The Montgomery County school board hired the schools chief of a small, diverse school system in Connecticut to replace retiring Superintendent Jerry Weast. Joshua Starr is the superintendent in Stamford, Conn., a public school system with 20 schools and 15,000 students –roughly one-tenth the size of Montgomery County Public Schools.
“When you’re in this business you want to be with the best, and in many ways Montgomery has been on the forefront,” Starr said in a conference call Monday evening.
Starr has been at Stamford for six years and was director of school performance and accountability for the New York City Department of Education before that. He also has been a school administrator in Plainfield, N.J., and Freeport, N.Y., and began his career as a special education teacher in New York City Public Schools.
Tom Jones, whose daughter attends Bethesda’s Walter Johnson High School, and who interviewed Starr as part of a community committee, was excited about Starr’s background in special education.
“I think he has a commitment to it, so I look forward to the opportunity to be involved with him,” Jones said.
The school board voted unanimously to appoint Starr on Monday evening; the decision is conditional on negotiation of a contract and approval from the state superintendent.
School board member Judith Docca said Starr impressed her during the interview process “because he was very open and forward-thinking, and willing to listen, and we know he is going to be collaborative with our employee organizations.”
Weast, one of the longest-serving superintendents in the country, has had to contend with a changing population as the county became more racially diverse. When he was appointed, more than half of students were white, and just 14 percent were Hispanic. Hispanic students now comprise 23 percent of the student body. Montgomery students come from 164 countries and speak 184 languages.
Starr said his Big Apple experience would help him bridge the gap from Stamford to Montgomery, the 16th-largest school system in the country, and noted that the two districts were similar in their diversity.
“The Stamford demographics are almost the same as the Montgomery County demographics,” Starr said. “I think we have a few more Latinos, and you have a few more Asians.”
Weast, who retires in June after 12 years of managing the 141,722-student school system, achieved mixed results during his tenure. The overall graduation rate has slipped from 91.5 percent to 90 percent. The school system, however, was a 2010 finalist for the Broad Prize in Urban Education, netting $250,000 for progress toward closing the achievement gap between low-income and minority students. [email protected]
