Joan Raymond was just six months into a well-earned retirement following 20 demanding years in the superintendency of some of the hottest kitchens in the nation. But when some longtime friends told her about an opening in South Bend, Ind., Raymond couldn’t ignore the itch to give it one more whirl.
She figured, justifiably, her vast accumulation of experiences in such rough-and-tumble urban centers as Yonkers, N.Y., and Houston would be a logical fit with the hardscrabble 21,600-student system in South Bend, a city best known as home to one of the citadels of higher learning, Notre Dame.
But Raymond found the school system in far more desperate need of an overhaul than she’d envisioned when she came on board in fall 2000. The district had nothing resembling a standardized curriculum or staff development plan. Board members—some of whom today freely admit to micromanaging Raymond’s predecessor—were largely oblivious to a brewing budget deficit. Schools in half the district were wildly overcrowded, while other sections had underutilized buildings. “It was like the Titantic sinking to one side,” she says.
And yet, this was the perfect target for the highly demanding, no-nonsense Raymond, who sees South Bend as a coda to an already accomplished career that began as a substitute teacher in her hometown of Chicago in 1957. “She had more in her toolkit than anybody we could have brought in here,” says John Ritzler, the district’s director of research and evaluation and a member of the superintendent’s cabinet.
As she begins her sixth year at South Bend’s helm this fall, Raymond has been the dictionary definition of perseverance, sublimating attacks on her person and property to engineer a wholesale reorientation of a flagging system. Most courageously she directed a redrawing of the boundary lines for South Bend’s 33 schools as part of a long-overdue updating of a two-decade-old federal consent decree for desegregation.
Known locally as Plan Z, it was Raymond’s best and final offer after community groups could not find consensus in redistricting options labeled Plans A, B and C. The superintendent smartly pitched Plan Z as a way to resuscitate student academics by reconfiguring schools as K-4 and 5-8 academies while adding a dose of quality magnet programs that now attract white students to schools in neighborhoods they wouldn’t otherwise consider.
Her tell-it-like-it-is directness, combined with her voice of confidence and know-how, has appealed to outside funders. “When something hasn’t worked, she has not kept doing the same thing expecting different results,” says Susan Warner, who heads the local education foundation.
Last year Raymond secured $5.5 million in federal money to develop a Head Start program on behalf of a small consortium of school districts. It’s one of the few times the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has selected a school district to directly run a Head Start program.
Because the federal award came just a few weeks before the start of the school year, the take-charge superintendent personally dove into the operational details to ensure the hiring of qualified staff and suitable early learning sites were in place.
Kim Barnbrook, a first-year school board member, says Raymond’s hands-on style has helped to rebuild public confidence. “She runs this corporation like a tight ship.”
Yet with just a third of South Bend’s schools attaining adequate yearly progress under NCLB this year, Raymond knows her toughest campaign now is to counsel the public on patience. “Few understand how long it takes change in the classroom to make a difference,” she says.
Raymond, who will turn 70 in February, hopes to stay on board long enough to reap the fruits of her labor. South Bend’s school board president and a 12-year member of the board, Marcia Hummel, admits her “biggest nightmare” is the superintendent’s next and probably last retirement announcement.
“To this day, I don’t understand why she was willing to take this task. But she did,” Hummel says, “and I thank God everyday for her doing so.”
Jay Goldman is editor of The School Administrator. E-mail: jgoldman@aasa.org
BIO STATS:
Joan Raymond
Currently:
superintendent, South Bend, Ind.
Previously:
superintendent, Elmhurst, Ill.
Age:
69
Greatest influence on professional career:
During my tenure in the Chicago Public Schools as a teacher and administrator, one individual, Eileen Stack, served as a mentor long before most of us knew what a mentor really was. Although she is deceased, I still follow her advice because she had the best administrative mind.
Best professional day:
The most recent and perhaps the most vivid was the approval by a U.S. district court of the reorganization plan for the South Bend system. It was a work of love and professional dedication by staff, the board and community. It will probably stand as the culminating achievement of my career.
Books at bedside:
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini; The Essential Ronald Reagan by Lee Edwards; Romances with Schools by John Goodlad; Split Second by David Baldocci and The South Beach Diet by Arthur Agatston.
Biggest blooper:
At the beginning of my career, as I finished my first interview for a superintendency in the Midwest, I rose from the table with as much dignity as I could muster to say thank you to a room full of community leaders and school officials for their attention. I turned around and abruptly walked into the closet. After pausing for a moment, I reopened the door and said, “That was so you would remember me!” I didn’t get the job.
A key reason why I’m an AASA member:
I have been a member of AASA for more than three decades because it is a supportive professional organization with unlimited networking opportunities and a source for continued professional growth.
