Anne Arundel County has narrowed the field of candidates for schools chief to a sought-after retired state superintendent, the head of a suburban Philadelphia school district and a Montgomery County assistant superintendent.
The finalists ? Robert Schiller, Dana Bedden and Kevin Maxwell ? will visit the county next week for in-person interviews with school officials, community groups and parents.
Bedden currently heads up the 5,500-student William Penn District in suburban Philadelphia. He has also worked as a school principal in Washington, and a subschool principal in Fairfax, Va. Maxwell serves as the community superintendent in Montgomery County responsible for several middle and high schools in the Clarksburg, Damascus and Gaithersburg areas.
Schiller last worked as Illinois state superintendent until Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich seized control over state School Board appointments and ousted the superintendent. Before Illinois, Schiller spent a year as interim chief of Baltimore City Schools in 1997-98.
In addition to brief stints as a local superintendent in New Jersey and state schools chief in Michigan, Schiller has also been a finalist for positions in Fairfax County, Ohio, Delaware and Orleans Parish, La. Local school activists said they were anxious to meet the finalists to discuss some of the current challenges facing the district.
“Morale is on the improvement side, and we want to make sure that continues,” said Sheila Finlayson,president of the Teachers Association of Anne Arundel County. “We want someone we can work with.”
Previous superintendents have had rocky relations at times with the District?s teachers unions and School Board members. Anne Arundel?s immediate past superintendent, Eric Smith, resigned suddenly last fall after what some said were ongoing disagreements with the board.
Carl Stokes, who served on the Baltimore City School Board that hired Schiller, said he was popular politically despite being hired to make some of the hard decisions.
