Kevin Maxwell, 56, superintendent for Anne Arundel County Public Schools since June 2006, spent 22 years as a teacher, principal and chief educational administrator in Prince George?s County Public Schools.
He was also principal of Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda for four years and became one of six community superintendents for Montgomery County Public Schools in 2004.
Maxwell, a native of Fort Belvoir, Va., received his bachelor?s and master?s degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park, and his doctorate in philosophy, language literacy and culture from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
You were very critical of County Executive John R. Leopold and how he underfunded the school board?s budget requests. What are your impressions of the recent actions from the County Council that would restore much of your requests like special education teachers and fully funding teacher contracts?
The council engaged with us in a very collaborative process that ultimately helped the children of this county greatly. This is a tight budget year, and no one got everything they asked for. But our school system is in a far better position now than it was when the county executive proposed his budget on May 1. We will take the funding allocated to us by the council and make the reductions we have to make and continue to move our school system forward.
How is the school system retaining the highest-quality teachers?
Starting salaries of teachers is very important, and keeping your commitment to negotiated agreements is really important.
We?ve got a number of professional development schools in our school district. By having these schools, we get teachers into our schools while they?re in training. And by working in our schools and seeing the benefits, challenges and opportunities of our schools, they?re better informed when it?s time to make a [career] decision. And we?re better informed because we?re seeing someone in a real-life situation with an opportunity to make a difference in children?s lives.
Many of these teachers say they?re paid for a 37 1/2-hour workweek, but the teachers union said the actual workload is more like 58 hours a week. Why the burden?
When you look at the working conditions of our teachers, they?re not substantially different than the working conditions of teachers in other jurisdictions. I don?t believe we?re asking a whole lot more of our teachers than teachers are being asked in Howard County or Prince George?s County or Montgomery County.
Second, we have met with a group of teachers from the [Teachers Association of Anne Arundel County], and we have a list from them suggesting ways we might help with the workload issue and we?re examining that. But some of it also comes down to finances. There are decisions that have to made when you have a certain size pot of money you have to deal with. And you can either give people pay raises, or you can hire more people so you can have more hands to do the work. And by paying your employees more, you reduce your ability to buy more employees. You can?t have both things in the fiscal climate we?re sitting in.
Last year there were 209 student suspensions for physical attacks on teachers. What?s being done to prevent this, and what exactly were these incidents?
It?s a great question. About 137 of those 209 noted in your article (click here for the “Teachers Under Siege” series of articles) were by elementary school children ? some of them in prekindergarten and kindergarten. And it?s important to understand kids that little are not fully acculturated to school ? in some cases don?t know how to interact in that situation. If you have a kid who?s never been in school before, and all of a sudden you put him in a roomful of 15 kids, sitting there in a nice little straight row might be something they?ve never done before. And anybody who has had kids ? scratching and kicking and biting and roughhousing and stuff like that are some of the behaviors you see at times with kids. I?ve seen my own sons and daughters going at each other pretty well. I wouldn?t call it a violent thing.
There used to be a category in elementary schools called “inappropriate physical contact” that differentiated between contact with an adult [in a nonviolent way] that was eliminated from our coding in an attempt to align it with some of the coding requirements from the state. When that was eliminated, the assault reporting went up. Part of this is a reporting issue. We?re not talking about physically huge high school kids in all these cases.
But we take this seriously. We don?t want our teachers assaulted at all. If they?re really attacking a teacher, that should be an expulsion request, and we should be doing what we can with the authorities.
Last year, 10.9 percent of students were suspended, just over the state average of 10.7 percent. Are you satisfied with the level of safety in your schools?
It?s a mistake first of all to make the equation that all suspensions are related to safety. Some behaviors you suspend kids for are not necessarily safety-related. This county has aggressively moved toward trying to encourage more positive behaviors. We?ve got a really strong and growing PBIS program [Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support, a process thatfocuses on improving a school?s ability to teach and support positive behavior for all students]. Where we?ve implemented them, they?ve really reduced disciplinary incidents a lot.
I guess I?d say we?re not satisfied because we want to reduce the time that kids are out of class, and we want to reduce the amount of time that teachers are taken away from teaching and learning opportunities. The more time we can focus teachers on what they need to do to teach, then the more time we can focus on all our kids learning and the better off we are. We don?t want to have disproportionate numbers of any student group being disciplined, being suspended, having referrals or being out of class. Lost class time is lost learning time.
In March, Chesapeake Science Point Public Charter School violated a rule after police arrived at the school to investigate a student?s claim that he would bring an Uzi to school to kill everybody. The school never reported the incident to the school system?s security office as it was required to. As superintendent, does it concern you?
Yes, it does. As a charter school, they?re still a public school. It?s called a public charter school. They?re not a private school. They are a public charter school and part of the Anne Arundel County Public School System. And they have to follow the same policies and procedures as everybody else does. By not reporting things, not consulting with central office about issues and concerns, [they don?t get] the support that we can offer them. It?s part of what we?re here for. We?re here to support all of our public school principals and our communities.
Did you ever receive a satisfactory response why the school failed to report the incident?
I wouldn?t characterize it as a satisfactory response. It?s what you?re supposed to do. It wasn?t done. I don?t think there is a good reason why you don?t do what it isyou?re supposed to do.
