How Cincinnati 'star' superintendent became victim of district's 'fragmented culture'

Two weeks before she decided to resign from Cincinnati Public Schools, Superintendent Iranetta Wright said all was well with the district's unions. Their interactions were friendly and communications honest, she said. Or so she thought.

Then, two days before she submitted her resignation letter, all six unions announced votes of no confidence in her leadership. She was shocked. Still, Wright remained steadfast in her devotion to the district.

But two hours before she stepped down on Wednesday, Wright had grown a bit weary. She met with The Enquirer's editorial board and laid out the obvious: Cincinnati's unions wanted her out. And another truth: She didn't want to stay in a place that didn't want her around.

Cincinnati superintendent: Complaints mount against Iranetta Wright

By the time the school board announced her intent to resign, Wright − the superintendent who union leaders say had always craved the spotlight − was nowhere to be found. Her chair sat empty on the board of education stage, her name plate still in place.

Wright, who was hired to be the face of a district supposedly ready for change, was told to stay away.

"She's a star," school board president Eve Bolton said after Wednesday's meeting. "She is gifted and she is dedicated to kids and dedicated to public education. And my hope for her would be that she would be able to be in another district that would also benefit from her leadership."

Wright promised better work culture, transformation when she was hired

Wright was hired on the heels of two locals: Laura Mitchell, a Cincinnati native who spent 27 years serving the district, and Tianay Amat, who worked in the area for nearly two decades before taking on the interim role. Amat also applied for the full-time superintendent job and was a finalist alongside Wright.

But back then, Cincinnati was looking for someone new. The board picked Wright because she was "committed to transformative, positive change," then-board president Ben Lindy said.

The district had pockets of success already. Walnut Hills High School is consistently ranked in the state's top schools, and Cincinnati's Montessori program is nationally recognized. But while Cincinnati students tested slightly higher than other urban school districts in the state, the board knew they could do better for kids. And Wright was known to transform failing schools into great ones, as she'd done in Florida and Detroit.

In her first 100 days in Cincinnati, Wright hosted listening sessions with the community, spoke individually with school board members, visited classrooms, assessed school systems, pored over equity data and developed a professional development plan for district employees.

She determined early on that the district had "a fragmented culture." Staff felt like the district was divided between those in its central office and those in school buildings, she said. Wright was motivated to bridge that gap in order to improve supports for kids.

"I appreciate the work that's being done by our staff," Wright said then. "All of them. Our teachers, our custodians, our paraprofessionals, our school office assistants. Everybody, it takes everyone. It takes all of us to make sure that our children are successful."

She took to launching public initiatives, including the "Superintendent's ABCs" to focus on academics, behavior and culture. She also launched the "Be Present" movement that encouraged everyone − teachers, parents, kids, neighbors − to do their part in making sure kids got to school on time to thrive. Wright took the "Be Present" initiative to heart, routinely visiting schools and posting dozens of selfies with students to her social media.

But while some saw these efforts as genuine and positive, others scrutinized Wright's every move. And they let her know. A year into her tenure, union members sent letters to the board outlining several concerns with Wright's leadership. They said she was controlling, she bullied and embarrassed staff members, she didn't take seriously the input of veteran educators in the district and she had fostered a culture of fear.

At the time, Wright said these gripes were coming from a loud few. She held fast to her commitment to excellence, took a satisfactory evaluation from the school board as a nod to her early success and proudly reported small improvements in the district's test scores after her first year.

But Julie Sellers, president of the teachers union and initially a proud advocate for Wright, didn't buy it. Everyone's test scores went up after COVID-19, Sellers said. Once starry-eyed at Wright's tales of success elsewhere, Sellers said she had come to see that Wright wasn't a good fit for Cincinnati after all. Other union leaders said they'd understood that from the beginning.

Unions reach a breaking point

If you ask Wright, her relationship with the district's unions crumbled in a matter of days. She told The Enquirer she "didn't know that it was this bad" until the union votes were announced in early May.

But some union leaders say Wright got off on the wrong foot two years ago, when she doubled back on assertions she made during her interview process. And she never recovered.

"She said everything we wanted to hear," Fannie Carradine, an administrative secretary in the district's central office and president of the Cincinnati Federation of Office Professionals, said during a meeting with The Enquirer's editorial board.

Carradine said Wright had told union leaders she had an open door policy with unions. But once she was hired, Wright only met with the teachers' union and administrators' union. Carradine was left to negotiate with one of Wright's chiefs, who had to get Wright's approval before making decisions.

After a year of delays and frustration, Carradine said, Wright started to meet regularly with all of the district's unions. But union leaders agree that those meetings were unhelpful at best, and say Wright didn't seem to understand the concept of collaboration at all.

"It was apparent to us that her definition of collaboration was, 'I'm telling you, I'm informing you of this,'" Mike Turner, president of the administrative union, said. "But that's not collaboration."

The unions pointed to a recent budget snafu as a prime example of Wright's ineffective and troublesome leadership. Sellers said her union provided more than two dozen suggestions to bring down the budget deficit earlier this school year, of which Wright only kept three in her presentation to the school board.

That presentation didn't go over well. For months, Wright continually brought forth budget cut recommendations, including changes to transportation, that went against the board's wishes − resulting in a stalemate that hindered schools from starting the hiring process for the upcoming school year.

At a school board meeting in early May, Kareem Moffett, a board member, said the board had “sat through four months now of having the same things brought back to us repeatedly, which is a huge waste of time and almost disrespectful.”

“Clearly there is no collaboration,” Moffett said.

A week before Wright submitted her resignation, the board considered a resolution that would have stripped Wright's authority to recommend personnel cuts and instead given the school board the power to identify which employees not to renew. Later, Bolton told The Enquirer that resolution was intended to "make an impression" that the board wasn't happy with Wright's process.

The budget remains unbalanced as Wright departs from the district.

Meanwhile, Sellers said a call for a no confidence vote came from the ground up. Teachers were fed up with the budget extensions that started to point more and more to staff reductions. In a historic vote at the union's largest meeting on record, Sellers said, not a single member voted in favor of Wright.

Though none of the unions would say how many members voted, all six said they had impressive turnouts and all overwhelmingly voted no confidence in Wright.

Afterward, both Turner and Wright told The Enquirer, separately, that they did not see a way to salvage the unions' broken relationship with the district's superintendent.

What's next for Cincinnati Public Schools? No clear path forward

The school board will approve Wright's settlement agreement and appoint an interim leader Monday, Bolton said. But it's not clear when the search for a permanent replacement will begin.

Last time, that search process took a full school year. And it was expensive: The district hired a search firm that cost $75,000, not including advertising and travel expenses.

Not everyone on the board supported Wright's resignation. Lindy, the board president when Wright was hired, vehemently opposes her departure. He thinks Wright is the most talented superintendent the district has seen and is scared for what the district's uncertain future holds now that she's leaving.

"The slimmest possible majority is choosing to push out our superintendent, despite the progress we’re seeing, with no plan for what happens next in the middle of a budget crisis," Lindy said.

His predictions for Cincinnati Public Schools after Wright leaves are grim: "What happens next is going to be bad. The churn we see, the difficulty we have in attracting future superintendent candidates, the regression that we may see in results for students, all of this is the responsibility of this board president and the three other board members who support the superintendent’s departure."

The board will determine Wright's settlement on Monday.

But Wright wasn't there to hear Lindy's support. Her chair − the seat meant for the leader of Ohio's second largest school system, one that serves 35,000 children and employs 6,500 workers − remained empty.

Now the school board will look inward again for an interim leader to point them to what's next.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: What Iranetta Wright's resignation means for Cincinnati's schools