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September 8, 2014 | VOL. 50, No. 36
HIGH TURNOVER IN REGION’S TOP SCHOOL POSTS
INSIDE
BY JOHN GOLDEN jgolden@westfairinc.com
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CONSUMER HABITS • 13
HV OUTLOOK• 25
FACES & PLACES • 43
Cross-country soloist
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Ken Fuirst with the bike that carried him more than 3,500 miles across the U.S. this summer.
REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK
Holistic community development Business, nonprofits have shared stake in urban renewal BY CRYSTAL KANG ckang@westfairinc.com IN EARLY AUGUST, I went to the Cincinnati neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine on a mission to help create a church and serve the urban poor in a predominantly African-American community. The area my church group and I stayed in is historically known as much for its Italianate architecture as its high crime rate.
Much of the community has been held together by Living Water Ministry, a church started in 1999 by a Christian couple, Pastor Johann and Grace Kim. While walking through the neighborhood, I noticed that the gentrification process had already begun just a few streets away from the church’s backyard where many homeless people sat on the curb to drink and smoke from the early afternoon to late evening. Holistic, page 6
igh turnover in the ranks of school superintendents in the Hudson Valley that has left the region with an uncommonly large number of newer administrators in school districts’ top jobs could impair those schools’ stability and success in reaching educational goals, according to a new report by Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress. The issue brief, titled “The Spin We’re In,” was released as teachers and students returned to classrooms this month in 122 public school districts in the nine-county region represented by Pattern for Progress, a nonprofit policy, planning and advocacy organization based in Newburgh. Three out of four school superintendents in those districts — a total of 91 top administrators — have been in their posts for five years or less, Pattern researchers found. Of the region’s 122 permanent and interim superintendents, 21, or 17 percent, have been in their jobs for nine months or less. Seventy-eight of the region’s school systems, or 64 percent, reported having hired three or more superintendents in the last 10 years. In 34 of those districts, four or more individuals have held the top school post in that decade, while four districts surveyed said they had hired six or more superintendents in the same period. A vanishing figure in the state’s highpressured and financially constrained educational sector, the long-term superintendent serving 10 or 15 years in a district, has become relatively rare too in the Hudson Valley. Only 13 superintendents, or 11 percent of the region’s top school administrators, have been in their posts for 10 years or more. “This means that districts are seeing the revolving door spin faster than ever before,” Pattern for Schools, page 6