withered into disrepair, and helped it bloom into an area where children could come and see flowers and a vegetable garden instead of rocks and crabgrass.

She said one custodian went above and beyond and even came in on Saturdays. “I just feel honored to work with people like that,” Lucas said.

And, not only does she appreciate the work people do, she appreciates their input and opinions as well.

“It may be a bus driver, it may be a custodian, it may be a secretary. I learn so much from each one of them. They see things from a different perspective. I’m continually learning from every person I work with and it is definitely a team,” Lucas said.

Since August 2004, Lucas has been keeping a watch on more than gardens; she’s overseeing the security of the schools by making sure cameras that are in place are in working order and that Evesham’s middle schools, which don’t have cameras, receive the proper funds so they can install the wiring to make sure everyone is safe.

“Ten years ago anybody could walk in. We have to be a lot more conscious, everyone needs to stop at the office. We do question anyone we see in the building that we don’t know,” Lucas said.

Lucas is busy securing the schools physically, but she’s also taking proactive measures: she and the district’s crisis management team developed a flip chart on emergencies to put in classrooms so a teacher could consult it and find out immediately what to do during a crisis.

“It was quite an involved process of putting that together because there’s so many scenarios that could occur,” Lucas said.

There is another change being instituted: the math curriculum and materials are being revised so they’re more closely aligned with the core curriculum of New Jersey. Instead of teaching math and geometry for a semester, math will be interwoven into the curriculum throughout the year.

“Traditionally, when you learned math you may have learned a unit on multiplication, a unit on geometry and that was it. You didn’t really see it for the rest of the year. This is more of a spiral approach that really touches on the higher levels of thinking. It promotes problem-solving,” Lucas said. “You’re continually revisiting it. You certainly aren’t going to forget that. The research has shown it’s the best way of teaching mathematics.”


Haddonfield School District

“The key to everything in life is communication,” said Joseph O’Brien, the new superintendent of the Haddonfield School District.

O’Brien, formerly Springfield School District’s superintendent in Pennsylvania, believes that interacting with the community on every level is the prime ingredient in the recipe for a successful school district.

“There shouldn’t be walls or barriers between us and the community. I will never see it as my school district; I see it as our school district,” O’Brien said. “I’m going to be attending a lot of events at the historical society, speaking at Rotaries, speaking at Lions. You name it, I’m going to go and address it.”

O’Brien is also addressing the issue of technology in Haddonfield and said one of his longer-term goals is to connect the district to all that the new century has to offer, including a new Web site and faster, efficient ways of communication.

“We have to get away from the idea that you have to go sit with a teacher to have a conference. You can have an intent conference,” O’Brien said. “Students should be able to access our library from home. Parents should be able to find out how their children are doing on the Internet.”

In Haddonfield, public education is as important as the Philadelphia Eagles are in South Philadelphia says O’Brien. He added that they care about education and alluded to the fact that Haddonfield rarely rejects a bond referendum and when they do, it’s about the plan, not the money.

“The one issue they didn’t pass had nothing to do with the money. They wanted to take away an athletic field. It wasn’t about the money. You can argue that Haddonfield has passed every referendum. They fund their schools. They care about education. They put their money where their concerns are,” O’Brien said.

This year, students at Haddonfield’s elementary and middle schools will be taught a new way to learn how to add and subtract: Everyday Math. It’s an innovative curriculum developed by the University of Chicago and uses approximation in learning mathematics and emphasizes how math problems relate to everyday life.

“It’s very rigorous, very difficult, very challenging and absolutely the right curriculum for Haddonfield,” O’Brien said. “The problem you have is not with the kids; the problem is with the parents who suddenly can’t help the kids because it’s a different way of doing things.”


Lenape Regional School District

Programs are cut. Payrolls can’t be met. Schools can’t operate. It’s California all over gain, except this time it’s New Jersey. That scenario is only a few years away says the Superintendent of the Lenape Regional School District, Dr. Daniel Hicks.

“The public relations coup of the century in New Jersey has been the fact that the legislators and the governors, Whitman on, have succeeded in convincing people that the problem with public education is overspending in the public schools and convinced them to ignore the fact that the government has abandoned its role to fund public education,” Dr. Hicks said.

Dr. Hicks added that since the 1992-1993 school year, state aid has decreased by more than 30 percent for Lenape. Property taxes have taken over where the state has left off. “We’ve lost four budgets in a row. We haven’t lost four budgets in the past 30 years,” Dr. Hicks said. On April 18, the budget will be voted on. It’s an annual occurrence.

“In California, schools failed. Students were suffering. Programs were eliminated. Now they’re trying to rebuild, but it takes years and years to come back,” said Patricia Milich, public information officer for the district, referring to Proposition 13 in California, which put a cap on property taxes that were used to fund schools.

The district serves Evesham, Medford, Mt. Laurel, Shamong, Southampton, Tabernacle and Woodland townships and Medford Lakes. Each of these districts has their own K-8 elementary school. When the children graduate, they attend one of Lenape’s four schools: Lenape, Shawnee, Cherokee North and South or Seneca.

“This district has gained 2,500 pupils in the last 13 years and has received not one new dime in state aid,” Dr. Hicks said. “That means the taxpayers of our eight communities has had to absorb the cost of every new child who walks through the door. The hardship that creates in terms of resources is at times overwhelming.”

Dr. Hicks said he isn’t asking much, just that the state live up to its share of the responsibility in funding public schools. “We’re just at about the point where we’re out of magic tricks,” he said.


Matt Stringer is the editor of Curious Parents.