According to the terms of a contract negotiated over the last several weeks, Howe will take over from interim Superintendent David Paciencia on February 2, 2009. The district, which faces numerous challenges including a $35-million construction project, a Middle School in state-mandated “corrective action,” and an impending budget crisis, has retained Paciencia as a consultant to help Howe with the transition. 

The school board, which includes this writer, had several executive session meetings in the last month, finalizing the details of the agreement, which pays Howe a $135,000 annual salary, and voted 6 to 0 (with board member Jeff Otty unable to attend) to hire Howe at Monday’s 12-minute meeting. 

Howe takes over a small and struggling kindergarten through high school district with a budget of nearly $40 million per year, 400 employees (almost 200 of them teachers), four school buildings, and a fast-declining enrollment—down from more than 2,400 students just ten years ago.

He also inherits a district in administrative disarray: with five different superintendents in just the last eight years, HCSD is the Peru of school districts. According to many observers, the district has been in a leadership vacuum since Neil Howard retired at the end of 1995, after presiding over the district for more than twenty years.

The last fifteen years have been marked by continuous change and upheaval for the tiny district, including:

• A contentious “consolidation” in the early '90s, which forced small town (and relatively “autonomous”) elementary schools in Claverack and Greenport to merge with Hudson in order to avoid civil rights penalties (the district’s minority enrollment is 25 percent, with most of the African American students living in Hudson);
• New laws which forced a public vote for construction projects, which left the district holding a $1 million set of blueprints, approved by the school board just before the laws changed, but no approval from the taxpayers to move forward;
• New state testing requirements which revealed, for the first time, a huge “achievement gap” between black and white students;
• New federal academic achievement mandates (the infamous No Child Left Behind law) that showed all Hudson students well below par in English and math;
• Reporting requirements that showed Hudson to have a high number of Special Education students (double the state average);
• The awarding of a charter by the State Education Department to a local group, composed mostly of African Americans, to establish a charter school;
• A State Education Department investigation (the so-called “Baldwin Report”) that revealed serious leadership problems in the district;
• A State Comptroller’s audit which found improprieties of sufficient seriousness that it referred them to the District Attorney for possible criminal prosecution.

Such fast-paced and significant alterations in education policy and practice created enormous challenges for the tiny district. Add to this mix a decaying local economy, which drained the City of Hudson of an active middle class—a mainstay of successful school districts—and a more muscular state education department, including the rise of the regional Board of Cooperative Education Services (BOCES)—well, you have a recipe for educational chaos.

While such an unruly educational environment demanded strong leadership, the school board, composed of seven community members elected by voters in the district—a district which now includes the communities of Hudson, Greenport, and parts of Claverack, Livingston, and Stockport—instead drifted with the tides. Thus, in the eyes of some, including this writer, there has been a serious leadership vacuum. Most notably, the board had been unable to find a superintendent who could weather the storm. 

The district’s last permanent superintendent, Fern Aefsky, stayed only eighteen months, resigning abruptly last May to take a job in the Beacon School District. Aefsky, as with several recent superintendents, was selected in a process highly influenced by BOCES. The agency had just completed a state-ordered investigation of education practices in Hudson and was at the apex of its hold over the district. Despite a lengthy superintendent search process, which included a large citizens' committee to review candidate qualifications and conduct interviews, the HCSD board ignored the committee’s recommendations and, on the recommendation of BOCES, hired Aefsky, a special education administrator from Poughkeepsie with no experience as a superintendent and whose application the committee never saw.

The search process initiated in the wake of Aefsky’s departure severely limited BOCES input. The board, thanks to the influence of new board members Emil Meister, Jeff Otty, and yours truly, further gathered authority by deciding against a community search committee. The board has the ultimate authority, was our argument, so the board must decide—must be engaged in the process. Instead of a community committee, the board instead conducted a series of “stakeholder forums,” and posted a survey on its web site, inviting people to tell the board what they wanted in a superintendent.