Maplewood-Richmond Heights School Superintendent
By Shera Dalin
Photograph by Whitney Curtis
Seven years ago, Dr. Linda Henke left a secure job as the assistant superintendent of the Clayton School District to tackle tough issues in the Maplewood-Richmond Heights School District. She went from one of the wealthiest, highest-performing districts in the state to schools plagued with fighting, low test scores, underperforming teachers, a high dropout rate and crumbling buildings. Henke, 57, also inherited a district on a state watch list for students’ poor performance on the Missouri Assessment Program test and at risk for sanction under the federal No Child Left Behind law, which sets proficiency deadlines in 2014.
She began to rebuild the district by edging out lackluster teachers and seeking extra tax money to renovate the middle and high school building and construct a new elementary school; the moves caused controversy, particularly from teachers whose contracts weren’t renewed.
Among the innovative initiatives she has pushed through: providing laptop computers for all middle and high school students, renovating the middle and high school library to look like a Barnes & Noble (it even has a coffee bar), and, most recently, creating Joe’s Place, a home for four homeless high school boys that has garnered international press coverage.
Henke, who taught middle and high school and college English before landing in an office, recently placed second in a national competition held by the School Library Journal to name a school administrator of the year.
You came from the Clayton School District, which doesn’t have the sorts of problems you’ve encountered in Maplewood-Richmond Heights. But in your wildest dreams, were you expecting to deal with homelessness? The job of schools has gotten much bigger. Clayton is a wonderful school district, but it is a rarified environment. I really didn’t plan on being a school superintendent. Maplewood-Richmond Heights School District has gone through a lot of trauma. I was the fourth superintendent in five years when I came here. And the school board came to me and said, “Would you be willing to come over here and be superintendent?”
So you didn’t apply for the job? No. I loved being assistant superintendent. But when they came to talk to me, I was really intrigued. Here was a school district with great diversity. Over half the kids are in poverty. We also have middle- and upper-class kids, and 40 percent of our kids are African-American and another 8 to 10 [percent] are international families. I saw this as an opportunity to get involved in urban education on a small scale. It’s been a tremendous adventure.
What are some of the programs or changes that you are most proud of? I’m most proud of the fact that this district has stabilized and become known in the county as a place where good teachers come to teach.
Yes, you inherited very high turnover—around 30 percent. Yes. The year that I came, the eighth-grade students had had seven math teachers in two years. The high school seniors that year had six principals. It was like a revolving door. Now, Maplewood-Richmond Heights has become the place for a particular kind of teacher. We seek out adventurers—people who are willing to try new ideas, be creative and have a passion for diversity. And they stay.
Your MAP test numbers are going up, and you’re proficient in some areas but not in others. Are you satisfied with the way you’re going? Do you think all students will be fully proficient by 2014? No. I don’t believe by 2014 all of our students will be proficient. I am very pleased with the increase in performance over the past eight years. But the gap for African-American students has actually widened a little bit. With our African-American students, you have questions about [whether] all the teachers are culturally proficient. We are attacking this issue head-on, and I really believe we will be able to crack it in the next five years. But we certainly are not there right now.
What’s working in the district? We now have district-wide procedures for homework. All students do their homework, and if they can’t do it at home, we have procedures and people here to help them. That was a huge cultural shift. When I came, the expectation was that some would do their homework and some wouldn’t; if they chose to fail, that wasn’t really our issue. Now if a student is failing, our assumption is that we haven’t created the atmosphere for success, and it’s our job to figure out what we need to do.
We are also finding that technology can make a difference. What we discovered is that the year we put in our laptops, our discipline [incidents] dropped by 75 percent.
Why? Because kids loved having the computers, and they wanted to be in class. But just giving students computers doesn’t make a difference. Teachers who know how to use those computers to individualize [lessons]—that’s what we’ve been investing in. The teacher will say, “Look at this small video clip—here are some questions I want you to think about. Go to these two websites and check the accuracy of the video clip.” We are really pushing our kids to use technology to think more deeply.
