Covington's Moreland to retire

Jack Moreland is hanging it up.

Congratulations, Jack.

As I have acknowledged elsewhere, I am indebted to Moreland; not just for the beer he bought me at a Kentucky Association of School Administrators summer meeting, but also "for his clear interpretation of the events surrounding what will surely be the hallmark of his fine career in public education."

I was referring to his leadership of the Council for Better Education during the darkest days of the superintendents' suit against the state - when the legislative and bureaucratic heat was on - and after its historic conclusion. Jack (and Frank Hatfield, the Council for Better Education's first president) submitted ot interviews and allowed me to scour CBE records as part of my doctoral study. When the study was recognized nationally in the field of education law, the Council published it.

Moreland wishes the district had made more progress on the state assessment, but he will retire with an uncommonly proud legacy. His leadership is notable for its shear impact on public education in Kentucky; an impact few can match.

The none too flattering photo is a few years old.

This by Kevin Eigelbach in the Kentucky Post:

Jack Moreland started his tenure as superintendent of the Covington Independent Schools in 2000 as an interim, with a state takeover of the district looming.

He leaves it a better district than he found it, if not a perfect one, said one of his bosses.

Moreland, who announced Tuesday he plans to retire at the end of this school year, gave the district the stability it needed, longtime school board member Jim Vogt said. "He came in a time of turmoil. There was a real sense of people being down, and people leaving.

"The focus he brought was a positive, we-can-do-it kind of attitude, and I think that was contagious."

Moreland was hired as the interim after then-Superintendent James Kemp resigned under pressure from the board. A year before, the state Department of Education had reported that in spite of the district's high spending, its students continued to score poorly on achievement tests.

Moreland brought instant credibility because of his role as a founding member of the Council for Better Education, a coalition of districts that pushed equitable state funding for with a landmark lawsuit.

Funding is always a challenge for superintendents, Moreland said, because there's never enough to pay personnel what they're worth. The coalition's efforts resulted in the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990, which The New York Times called the most sweeping and ambitious education reform in the 50 states.

"I don't think I'll ever be involved in anything as significant as that was," Moreland said. "I only had a small part to play, but I'm awfully proud of the part I did play."

Moreland, who was superintendent of the Dayton Independent Schools at the time, was the first plaintiff in the lawsuit that prompted the Kentucky Supreme Court in 1989 to declare the state's school funding system unconstitutional.

When 100 Kentucky superintendents reactivated the Council in 2003, they unanimously voted for him to lead them.

The Kentucky Association of School Administrators named Moreland its superintendent of the year that year. This fall, he was inducted into the Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame.

"It's not hurt us that he's very well respected on the state level," Vogt said.

"Just by dint of who he is ... he was able to find ways to build bridges that maybe weren't there before," Vogt said. "I think that's real important for school systems today, that they not exist in isolation."

Moreland led a reform of the district built around realigning curricula, emphasizing basic reading instruction and increasing opportunities for teachers to get more training. From 2000 to 2006, the overall academic index for the district's elementary schools rose from 47.1 to 66.4. For middle schools, it rose from 39.4 to 49.9 and for high schools from 51.5 to 60.

"We haven't made as much progress as we would like to have made," Moreland said. "However, clearly, we have made significant progress." All-day kindergarten and expanded early reading opportunities stand to help the district make further, long-term gains, Moreland said.

A graduate of Eastern Kentucky and Xavier universities, Moreland began his career in education almost four decades ago as a chemistry teacher in the Newport and Dayton systems. He served as superintendent of the Dayton Independent Schools for 19 years, then was interim president of Northern Kentucky University from 1996 to 1997.

He followed that with another interim job - as chancellor of the technical branch of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System for a year.

He has taught as an adjunct instructor in school administration at Xavier, and is teaching the subject this semester at NKU.

His four-year contract with the Covington board ends with this school year, and he decided not to accept another four-year contract. He would have been 65 when it ended.

"I've been a superintendent for 26 years, and I've got bruises all over my body to prove it," Moreland said. "It's been a great run, but it's a taxing job."

Some of those bruises came in verbal battles with former Kentucky Education
Commissioner Gene Wilhoit.

When Moreland asked the Department of Education for help in 2002, the department responded with a financial audit of the district.

He told Wilhoit of his frustrations at a board meeting in January 2003.

Wilhoit told him he was simply doing his duty to see that every school district in the state has a balanced budget.

The state assigned former school superintendent Dan Branham to the Covington schools for 18 months to help the district solve its budget problems.

"Dan, you say you can't cut your way out of a deficit. Well, I say you can't cut your way into excellence, either," Moreland told him at the board meeting.

Some of the district's financial problems stemmed from efforts to turn its academic problems around, such as spending $400,000 to overhaul its curricula and $300,000 for a security camera system to improve safety.

The district ended the 2003-2004 school year in the black, a year ahead of a state-imposed deadline.

Over the years, Moreland had some intense discussions with his board members, but he never left a meeting feeling he didn't have a chance to express his opinion, he said.

"Whenever you have a board of education, there will be five different opinions," he said. "The Covington board ... we would deliberate and have our say, but in the end, we came together in consensus."

The current emphasis on school accountability, with federal mandates such as No Child Left Behind, isn't all bad, Moreland said.

"In the late '60s and early '70s, when I began my career, I think we had allowed a lot of complacency to come into education," he said. "Just getting to the end of the school year was an end in itself."

But the pendulum has swung too far the other way, he said, so that test scores have become ends in themselves. Many good things that happen in schools never get measured on an accountability score, he said.

He has no plans for his retirement, except to indulge in his love of travel with his wife. "I don't have a real hobby I'm thrilled about," he said. "My hobby has always been school."