New DeKalb School Superintendent Brings Big Ideas from the Big Apple 
The search for a new superintendent of DeKalb County schools was a longer process than the Board of Education might have expected. But when the dust cleared, there was one woman standing from that nationwide search. Now, the Board is banking on veteran educator Cheryl Watson-Harris being the right choice to guide the school district through its most challenging time in recent memory.
Watson-Harris spoke with InTucker in an extensive interview about her background, her influences, her vision for DeKalb and her efforts to lead in the time of coronavirus.
Q: It looks like you’ve hit the ground running here in DeKalb County. Tell us what this past month has been like.
A: I was incredibly excited, obviously, to become the new superintendent of the DeKalb County School District. I really have been waiting anxiously to meet our staff and our students and our community members. So, that has been one of my number one priorities to really make sure that I’m getting out and I’m getting to know the people that make up this beautiful school district.
It’s an interesting time to become a new superintendent because I have served in a number of leadership roles and I know that your entry should be one of listening and learning and celebrating. So, I’m trying to manage that with the urgency of our times.
Q: You came in and had to make what’s going to be one of the toughest decisions of your tenure just right off the bat with the virtual learning. How did you make that decision? What went into it?
A: This has been characteristic of my leadership style. I like to recognize that I’m one member of the team and I also have to ensure that there is community input. So right after that beautiful swearing in ceremony, I was kind of whisked away and had a meeting that same day with the COVID-19 task force, which was made up of a group internally to really look at the data and help to provide a recommendation of where we would go with the opening of school. That information was triangulated with the community survey that was issued as well as informal feedback from the community, lots and lots of emails, lots and lots of phone calls. Looking at all that information and then pulling it together and considering where I’m coming from, New York City, which was really the epicenter of this pandemic. It’s almost as if I have a glimpse into the future of what could happen and wanting to avoid that at all costs for DeKalb County School District.
So, really the data is what ultimately drove our decision. Thinking of the safety of our students and our staff, first and foremost, and just knowing that we needed a little more time. I will say that the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive about the decision. Even though we recognize that our children want to be back in school and we want them back in school.
There’s still some community members that are not happy with the decision, but I can sleep at night knowing that the decision we made was really to protect our children and our staff. We’re going to continue to revisit this. That’s what I’m so excited about our plan is that we’ve out [of] the gate said every month we’re going to continue to revisit the numbers and when it is safe and when we have the right training and when we have the right protocols in place, we will bring everyone back. But not until it is safe for our scholars and our staff.
Q: How satisfied are you with how your predecessor has left things? How much work do you have to do right off the bat?
A: I do want to just say for my immediate predecessor, Mrs. Ramona Tyson, what an incredible person. We didn’t really have as much of a transition period as one would expect. We had one week. But I will tell you that we devoted one hour every day…and she was able to share enough information with me that I have been able to hit the ground running.
Looking at student performance, looking at where some of our schools are with state accountability labels, etc., we do have some inequities. That’s true all over the country. That’s not just true in DeKalb, but that’s what I see as my work is to make sure that we’re looking at each school community and not providing the same thing to every school community, but really kind of pulling back the onion to see what is it that each school needs to be able to take it to the next level. We don’t want to see a map where you have primarily green schools and yellow schools and red schools in terms of performance in such kind of obvious clusters.
We have incredible staff working all throughout the County. We want to make sure that we are looking at the right data, that we’re adjusting our practices, that we’re providing interventions as needed to ensure that all students are set on their pathway to success.
Q: What were some of the things you were able to do in New York that you think you may be able to bring here and implement in DeKalb County Schools?
A: There are lots of things that I’ve learned and done and helped to develop with other amazing leaders both in Boston and in New York. And before I answer that question, I will say there’s a lot of things that New York and Boston can learn from the staff here in DeKalb County. We have some amazing leaders who are doing amazing things.
I’m working with the team already and a lot of these pieces are already in place, but to this notion of equity and an equitable approach to school improvement, we developed a comprehensive school support strategy. And really that allowed us to have clear metrics to determine the health of the school, whether it be by academics, building blocks for school improvement, that would be more of like your capital enhancements, and then conditions for learning. That would be more of the social emotional supports, the wraparound services, etc. A lot of those pieces exist currently. I do feel the need for us to pull it together a little bit more comprehensively so that we can look at each school and say this is how we prioritize schools for this type of work and that these are the progress monitoring checks we put in place so that we are assessing our progress towards our goals in real time. That was my legacy work in New York and definitely something I would love to see us tighten up here.
Q: How do you see the role of technology in educating our young people?
A: If I bring this back to our current situation, I believe we have some excellent schools here in DeKalb County that have a STEM and a STEAM focus and we have many teachers and buildings that I have visited that are just outstanding in terms of access to technology. I think in terms of technology and where we need to go to prepare our children for the jobs of the future that many educators, this is not just here in DeKalb, but many educators have been reluctant or nervous to kind of enter that space. But this COVID-19 crisis has forced the teachers, educators, students and families to use instructional technology in ways that they really hadn’t before. I think that that might be one silver lining from this is that education’s never going to look the same after this. We’re more educated. We have access to new technologies and tools that could make us much more efficient.
In terms of maker spaces and 3D printers and engineering, robotics, coding, these are things that we want our children to be exposed to that before had really felt like an add-on or a privilege. So we have to continue to look for ways to make sure that we’re looking at our curriculum and we’re preparing students to, even if that’s not their area of passion, that they all have access to awareness and these types of opportunities just as they do with their arithmetic and their reading because that really is what’s going to be required of them in the future. So we’ll continue to look at ways to increase access to technology.
Q: How do you know you’ve been successful?
A: In terms of how I assess if I am successful and if the district is successful is really we have to start with our strategic plan. We have a strategic plan here in [the] DeKalb County School District. Do we want to tweak it just a little bit? Do we want to tighten up in certain places? Absolutely. But we have a plan with clear identified goals and we have to ensure that the practices and the things that we’re doing are working towards us meeting those goals. So, the progress monitoring, the benchmarking and regular assessment of progress towards those goals will let us know if we’re successful.
Embedded in that are data points: graduation rates, student attendance, suspensions, as well as not only academic achievement, but growth. If you’re an A student, we want to make sure your growth matches the other A students throughout the district and throughout the state. So, I’m very big on that, cycles of continuous improvement, you know, I never want to rest on our laurels, I always want us to be moving forward and to be sure that we’re monitoring our progress in real time.
Ultimately, and I’ve said this from the very beginning, my goal is to ensure that DeKalb County School District is the number one choice for families, that we have a beautiful portfolio of schools and that every family in DeKalb can find a school that they say, “this is a great match for my family and this would be my number one choice.” When that happens, I know I’ll be successful.