Another example of something that worked? We did a survey of our kids four years ago, and only 14 percent of them said, “I have a significant adult in my life that I can talk to about my problems.” That really frightened me. So we have two mentoring groups now: the Men’s Leadership Academy and Women Who Look Ahead. We [teach students] how to behave in a restaurant or store, how to get money for college, how to eat well on a tight budget. The kids and mentors also keep track of their grades. It’s been amazing. We also started looping.
What’s that? In K-8, teachers stay with their students for two years. So in kindergarten, you know that your son will have that teacher all the way through first grade. We are also doing more home visits than ever before.
Doctors don’t make home visits anymore. How can you get teachers to do this? Some say, “I want to do at least one home visit with all my students during the two-year loop.” Others say, “I’m going to try to do a home visit with parents I haven’t been able to connect with.” Within five years, we want to have a plan for home visits firmly established.
What you’re doing—Joe’s Place, schools as studios—is that transplantable to other schools? Should you be looking at what everyone else is doing? We definitely should be looking at what everyone else is doing. One of the serious issues with No Child Left Behind is promoting a kind of cookie-cutter approach. More and more with No Child Left Behind, what I see is panicked teachers and frightened administrators who are pushed into bad practices. You actually hear educators now saying the phrase “leveraging their bubble children.” It means you take a look at the kids who are pretty close to being proficient and you spend more time with them so you can improve your score. That’s no longer looking at children as whole beings. I’m horrified by that.
What do you think of No Child Left Behind? Initially, I was a supporter of it. But increasingly over the last few years, I have seen some of the worst instructional practices in my career. And for the first time, I see childhood under siege. I see schools afraid to allow children to have recess because you can’t take away from instructional time. I see science and social studies being pushed aside because this is about literacy and mathematics. Those things are happening because of No Child Left Behind. I have become a real critic of it now. If I was a politician, they’d say I flip-flopped. [Laughs]
Let me play devil’s advocate. A lot of educators were not in favor of No Child Left Behind from the beginning. You said you changed your mind. Is that because it is too hard and schools can’t do it? No. The idea of ensuring that all of your population is educated is an important goal for a democracy. But the kind of education it is going to take to create children who can problem-solve, think creatively and collaboratively, and stay with hard problems over extended periods of time—that type of education is not being fostered by No Child Left Behind.
But we are demanding that our schools fix social ills. Do we expect too much of our schools? For many of our parents, keeping a roof over their heads, food on the table and providing a stable home environment takes all of their energy. We need society to come together and educate our children. Blaming schools or parents doesn’t get our hands around it. I was a single mom from the time my son was 8 months old, and I probably wasn’t the most active parent in school. When we look at parent involvement, we have to look at it in different ways.
But it’s not just parents who aren’t engaged. There are parents who are absent altogether, right? We have a lot of grannies raising children in our community. Just recently, I had a granny in my office who had a high school student, a fabulous woman who was trying very hard to provide good care for her grandson. She said, “I don’t take my heart medicine because it makes me tired at night, and I can’t go to bed because I need to stay up with him.” Blaming her for not getting here to a conference doesn’t seem very helpful when she’s already sacrificing her health to keep him in school.
So what’s the magic bullet? It’s about time for the state and national government to recognize that our children are our greatest resource and we need to start attending to their care and education. We should be creating a safety net so that our kids can grow up and thrive.
You’ve been criticized for putting a lot of resources into the early childhood center. Is that really the mission of schools? Without district-funded preschool, you have students coming to kindergarten who cannot write their name or hold a pencil. Preschool helps get all kids ready. Research is showing that it is particularly helpful for African-American boys. What we have committed to in this nation is to spend more money on incarcerating them rather than educating them. So preschool is a no-brainer.
You and your staff have been working hard. Are you having any fun? I am having a great time! It’s really hard, and it’s not always fun. But to be able to work with the community and create something that has an impact on kids, my goodness, what could be more fun than that?
