Now the top dog, always an educator

CCS superintendent Jordan brings teacher’s mindset to ‘complex’ job

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SILER CITY — Even the superintendent of schools has to deal with school bus traffic on the first day of classes.

Derrick Jordan kicked off the first day of Chatham County’s 2019-2020 school year on a trip around Siler City with Keith Medlin, the district’s director of technology and communications, but that jaunt got off to a bit of a slow start. While driving on U.S. Highway 64 Business out of Pittsboro, Jordan — the superintendent of Chatham County Schools — and Medlin got behind a school bus driven by a cautious and conscientious driver.

But by 7:40 a.m., they had arrived at Siler City Elementary School to greet students and staff at the start of what Jordan described as a “fun race” to try to visit every classroom in every school across Chatham County.

For 18 schools spread across 710 square miles, that’s not simple. But it’s not like Jordan has a simple job anyway.

Fulfilling his duties

As a former teacher and school-level administrator, Jordan enjoys being in the classroom the most, but his full duties require a little bit more work.

“The role of the superintendent primarily is to actualize the board’s vision for the school district,” he says. “To wrap around the goals and to establish some sub-goals to ensure that you continue to make progress. And to be a unifier. It’s complex work. You have so many different perspectives that are at play. The superintendent has to keep a finger on all those different perspectives.”

When he took the job of superintendent in 2013, he added a lot of responsibilites he didn’t have previously, namely dealing with facilities. Chatham is a growing district — according to the Operations Research and Education Laboratory at N.C. State, the county is projected to grow its student population by more than 22 percent over the next 10 years. Thus the need for new schools like Chatham Grove Elementary School (opening next August) and Seaforth High School (opening August 2021) arises, as well as schools built in Chatham Park as it fills up.

Jordan said that he tries to keep the same general mindset — “all students deserve the very best that we have to offer” — through all the growth, but as all educators have to do nowadays, changes and adjustments are part of the job.

“Folks have to know and understand that coming into education today is very different than what it was once upon a time,” he said. “The one-size-fits-all concept is no longer.”

Districts make adjustments of their own in curriculum and focus. State departments of public instruction hand down new mandates and alter the funds allowed for programs. A new class of students — graduating seniors leave and new pre-kindergarteners and kindergarteners become new Chatham County Schools students — presents new challenges for teachers and principals.

And superintendents, while keeping with the wishes of the school boards and working with their team of administrators, have to help implement new policies and procedures, curricula and standards, at a diverse group of schools. Chatham is no different.

“Every school has its own uniqueness, just like every student has his or her own uniqueness,” Jordan said. “Having to have some false starts — and I think people struggle to come to grips with that, and by people I mean external people — they wonder why things change with rapidity sometimes in school settings. It’s because you have to give the opportunity to try something. If it doesn’t work, you’ve gotta try something else. Unquestionably, that is a task that will be ever-present for good school districts.”

Back in the classroom

Jordan’s first day — and whole first week, for that matter — was spent in and out of classrooms, for the most part. He started Monday at Virginia Cross Elementary in Siler City. Walking on campus, he ended up walking side-by-side with a youngster gripping a parent’s hand.

“Are you excited?” Jordan asked. The child nodded. “I love it,” the superintendent said.

Jordan taught middle and high school classes and admits he “didn’t have a full notion” of what goes into elementary education until he became an assistant principal at one.

“I now know better than most that the work is massive, PK-12,” he said.

Going back to the classroom is his favorite thing to do as superintendent. Apart from this first week, he said, he will sometimes visit classrooms when he gets frustrated — “unfortunately, for a variety of reasons,” he says, “(those days) come a lot more frequently than I would like.”

Jordan stopped several times throughout the morning to not just observe classrooms but interact with the students in them. In Jessie Burke’s 1st grade class at Siler City Elementary later in the morning, he stooped to a low table to help a student get started on a book about manatees. He engaged in conversation with several teachers and got in the breakfast line at Virginia Cross to ask students how their summers were.

Those other elements — teacher recruitment and retention, facility construction and upgrade and community appearances — are part of the job, but Jordan will always be a teacher.

“Superintendents who are in it for the right reasons would say that the classroom is the place where they have the most comfort,” he said. “As much as I’ve been out of the classroom for a while now, I still get that rush when I go in and see students and teachers interacting with each other. It gives me that tingling feeling.”

Some students in the varying classrooms he visited didn’t know who he was. Teachers would often say something to the effect that he was their “boss’ boss’ boss.” But Jordan put it a different way to Virginia Cross 4th-grade teacher Melton Hardy-Powell’s class Monday morning.

“I am working to ensure that you have the best education possible,” Jordan said. “So I work alongside of your teachers, your principal, your guidance counselor, all of the adults in this building to make sure that you have what you need so you can exercise those brain muscles. How many of you have strong brain muscles?”

Perhaps a bit nervous at this man in a suit coming into their class on the first day, or 4th-grader nerves, or shyness, or for whatever reason, not many hands went up.

