After a national superintendent search, Anne Arundel County School Board members chose the close-to-home candidate Wednesday afternoon.
Montgomery County Community Superintendent Kevin Maxwell was chosen to be the next superintendent of Anne Arundel County Schools out of a field of 20 candidates.
He visited the district last week along with the two other finalists ? Robert Schiller, former Illinois State Superintendent, and Dana Bedden, superintendent of the William Penn School District in suburban Philadelphia.
“My impression from meeting the staff members and the parents and the students is that it?s really clear they share the same passion for education that I do,” he said. “We want the students to have a really high-quality education in the classroom.”
Maxwell, 54, is a 22-year veteran of Prince George?s and Montgomery County schools. As community superintendent in Montgomery, Maxwell was responsible for five school clusters encompassing about 27,000 students in Clarksburg, Damascus, Gaithersburg, Magruder and Watkins Mills.
He said his interest in teaching was sparked while in college at the University of Maryland, College Park when he worked with a church youth group.
“And I still enjoy it as much now as I did the first day,” Maxwell said. He will relieve Interim Superintendent Nancy Mann who stepped into the position last fall after Superintendent Eric Smith suddenly resigned. The School Board must hire a superintendent by July 1, the start of the next fiscal year.
Maxwell will inherit a sea of controversial issues, including the possibility of redistricting to relieve overcrowding in some schools, a minority achievement gap, hiring new teachers and tensions between parents and school administrators.
“The first thing that has to be done is to understand and really learn everybody?s viewpoint,” he said. “I need to meet people and they need to meet me.”
