As new Wake school superintendent is sworn in, he promises to listen to the community
New Wake County Superintendent Robert Taylor laid out a 100-day plan on Friday to learn more about the school district, including holding community meetings to hear about what is going right and wrong.
Taylor was sworn into office on Friday before he officially takes leadership of North Carolina’s largest school district. He’ll oversee a district that is still recovering from pandemic learning losses while also dealing with challenges from growth, staffing and political culture wars.
Taylor, 56, has 30 years of education experience in North Carolina, including 10 years as superintendent of Bladen County Schools and two years as a deputy state superintendent. None of his educational time was in the Wake County school system until now.
“The reassurance that I want to give everybody in this community is my job is not to come in and begin knocking walls down,” Taylor said in an interview Friday with The News & Observer. “It really is to evaluate the work that is taking place. It would be different if I had worked in Wake County my whole life.”
Taylor was chosen by the school board in July from a field of 28 applicants to replace Catty Moore, who retired at the end of June after five years as superintendent. Randy Bridges has been serving as interim superintendent since then.
Taylor was hired on a four-year contract and will earn an annual salary of $326,993.
Superintendent’s 100-day plan
Before the swearing-in ceremony, Taylor sat down with The N&O to talk about becoming Wake’s new schools chief.
Taylor said his 100-day entry plan includes multiple goals:
▪ Connect with the community through forums that will include teachers, administrators and community members. Taylor said he wants to hear firsthand what people say Wake is doing well and where the school system needs to improve.
▪ Put together a transition team to help Taylor focus on the right things.
▪ Evaluate Wake’s fiscal health and operations pieces. This includes Wake’s 36% bus driver vacancy rate, the adoption of the new student assignment plan and why HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) problems have caused so many schools to send students home early or close for the day.
▪ Look at Wake’s academic structure to see how it can do a better job of educating students.
This time period will also include talking with former Superintendent Moore. Taylor said he needs to be out in the community as the spokesperson for the school board’s new strategic plan.
“Our work is about teaching and learning, but we can’t do that if management things and logistical things stand in the way,” Taylor said in the interview. “So what we want to do is to make sure that when we’re at this point next year that all of those issues that are still in the way, they are not there.”
Focus on ‘instructional greatness’
After being sworn in, Taylor laid out his mission as superintendent of the nation’s 15th largest school district. Wake has more than 161,000 students and an annual operating budget of more than $2 billion.
“My focus will be about instructional greatness,” Taylor said during a speech at Friday’s ceremony. “That’s the one thing that grounds me as a teacher.”
Taylor said the district must educate every single child to make sure they can access the curriculum. Wake made academic gains last school year but is still performing below pre-pandemic levels.
Taylor said he also wants to help educators become “great teachers” and make Wake a flagship district in the nation in how to provide an education for a growing and diverse community.
The new superintendent emphasized the need to hear from the community.
“I know tons about education,” Taylor said. “I know tons about how we educate children. But there’s tons I need to learn about this community, and I know that with your help you’re going to help me meet those goals.”
Mississippi confirmation controversy
Taylor was only available to take the Wake position after Mississippi’s Republican-led Senate voted in March not to confirm him as that state’s superintendent of education.
The vote drew cries from some Democrats who said the Senate rejected Taylor at least partially because he is Black and had written about the state’s racist history, according to the Associated Press.
Questions had been raised about a 2020 article where Taylor, talking about his undergraduate days writing for the University of Southern Mississippi’s Black student newsletter, said Mississippi was “the most racist state in the Union.”
Taylor said his statements have to be viewed in context, including how they represented what he felt 35 years ago as a young college student who grew up in Mississippi. Taylor said his views have broadened since then.
But Taylor said his statements became fodder for politicians running for office.
Taylor has Republican supporters, such as North Carolina State Superintendent Catherine Truitt, who spoke at Friday’s ceremony. Truitt had hired Taylor in 2021 to become a deputy state superintendent.
Truitt said that Taylor’s comments about instructional greatness show why Wake hired him. Truitt said she’s excited that Taylor’s signature will be on her daughter’s high school diploma.
“You know that this is about students and you know how to put students first,” Truitt said of Taylor. “I am very excited that this new era has begun.”
Taylor said he doesn’t consider the Wake position to be a consolation prize. Instead he considers it be divine intervention leading a district with 161,000 students and a $2 billion annual budget.
“Wake County has always been one of the flagship districts in North Carolina,” Taylor said in the interview. “I think we’re uniquely positioned to be the national model of how you provide education for kids across the spectrum.”
Voucher expansion and Parents’ Bill of Rights
Wake and Taylor will face some challenges from the state, including implementing the new “Parents’ Bill of Rights” law. The law’s many requirements include new restrictions on discussion of LGBTQ topics in elementary schools and a requirement that parents be notified if their child wants to change their name or pronouns in school.
Wake’s “first responsibility is to follow the law,” according to Taylor.
“Our job is not to agree or disagree with what the General Assembly puts out,” Taylor said in the interview. “If we feel that something does not properly reflect the work that we do, then that’s what we want to have conversations with the GA about.
“When you begin to craft laws, allow us to be at the table to help you craft something that’s going to be workable, that meets the needs of both parents and the school district.”
Wake will also have to deal with the new state budget’s expansion of the Opportunity Scholarship program. The budget both increases state funding for private school vouchers and opens up eligibility for vouchers to any family regardless of their income.
Voucher expansion will transfer dollars from public schools to private schools, Taylor said. He said it could particularly decimate school districts in smaller counties.
But Taylor said charter schools, private schools and homeschooling aren’t going away.
“We have what I call a culture of choice, meaning that parents now have more choices than they’ve ever had as it relates to the education of our children,” Taylor said. “So it’s not our job to agree or disagree with the choices that are created. Our job is to put the best product on the table and hope that parents choose us.”
This story was originally published September 29, 2023 at 1:00 PM with the headline "As new Wake school superintendent is sworn in, he promises to listen to the community."
