One can glean plenty from a superintendent’s relationship with the school board president.
Former Bulloch County School Board President David Ball doesn’t have a negative word about Lewis Holloway, new superintendent of Starkville School District.
“I guess about the only thing … he’ll be honest with you,” said Ball, who served as board president for the five years Holloway ran the district. “When a parent does come to see him, if he doesn’t agree with them, he will tell them he doesn’t agree with them. We’ve had other people try to smooth things over, but he’s honest. He tells it like it is. Sometimes that makes people mad, but I think it’s a great quality.”
Holloway’s straightforward nature endeared him to many in the Bulloch County school system and the city of Statesboro, Ga., where his community networking helped the city pass three local option sales tax referendums to finance $150 million worth of school renovations. Holloway helped sell the community on his plan for visual learning designs at its elementary schools. Each of the schools were designed with science-based themes, including fossils and paintings in the lobby and hallways.
“They’re like museums,” said Ball. “You walk in there and kids want to go to school because there’s a tiger on the wall, a blue marlin on the wall. And the great thing is it only cost us $92 a square foot.
“[Holloway] is a great visionary,” Ball added. “What separates him is he can actually complete the task.”
Ball lauded Holloway’s focus on technology, hailing Bulloch’s information technology department and across-the-board technology available to students and faculty as “the best in the state.”
Each classroom is equipped with a SMARTBoard, each teacher has a laptop, and all schools have multiple computer labs, according to a Bulloch County Schools release. Additionally, parents are engaged in the educational process with online tools for home access such as Parent Portal and Compass Odyssey.
“Because of the work he’s started, we are in a better position to make the transition from No Child Left Behind’s assessments to the new national Common Core curriculum standards,” said Dr. Jody Woodrum, Bulloch’s assistant superintendent of teaching and learning for pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. “In the future, student achievement will not be assessed with paper and pencil but with technology. From our available bandwidth to our availability of computers, we are prepared.”
Daryl Fineran, who worked under Holloway for one year as a middle school principal, said Holloway’s management style will be a major asset for Starkville. While Holloway demands a lot out of his principals and faculty, he does it without lurking over their shoulder, Fineran said.
“That’s what makes a good leader,” said Fineran, who is currently a candidate for two superintendent jobs. “The biggest thing I took away from working with Dr. Holloway is how he handled personnel issues — very professional. He knows how to manage people. He just has a knack for getting a large group of people to work together.”
In July 2011, Holloway encountered his toughest personnel issue when news broke of middle school teacher Amy Bass Jackson’s sexual encounters with a 14-year-old student. Holloway didn’t dodge the issue; he confronted it head on. Holloway called other schools that had similar issues and developed a plan to address it, both with stakeholders and with the media.
“I was there for all of the TV interviews, all the people coming up from Savannah,” said Ball. “He handled himself well. He knows how to handle the press. He let every individual ask him one-on-one questions about the whole thing.
“If it were somebody younger, someone not as well-versed as he is, we would have been in a hell of a mess,” said Ball. “Probably in a lawsuit. But we brought it out front.”
Holloway will begin his four-year contract with Starkville on July 1.
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