Portland Public Schools superintendent Carole Smith is stepping down at the end of next school year. The move follows continued public pressure after lead was discovered in drinking water at two schools.
“I’ve affirmed to the board my intent to retire at the end of my contract, which is 2017,” Smith said.
Smith sent a letter to the district announcing the move late Tuesday afternoon.
Smith says she had not been planning to seek a new contract, but says making the announcement now helps the school board plan. It may also reduce mounting pressure against Smith, as parents have raged over how the district handled the discovery of lead in school drinking water.
There’s still an internal review going on, but board chair Tom Koehler expects Smith to serve out the school year.
“We certainly live in a culture where, when things happen, it seems like it’s popular to call for the beheading of people in public institutions, and I don’t subscribe to that,” Koehler said.
Koehler says the board will look into improving how upper management is organized, as it starts looking for a new superintendent.
From the earliest days of her career, Smith was focused on bringing equity to the public schools.
She grew up in Portland and Beaverton, and after earning a master’s degree in education from Harvard, she started teaching in Boston in the midst of desegregation. Smith returned to Portland in 1982 to run Open Meadow, a private, nonprofit alternative school that grew from 30 to more than 700 students during her time.
Related: Lead In The Water
Then-Superintendent Vicki Phillips hired Smith at PPS in 2005, and she quickly rose from running the district’s alternative schools to serving as Phillips’ chief of staff. When Phillips left to work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2007, the school board picked Smith to replace her.
The contrast between Smith and the woman she replaced was stark. Phillips, smart and stern, made tough choices, including shuttering eight schools, establishing a common, districtwide curriculum and shifting to a K-8 model.
Phillips left behind a very different school district — and a lot of bruised feelings. Smith was warmer, gentler and far more interested in building citywide consensus — even if it meant delaying change — on topics such as high school districting and how to ensure high school students receive the state-mandated amount of instructional time.
Under Smith’s tenure, PPS passed a $482 million construction bond. Graduation rates improved, particularly among the more vulnerable populations and long under-served demographic groups. And the performance gap between white students and students of color has narrowed. She served as superintendent of Oregon’s largest district for almost a decade — three times the national average for urban school systems.
But at the moment, she leads a district in crisis: PPS leaders planned to ask voters to pass another construction bond this fall that would help bring high schools into the 21st century. Instead, they’re struggling to reassure parents that the district’s 78 schools are safe, and they are looking at asking voters to approve a bond measure that may be as much about basic health as big ambitions for the district’s future.