Last Monday night in the new Northern High School cafeteria, Durham’s new superintendent Dr. Anthony Lewis pitched himself to staff, families, and a handful of students through a “community listening session.”
Backed by a robust resume—Alabama special education teacher-turned principal, assistant superintendent in Kansas City, superintendent in Lawrence, Kansas, and graduate degrees aplenty in education—Lewis has radiated confidence, charisma, and competency in his first three months in the job, a period that he joked about in his opening remarks.
“I’ve done my 90-day trial, right?” he told the crowd of about 100 people in the cavernous cafeteria, which may have been modeled after an aircraft hangar or a brilliantly lighted Costco warehouse. He reminded them that it will take many hands to fix some of the district’s struggles.
“When I meet people, they say, ‘Well, you have your work cut out for you.’ And I quickly correct them and say, ‘No, no, no, we have our work cut out for us.’”
That work will mostly involve cleaning up the mess left to Lewis by the previous administration, which announced a pay increase for classified staff—nurses, cafeteria workers, instructional assistants, maintenance staff and others—in October of 2023. Then, in early 2024, the administration told staff that many raises could not be accommodated by the budget and blamed an “accounting error.”
Through the winter, staff protested through actions that included several “sickouts,” closing down some schools. Former superintendent Pascal Mubenga and former chief financial officer Paul LeSieur both resigned in the wake of the crisis.
At the listening session, Lewis reminded the crowd of his right to alter the district’s strategic plan, the supreme planning document that outlines the priorities of a school system, which, in the 2024-25 fiscal year, accounted for more than a fifth of the county’s overall spending.
“[My] quick assessment over these first three months is that there’s tons of opportunities here in Durham. Now there are some things that are going to take us a year, or two, three to get out of. And frankly, folks, there are some things that I would consider low hanging fruit, or quite frankly some fruit on the ground.”
The event at Northern was the last of seven sessions meant to help the superintendent to gather information before making any major decisions to shape the future of the troubled district. The first exam of the suave leader’s skills is scheduled for January, when he will present his post-entry plan of goals and priorities to the school board that hired him.
The listening sessions were also opportunities for parents and staff to get to know Lewis.
During this month’s session, tables of stakeholders put their heads together to dream of their perfect DPS. And as Lewis moved around the room, he was grabbed by various passionate people with their specific concerns.
At one table, Northern High School parent Laura Guerrette grilled Lewis over issues with the new Northern building, a roughly $90 million endeavor paid for in part by voter approval of a 2016 bond referendum. She told Lewis that most of the athletic fields at the new school are still unusable, which has impacted the sports teams of two of her kids. Guerrette’s concern was particularly timely, as the district is already undertaking another massive project—a new Durham School of the Arts (DSA), the cost of which has already ballooned to about $241 million.
The decision to build a new DSA, which played out just before Lewis’s arrival, was its own source of intense debate as many parents and neighbors tried to keep the historic school in its current downtown location.
But parents at the listening session, including Guerrette, were cautiously optimistic about Lewis.
“He seems engaged,” Guerrette tells INDY. She recognized that he’s only been in the role for three months and still has a lot to learn.
“So now let’s see where it goes. Durham needs somebody that’s going to take a hold of all this, because Durham Public Schools is a mess and everybody knows it.”
Even just at Guerrette’s table of parents and staff, it was apparent that there was appetite for change.
Some parents said that the district doesn’t communicate enough, and they’ve missed important messages about their students. Others said DPS communicates too much, and they can’t sort through all the messages to decide what’s worth paying attention to. Teachers said that the district-provided curriculum was expensive but ineffective and parents, nodding sympathetically, mourned the loss of good old textbooks which are no longer being used.
Among the barrage of constructive criticism, transportation stood out as a key issue for Lewis to address. This year, the district has struggled with a shortage of bus drivers, leaving some students waiting hours for a bus that never arrives.
“Consistently, and I mean almost every day, either the bus doesn’t stop for him, the bus doesn’t show up, or we get a message a bus is two hours late,” Jane Dornemann told the 9th Street Journal in September. “The other issue is that my son is also consistently waiting for the bus downtown for up to two hours,” she added. “He most of the time gets home by six o’clock. His school lets out at 3:20.”
