Who will be Philly’s next superintendent? Announcement will be made Friday.
The school board is scheduled to introduce the new Philadelphia School District superintendent at 9:30 a.m.
Philadelphia has a new schools chief — but the identity of the next superintendent won’t be publicly revealed until Friday morning.
The school board is scheduled to introduce the new Philadelphia School District leader at a news conference at its North Broad Street headquarters at 9:30 a.m.
Members of the board, Mayor Jim Kenney, the appointee, and other city officials will be on hand.
Three finalists were in contention for the position: John Davis, Baltimore’s chief of schools; Krish Mohip, deputy education officer for the Illinois Board of Education; and Tony B. Watlington Sr., superintendent of the Rowan-Salisbury School District in North Carolina.
The new superintendent will replace William R. Hite Jr., who has spent a decade as Philadelphia’s schools chief and is leaving to become CEO of KnowledgeWorks, an education nonprofit, and to lead a program for superintendents at Yale University.
After a series of public sessions with each candidate, Watlington emerged as the front-runner, lauded for his emphasis on instruction and equity, and for the rapport he quickly built with students, teachers, and parents during a day of meetings in Philadelphia.
Should he be chosen as Philadelphia’s superintendent, Watlington would lead a $3.9 billion organization with 120,000 students in traditional public schools and 67,000 in charter schools. His current school district enrolls fewer than 20,000 students, and Watlington has only ever worked in North Carolina, a right-to-work state — a sharp contrast to Philadelphia with five separate school workers’ unions.