“I need more hands,” he said with a faux-stern look. “We’re going to have to work on that.”

Jordan smiled and said he’d be back in a few weeks to check on the size of their brain muscles.

Shifting and growing challenges

Throughout the morning on Monday, Jordan referenced the list of challenges facing Chatham County Schools and educators in general in 2019, revolving most around safety and mental health.

Jordan began as Chatham’s superintendent a few months after the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings in December 2012. That is cited as a turning point for focus on school safety in North Carolina — the state legislature granted funds to each district for security measures that next year — but Jordan said safety is always top-of-mind for educators.

“You’re always wanting to identify how you can be as safe as possible with the understanding that there is not any one answer that’s going to solve (it),” he said. “I wake up with it every day on my mind and I know that folks external to the schools — community members, parents, etc. — they’re all thinking about it. I think they’re catching up to where we are because we’ve always had it on our mind.”

The district installed new card key access points at front doors of its schools and has implemented other security measures, but at county expense. Jordan said he’d like to see more state funds for safety, but even more so for mental health.

Chatham County Schools has a heightened focus on students’ mental health this year, the superintendent said, and while it does fall in line with a statewide focus on the “whole child,” in Jordan’s mind, it falls right in line with the schools’ calling.

“This Whole Child focus is real talk,” he said. “It’s not just something that is in vogue today. It is a necessary part of how we do school now. If your kids aren’t in a good place mentally, they aren’t going to be able to do what we need them to do academically.”

The mental health challenges students face range from poor economic conditions at home to parents with mental illnesses to traumatic life experiences that they carry into the classroom. Jordan said he sees schools putting a lot of effort into addressing those challenges, but emphasized that additional work needs to be put in outside of the classroom.

“After a safety incident, it has a shelf life, seemingly,” he said of the mental health conversation. “This does need to be a conversation that happens ongoing. I think that sometimes folks are responsive to these big incidents, but they confine it to a short period of time. What we have said for Chatham County Schools is that we are going to be concerned about all of those pieces of the puzzle ongoing. We have to be concerned about mental health, we have to be concerned about the trauma that the kids coming into our schools experience, and we also — and this is one of the few professions in my opinion that has to be concerned about — not just the folks that you deal with directly, day in and day out, but folks who are in the home who you may never see.”

Couple that with awareness of the need to compete with charter schools — they “require us to make sure that we are working toward higher, higher, higher,” he said — and helping students who are economically-disadvantaged when it comes to food, health or living situation — “if folks don’t have the means to take care of those issues, then we have to figure out a way to fill that gap,” he said — and it makes for a full day, week, month and year for a district superintendent.

Making time for celebration

The first day of school offered Jordan an opportunity not just to see teachers and students, but to reward one.

The state instituted a new Beginning Teacher of the Year program this year, and Sarah Threatt, a 3rd-grade teacher at Siler City Elementary, was Chatham County’s first winner. SCE administrators got Threatt’s students from the gym and surprised her in the classroom with the award announcement and a bouquet of flowers.

The 2019 PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitude Toward the Public Schools, released this week, revealed that 60 percent of teachers polled nationally say they’re “unfairly paid” and half say they’ve “seriously considered leaving the profession in recent years.” Seventy-five percent say schools in their community are “underfunded,” and 55 percent say they don’t want their child to follow them into the profession.

Chatham County’s public school teachers don’t really reflect those national statistics. The 2018 N.C. Teacher Working Conditions Survey revealed that 91.4 percent of Chatham public school teachers feel their school “is a good place to work and learn” and 93.1 percent say “the community we serve is supportive of this school.” But the county, Jordan said, is “continuing to combat the issue of trying to hire (and) identify quality teachers.”

“The number of people entering the education profession is continuing to decrease,” he said. “We’re hoping that we will turn that tide around.”

This first day, for Jordan at least, was about helping pump those teachers up, to get them ready for the new year. “Happy Day One,” he would tell many, one of 180 scheduled school days. While he visited music classrooms, art classrooms, Exceptional Children’s classrooms, middle school and high school classrooms, the message and the motivation for him was the same.

“The young people really are the reason why I’m able to get through it,” Jordan said. “It’s amazing to me that, at the time when you feel the lowest, when you engage with young people, they tend to uplift. You hear things from kids that you just wouldn’t expect. They say something funny, they say something deep, they remind you that all is not bad, and, quite frankly, they also give you some sad stories that remind you of the need to stay the course and make sure that you’re there hoping to remove obstacles for them.”

He acknowledged that, of course, educators should be saying something like that, but the ones who believe it are the “real educators,” and that’s why he deals with the parents who complain about school cancellation due to weather, changes from the state level, the things he doesn’t like.

He believes his students are worth it.

“We do have some phenomenal students, even with the challenges they bring to the table,” Jordan said. “I tell our folks that, for some of our kids, we represent their greatest hope for success once they leave so. We need to treat them all like that.”

Reporter Zachary Horner can be reached at zhorner@chathamnr.com or on Twitter at @ZachHornerCNR.