Three things you probably don't know about Sandra Dungee Glenn, new boss of the Philadelphia School Reform Commission.
She loves Desperate Housewives.
She is a distant cousin of Super Bowl-winning Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy.
Her nickname used to be "General MacArthur."
An intensely private person, Dungee Glenn would rather serve detention than discuss her personal life. Even longtime acquaintances know very little about the wizard behind the curtain.
"I'm very, very selective about how I share myself," says Dungee Glenn, 50, appointed chairwoman of the embattled commission by Gov. Rendell in August.
"I don't want my private life open for view, debate or commentary," she says. "People can be hurtful and cavalier. . . . It works better to keep it to myself."
Dungee Glenn is all about control. From her physical discipline to her political savvy to her impeccable fashion sense, little is left to chance. Her will could bend steel.
"In my heart of hearts, I'm a benevolent despot," she says with an easy laugh in her spacious office at school district headquarters on North Broad Street.
"If somebody crowned me empress, I'd probably get a lot more things done, and more quickly. I would completely reorganize the bureaucracy. There are probably parts of this building where the lights would go off and never come on again."
Some believe the 170,000-student school district is beyond redemption. It's in beaucoup debt, lacks a permanent chief executive officer, and has more dropouts than a division of paratroopers.
A $2 billion-plus corporation, the district is struggling to offset an estimated $15.5 million shortfall. CEO Paul Vallas - tabbed as "the messiah" when he began in 2002 - left in June for New Orleans.
The commission's goal to find a successor before the end of the year registers a 9.5 on a 10-point pressure scale, says Dungee Glenn, named to the commission by Mayor Street in 2002.
"She'll be judged a lot by who they pick," says Zack Stalberg, president of election watchdog group Committee of Seventy.
And if that doesn't generate enough heartburn for the West Philly native, negotiations begin in January with the 17,500-member Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. Its four-year contract is up Aug. 31.
To City Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown, Dungee Glenn's job "is as big as being mayor, when you look at the size of the budget, the layers of the organization, the different constituencies you're trying to serve.
"Both require masterful strategic thinking."
Lucky thing Dungee Glenn prays a lot. At least twice a day, "sometimes constantly on SRC days." A Baptist, she reads the Bible daily, attends church weekly, and tithes more than 10 percent of her income.
To Dungee Glenn, her new post is a calling.
"I honestly believe this is an assignment I've been given by God," she says. "It's part of God's purpose for my life. I don't think that. I know that."
The five-member reform commission could use some divine intervention. After a year of political infighting, the commission and Vallas were barely on speaking terms when he left.
No worries. Whatever the chaos swirling around her, Dungee Glenn keeps her cool. And it's not because she's a wine connoisseur.
"When things upset me, I take a moment and get myself centered," she says. "That's how I cope. I'm a Virgo, an Earth sign. I want my feet on the ground. I want to know I'm settled.
"Things can go crazy around me, but I'm clear about where I am. Other people can bounce off me and all around me, but I'm OK."
She was the same way at Girls High, according to classmate Anita Thomas, her freshman roommate at Penn State in the late 1970s.
The middle child of a public schoolteacher mother (Girls High Class of '46) and pharmacist father, Dungee Glenn "was the stable, quintessential good girl," says Thomas, head of the Creative Outlet Dance Theater of Brooklyn.
"She was always very responsible. She never got in trouble; never smoked; never gossiped. She treated people fairly and was a good listener."
At Penn State, Dungee Glenn was miserable. "There were very few blacks," she says. "I found it to be a hostile environment."
She changed her major from veterinary medicine to health, planning and administration. And she didn't use a single one of her Nittany Lions season tickets, a gift from her father. "Football games could be rowdy, with a lot of drinking. People weren't always polite."
"Polite" is a major requirement for Democrat Dungee Glenn these days. She must nurture many fragile relationships - and egos - across different political worlds.
"She has not offended the mayor, the governor or City Council," says Reynolds Brown, a friend and fellow Girls High alumna. "That's a tough tightrope to walk."
U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, for whom Dungee Glenn served as chief of staff, says: "She has no enemies I am aware of. I haven't heard one voiced disagreement, which is unusual in our city. I've never seen it before."
Dungee Glenn has her limits, however.
In an uncharacteristic move, she stormed out of a reform commission meeting in May when Thomas M. Brady was appointed interim CEO. She said James Nevels, then chairman, had not informed her of his plans.
"What was done was so underhanded, so disrespectful to me, I was not going to dignify the proceeding with my presence," she said.
Brady took the helm June 30. "Despite our rocky beginning, I have nothing but high praise for him," Dungee Glenn says. Nevels resigned in August.
When Dungee Glenn persuaded the commission in 2005 to mandate that high school students must take an African American history course to graduate, there was backlash from some Latinos and whites.
John Perzel, then speaker of the Pennsylvania House, said students should master basic reading, writing and arithmetic before going into African American history.
Dungee Glenn labels the requirement "a work in progress that will continue to grow and change."
It was during her 1991-94 tenure as Fattah's top aide that Dungee Glenn's colleagues dubbed her "General MacArthur."
Back story: Her first husband's name was Ralph McArthur. She married Manwell Glenn, now Philadelphia's assistant managing director, in 1997. Her 13-year-old stepdaughter attends public school.
Dungee Glenn labels the "general" epithet "a term of endearment. Even as a woman, I've taken a very militaristic, ordered, disciplined approach to my work. I could command volatile, high-ego men to follow my lead."
Did someone say discipline?
During the week, Dungee Glenn is up at 5 and working out by 5:30. The junk food buffet - cinnamon buns; chocolate-chip cookies; mocha almond fudge ice cream - is only open Sundays.
Clothing-wise, Dungee Glenn favors bright, dramatic colors. She often wears four rings, including one on her thumb and pointer finger. Her long hair is braided tightly in "sister locks."
"When she walks into a room, inside a minute and a half you say, 'Wow,' even if you don't know her," says Debra Kahn, Mayor Street's secretary of education from 2000 to 2005.
Dungee Glenn's aesthetic choices "are a statement of who I am as an African American woman." In Reynolds Brown's view, the nontraditional look "forces you to take her seriously."
No problem there. Dungee Glenn, president of the American Cities Foundation, an urban policy think tank, is taken so seriously that many - including Mayor Street - say she could be the city's first female mayor.
"She could do the mayor's job, my job, anybody's job," says Fattah. Adds Reynolds Brown: "I'd be the first in line to organize her campaign."
Dungee Glenn insists she's most comfortable behind the scenes, out of the limelight. Her strength, she says, is in empowering others. Still, she admits she's thought about being Mayor Dungee Glenn.
"Never say never. Five, 10 years from now, I don't know what might make sense to me. Now, I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. I don't worry about anything else."
Class dismissed.
