Departing Clark County superintendent: ‘My mother needs my full attention’
Superintendent Dwight Jones doesn’t want to leave the Clark County School District hanging.
That’s why he’s resigning as head of the nation’s fifth-largest district instead of taking a leave of absence to care for his ailing mother in Texas, Jones said Wednesday.
“No other factors” contributed to his departure, said Jones, who abruptly announced his resignation late Tuesday.
“Right now, my mother needs my full attention,” he said.
Jones is ending his brief two-year tenure with two weeks’ notice, well short of the 90 days required by his contract. His last day will be March 22. After that, he plans to go to Dallas to care for his mother for two to three months.
His contract does allow him to take a leave of absence in cases of family illness, but Jones said he doesn’t want to keep the district waiting for his return.
An interim superintendent, yet to be named, will have to step into the vacancy created by Jones’ departure as the School Board gears up to conduct a superintendent search, a process that generally takes months.
Word of Jones’ decision prompted prominent Nevadans to issue statements of support.
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., even hinted at a contributing factor in Jones’ departure.
“It is unfortunate that Nevada continues to lose leaders of Dwight’s caliber because of lack of support,” Reid said in a statement Wednesday.
Having seen through just one complete school year, reformist Jones is the shortest-tenured superintendent the district has had in decades. Since his first official day of work in December 2010, the former Colorado education commissioner has been buffeted by the district’s financial shortfalls, which caused constant battles with the teachers union over salaries.
A failed attempt by the district to freeze teacher salaries in 2011-12 resulted in increased average class sizes of 34 students in primary grades and 38 students in high schools.
Jones’ predecessor, Walt Rulffes, retired in 2009, just shy of six years at the helm. Before Rulffes, Carlos Garcia served five years and resigned. Brian Cram held the position from 1989 to 2000 and then retired. Jones served about half of his four-year contract.
“It’s no secret our relationship has been tenuous at best,” Ruben Murillo, president of the Clark County Education Association, said of Jones while at a Wednesday School Board meeting.
But the “vacuum” left by Jones’ quick departure has Murillo wondering on behalf of teachers with low morale — what’s next?
Most School Board members were told of Jones’ resignation Tuesday night. After not responding to repeated requests for interviews on his departure from the Review-Journal throughout the day, Jones sent a mass email to district employees announcing his decision to leave.
Four of seven School Board members stood behind Jones at the Wednesday news conference and spoke words of praise for the leader hired to implement reforms to improve student performance. Gov. Brian Sandoval and Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman also released statements Wednesday backing Jones.
School Board members Erin Cranor, Linda Young and Chris Garvey were not at the news conference held immediately after a School Board meeting they attended.
“This is not easy,” said Board President Carolyn Edwards, who supported Jones in October 2010 when the board hired him in a 6-1 vote for a $358,000 annual compensation package. “We hoped to have him for at least four years.”
She vowed that the reforms Jones began wouldn’t be shelved but would continue in earnest.
However, just an hour prior, the School Board unanimously decided — at the urging of a majority of its 357 school principals and Jones himself — to no longer rate its schools using the new accountability system that Jones created in his short time here.
Just a year and a half into the rollout of the rating system, which awards one to five stars to schools, the district will have to replace it with a different rating system created by the Nevada Department of Education.
The state system also awards up to five stars to schools, but many Clark County schools stand to lose stars under the state’s more rigorous system.
Jones asserted, “Clark County School District is better than I found it two years ago.”
When asked for his greatest accomplishment, Jones didn’t point to tangible gains made in student performance but focused on his effort to bring the community together to start the conversation on building a better school system.
The School Board will start planning to replace Jones at a March 14 meeting. And board members will decide whether to waive the contract requirement for 90 days’ notice of his resignation.
Contact reporter Trevon Milliard at tmilliard@review journal.com or 702-383-0279.
