The hiring of Dr. Bryan Johnson to be the superintendent of Hamilton County Schools won’t turn around one test score. It won’t settle one lawsuit. It won’t prepare one student for higher education or the workforce.
What it will do, we hope, is signal a new day for the district’s 43,000-plus students, a day in which the we’ve-always-done-it-this-way approach is swept away, a day in which ineffective programs are scrapped, a day in which every dollar is accounted for, a day in which transparency and openness become administration hallmarks.
Those items are in the purview of Johnson, and if he attends to those we believe the district in time can surge.
The current chief academic officer of Clarksville-Montgomery County Schools was elected superintendent by the Hamilton County Board of Education Thursday night in a 5-4 vote over interim Superintendent Dr. Kirk Kelly.
As we have often said, Kelly is a kind and gracious man but not the leader we believe is necessary to lead the district at this critical time. Before becoming interim superintendent 14 months ago in a controversial vote, he had been an assistant superintendent only a year and before that had been the district’s director of accountability and testing.