Like most problems in the district, that’s not exactly Lewis’s fault—districts nationwide are dealing with similar shortages—but it is his responsibility to fix.
On that issue at least, Lewis has some social goodwill banked because he has two children in the district who are among the roughly 70 percent of students—totaling 7,000 stops—who ride DPS buses.
He says that the first step is “getting the right people in the seats to get the work done,” referencing the new CFO Jeremy Teetor and COO Larry Webb, both of whom are starting before the year’s end. Lewis has previously mentioned that the district has about 37 drivers currently in the training pipeline, and urged community members to help recruit drivers who either have their CDL license or are interested in being trained.
Other pieces of the city-county government apparatus have tried to alleviate some pressure from the transit crisis.
In a recent joint meeting, county commissioners and board members agreed that driver salary could be more competitive. Board member Natalie Beyer pointed out pay for GoTriangle drivers starts higher, and has a higher cap, than pay for DPS drivers. “We’re at about $19.43 [per hour],” Lewis said at that meeting. “We’re right there close to Wake [County]. But we’re not number one. And we definitely want to be number one.”
And the city’s transportation director, Sean Egan, recently told INDY that the GoDurham lines servicing Northern and Riverside high schools have been doubled in frequency. That same benefit will reach Southern High School in the spring.
At the listening session, trust—or a lack thereof—between staff and administration was also top of mind.
Millie Rosen, a seventh grade math teacher at DSA, said that there have already been several instances this year when staff input could’ve helped administration to flag problems earlier. She pointed to the recent lunch menu revamp, which was a positive change for students but put more pressure on cooks and kitchen staff who were not fully trained or sometimes did not have the proper equipment or ingredients.
“When we go to the school board, the school board members tell us, ‘Oh, just email us if you have issues.’ But that doesn’t suffice,” Rosen says.
Rosen, who sat next to Guerrette during the breakout session, is also the secretary of the Durham Association of Educators (DAE) which was the organizing force behind the staff sickouts. Because of North Carolina law, though, local governments are barred from officially negotiating with public sector employee unions.
Rosen and the DAE believe that best way to get staff feedback is to recognize the staff’s union through the “meet and confer” process, which allows something of a seat at the decisionmaking table without breaking the law.
“When you have a district that is burning to the ground because of state cuts, we need a coordinated effort by the staff to have an organization that can reach the vast majority of staff in a short amount of time, which, right now, is the Durham Association of Educators,” Rosen says.
The board has been reluctant to approve the process, but Rosen says she has “a lot of hope for the new superintendent, because when he worked in Lawrence, he did the exact process that we are trying to get rolling.”
In his first 100 days, Lewis has often spoken about listening to students more. Damien Malone Jr. from Shepard Middle School tells INDY that Lewis should focus on reducing unnecessary testing.
“We have too many tests. Every other Friday we have a [county] test, and that’s a big grade,” says Malone. He also wants Lewis to maintain a focus on diversity in staffing.
And across the system, other student voices have been louder than ever. Last week, students at DSA held a walkout to promote a “Green New Deal for Schools,” with demands for a “climate justice curriculum,” climate disaster plans that utilize school buildings as community-wide recovery zones, and pathways to jobs in climate-related fields.
DPS board chair Millicent Rogers says that the district also needs to include students in conversations about school safety.
“What makes them feel most safe in school? Do they have a trusted adult? Do they feel safe en route to school?” Rogers says. “Letting them lead those conversations is going to be really important. The students know what they need.”
To wrap up the evening, Lewis turned the attention back to some students in the room.
“Oftentimes in education we do things to and for students, but not with them,” he said. In a move sure to win approval from the audience, Lewis handed the mic to Luna, a student at Holt Elementary School, who he had spoken with earlier in his rounds. He held up a list of questions that Luna had written.
“What would you do differently from [former superintendent] Mubenga, and how would you do it?” Luna asked. She also reminded Lewis to occasionally stop by classrooms to ask students themselves what they want out of DPS.
The crowd of adults went wild with applause.
“You tell him, Luna!” shouted one staff member as Lewis smiled proudly.
Lewis told Luna and the crowd that those in charge won’t know what’s best for students if they don’t talk with them and involve them in decision-making.
“Our work will be so much easier if we listen to our students,” Lewis said.
Additional reporting by Justin Laidlaw.
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].
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