By Adam Pagnucco.
In an article in Harvard University’s Education Next publication, former MCPS Superintendent Jack Smith reflects on his COVID policies during the pandemic. While the article is about recent superintendent turnover across the country, Smith’s comments on MCPS have drawn attention in Montgomery County.
The article begins with an account of Smith’s decision to leave MCPS, noting that his wife had been living in Maine for “more than a year and a half” to help care for their grandson. After discussing the broader issue of superintendent turnover, the article contains these comments by Smith about the COVID crisis.
As for Smith, the now-retired Montgomery County superintendent had been running the nation’s 14th-largest school district, with more than 160,000 students. He had planned to stick around for eight years or so—the previous January, Montgomery County’s school board had voted unanimously to renew his contract for another four years, putting him on a path to remain through June 2024.
“But you know, this is just how life happens,” he said in an interview.
In nearly the same breath, however, Smith said, in so many words, that the decision was easy. The last year-and-a-half or so of his superintendency, from March 2020 until his retirement in June 2021, was “among the most challenging of my 41 years in education—by far.”
He summed up the reaction to Covid—from educators, lawmakers, community leaders, unions, health officials, and parents—in a three-word phrase that says it all: “Too much noise.”
In his retirement, he has been reunited with his wife. They live a quiet life in Standish, Maine. Their grandson is recovering nicely. Looking back over the past two years, Smith said virtually everyone with hands on schools—superintendents, boards, unions, local and state leaders, health authorities, and even the federal government—misjudged the Covid crisis.
“The governors and the state superintendents were quick to shut down schools,” he said, “but then they didn’t open schools.”
Teachers unions, for their part, came off as out-of-touch when talking about the dangers Covid posed to educators. He recalled emails from teachers afraid to re-enter buildings during the pandemic, one of which told him, “My blood will be on your hands.”
“I heard it over and over and over,” Smith said. “Well, that was really tone-deaf to the police departments, the people who worked in the food industries, the people who kept the school moving, the people in the Post Office, the people who kept all of the essential services, all the medical people, moving. Because then they would write to me and say, ‘How dare you keep the schools closed for your staff when we’re out here on the front lines?’ That just was really, truly a disaster for superintendents across the country trying to navigate that.”
MCPS’s COVID policies were controversial among both parents and school system employees. These remarks will be sure to provoke strong reactions among both groups.