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Principal seeks reconciliation

Thurgood Marshall Elementary’s embattled leader listens, responds to critics

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Dan Gross⁄The Gazette Thurgood Marshall principal Mary Wilson sits with first-graders Dyneshia Tindal, Ava Corral, Sara Levene, Vincent Morris.

‘‘In corporate America, they just get to the bottom line. And for us, student achievement is the bottom line,” she says. ‘‘And so we want to do everything we can to be sure our students are achieving everything they can.”

A strong believer in ‘‘participatory management” and ‘‘shared decision making,” hers is a leadership style she admits may rub some people the wrong way.

‘‘Sometimes people think that the principal should just be the person to tell people what to do,” says Wilson, now in her eighth year as principal. ‘‘But I don’t believe that, I don’t believe in that at all. What I do is try to build leadership capacity with the people who are here.”

Wilson’s leadership, however, has come under scrutiny from parents and the county school system.

Concerns that have been stewing throughout the year among frustrated parents — one of them the immediate former president of the school’s PTA, who stepped down earlier this month — came to a head at several public forums and through a petition drive that garnered more than 300 signatures to find ‘‘new and effective” leadership for the 572-student school in Gaithersburg.

At the latest meeting, Thursday night, parents stood one by one at the podium to raise their concerns about bullying, teacher turnover rates, school communication toward parents — some of them emotional, some of them directed at Wilson.

The principal sat and listened.

Education, career Bachelor’s in education from California State University – Los Angeles Master’s in early childhood education from Pepperdine University Master’s from California State University – Los Angeles in school administration Moved to Montgomery County in 1987 Taught 4th grade at Wayside for four years Assistant principal at Strawberry Knoll, one year Assistant principal at Sally Ride, one year Principal Internship at Bells Mill Principal at Oak View, two years Principal at Thurgood Marshall since 1998

There were supporters. With a decade’s experience teaching at Thurgood Marshall, kindergarten teacher Marlynn Goren thinks Wilson’s leadership style works just fine.

‘‘To me, a well-run school is when a principal sort of steps back and the teachers can get the job done without someone whipping out the old ball and chain. I think she’s done that,” Goren said in an interview this week. ‘‘She’s implemented her own programs, what the county has wanted, and gives us the training. Then she steps back to let us do those things.”

The first step in getting the school back to the business of academic achievement, says Wilson, is dialogue.

She is planning another meeting to give parents her response, hopefully by the end of the month.

‘‘That to me is the important piece,” she said in an interview Monday, at which her husband Clint Wilson, a journalism professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C., sat in.

‘‘The rumor mill can be very dangerous, so they need some clarifications and I want to give them that. I want to give them some data, I want to give them some background information so that they know the parameters in which we have to work.”

The school already has a principal advisory council and a school improvement team set up.

There are also the monthly ‘‘Principal’s Coffees,” the school newsletter, even a suggestion box outside the office.

‘‘So we have avenues for having concerns addressed,” she said. ‘‘I want parents to feel comfortable utilizing those. I want to really try to reassure them that there are systems in place where they can have their concerns addressed.”

Now that the concerns have been aired, Lisa Torvick, the new PTA president, wants to focus on getting the school community out from the morass.

‘‘There are two sides of everything. In my position, I don’t have the luxury of agreeing with either.”

But of one thing Torvick is more sure: ‘‘The kids love her,” she said. ‘‘My daughter was incredibly angry with me that I didn’t win lunch with Mrs. Wilson. She greets each child every day with hugs and a smile.”

At a school that averages more than 1,000 parent-volunteer hours a month and has consistently scored well above targets on state math and reading assessments since Wilson became principal, Torvick remains optimistic that the school will be able to work through its problems.

And though careful not to choose sides, she does want to see substantive change from Wilson.

‘‘If she’s going to stay on as principal, we need to see better communication, we need to see an anti-bullying program.”

Along those lines, Wilson and eight teachers have enrolled in a behavior-management training course that begins at the end of June. She and the eight teachers will then train the rest of the school staff.

Wilson is also working with a few teachers to set up a ‘‘discipline committee” to track how often and for what students are sent to the office for, to then create a database for better recordkeeping.

‘‘These are things we want to do so we can systematize the discipline school wide so that everybody’s doing everything exactly the same way,” Wilson says.

Wilson does not see the recent uproar as having done irreparable damage to the school’s sense of community, and with continued and open dialogue, believes parents and school administrators can come together to address the school’s issues in a ‘‘proactive and productive manner.”

‘‘Thurgood Marshall is a good school academically and socially despite what has been coming out... We, certainly, like all schools, have our share of children who have challenging behaviors. But we are working within the guidelines of the system in Montgomery County to address the concerns that we have for our children.”