Little Rock school chief shaped by good, bad of past

Dexter Suggs Sr., the incoming superintendent of the Little Rock School District, carries with him wherever he goes mementos of his past - both the good and the bad.

The good: A large silver ring with a deep blue stone, a reminder of his fulfilledpromise of a high school championship team earlier in his career.

The bad: The depression under his ribs on the left sidefrom a long-ago gunshot. And there’s another gunshot scar in his back, he said, and scars from knife slashes under both arms and close to the outside edge of his right eye.

Look closely at the top of his 44-year-old forehead - that scar is from having his skull split open.

“The hospital was my second home,” said Suggs last week, recalling his childhood in the Walnut Park neighborhood of St. Louis, a violence-ridden area that he described as being then and maybe still among the most dangerous places to live in the country.

Thirty years later and in Little Rock for most of this month to get familiar with people and issues before taking leadership of the 25,000-student district on July 1, Suggs is looking to his future - one he intends to intertwine with the Little Rock district’s for a long time.

His newly signed contract is for 20 years, he jokes. It’s actually just for three years - the maximum allowed by state law - but it can be extended annually.

His tone is serious when he talks about working with the g reater Little Rockcommunity to “transform” the district into a one that is better respected and supported by the city’s residents, one that will ultimately stand out as one of the best in the South and in the nation.

He sees the challenges: The state-labeled low-achieving “priority” schools for one.

The condition of facilities, for another, including the abundance of portable classrooms and the aging athletic facilities that someday may require a tax increase to provide replacements.

“It’s a process,” he said. There will be no silver bullets, he added, no cookie-cutter solutions and no immediate sweeping personnel changes.

Regarding what he might do his first days officially on the job, Suggs promised to listen and converse with the community, and to increase the level of accountability “the likes of which has never been seen before.”

“For everyone. For the staff. For myself,” he said and then added: “I’m very competitive. I believe in being successful in whatever I do. I know exactly how to motivate people to move to the next level. I’m very forthcoming, very candid in my conversations.”

Asked how he inspires, Suggs said each person and situation is different.

“People must be prepared to do their jobs,” he said and reached back to his roots: “I’m from Missouri. Show me. Don’t talk. Just show me.”

Serving out the last few weeks as chief of staff in the 31,000-student Indianapolis Public Schools, Suggs is an Army veteran from thePersian Gulf War and a national-award winning educator with about 20 years of teaching, coaching and administrative experience in two Indianapolis-area districts.

He has a doctorate. He’s married to a woman with a doctorate and they are the parents of three children whom he describes as “scary smart.”

Dressed on the day of an interview in a gray-green suit and paisley tie, and peppering his short, direct answers with yes ma’am and no ma’am, Suggs is a long way away from his youthful travails and the hospital stays. But his life story is gripping - even the abridged version.

He and his sisters were raised by his mother and stepfather, “loving people, and they did their best to raise me,” he said.

He was high-achieving in elementary school, but as he got a little older he abandoned academics in favor of using school to socialize with friends who were fellow gang members.

As a sixth-grader, he was expelled from one school, he said.

For fighting?

“No, I did something to the principal,” Suggs responded, paused, and elaborated: “I had no respect for anyone. I didn’t care who you were - principal, teacher. You could be someone walking up the street, I did not care,” he emphasized. “You and I having this conversation - it would never happen. I’d be more likely to hit you upside your head than to talk to you. That’s just how bad it was. That was the norm in my community.”

He said he was shot the first time in the summerbetween sixth and seventh grades, stabbed a couple of times during the seventh grade - and he thought he was going to die after he was shot again in the summer after seventh grade.

But between eighth and ninth grades, Suggs said, it dawned on him that he was headed for jail or death. He persuaded his mother to fill out an application for a school-desegregation transfer to a distant high school. He caught the bus at 5:30 a.m. to Pattonville High, near Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, and returned home late in the evenings.

He became involved in football, basketball and track, excelling to the point that he was making the newspapers as a freshman. That caught the attention of gang members from his neighborhood. Surprisingly, they rallied around Suggs, buying him practice and game cleats.

“They said they wanted me to look good … because to them I was representing the ’hood,” Suggs said. “They provided lunch money for me. They made sure I wouldn’t come back to the streets. They would even come to my games. At some games, I had the largest cheering section.”

His academic achievement also improved.He said he knew he had “crossed over,” when he reported to his junior year science class, looked around and saw two students, who would later become an astronaut and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, and realized his counselor had signed him up for Advanced Placement physics.

Suggs laughed about parts of his high school story, but he pointed out that there was a darker element to it.

“I was once told that, ‘If you come back to this, we’re going to kill you. You can do something with yourlife. You aren’t allowed to come back.’ That was unique because in our situation it was usually ‘blood in, blood out,’” Suggs said. “To be able to walk out without going through any consequences,” he said, “put the weight of the community on my back. Everyone was looking at me.”

“That has helped me as an adult,” he said of the experience. “Pressure situations don’t bother me.”

College followed high school and, wanting to avoid going home for the summer, he signed up for the Army Reserve.

During what would have been his sophomore year, he was called into service for the Persian Gulf War. There was training at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., and 6½ months camped in Kuwait, 17 miles from the Iraq border.

“My whole perspective on life changed. I valued things I didn’t value before. That’s when I decided to become an educator - because you have a lot of time to talk to yourself in the desert. I reflected on things I had done - bad things - to people who didn’t deserve it. So I thought being an educator would be the best way to give back to society and I’ve always said that if you are going to do something you want to be the very best at it.”

Suggs has a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, two master’s degrees, one in curriculum and instruction and the other in administration supervision, and a doctorate focusing on organizational leadership, which is from Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion.

He said he was recruited to the Metropolitan School District of Wayne Township where he worked at Ben Davis High as a speech and English teacher and coach, primarily of girls basketball. He moved into the Indianapolis Public Schools system as an assistant principal, a principal and in other leadership roles.

In remarks to the public when he was a candidate for the Little Rock job, Suggs described himself as data-driven, a “workaholic” and a “servant” leader.

Andrea Roof, a member of the Indianapolis School Board, last week recalled an early encounter with Suggs before she was on the board, an encounter that seems to support those descriptors.

“When he was head of transportation, I was having several issues with the bus showing up,” Roof said in an e-mail. “I had small children and was growing very frustrated. When I talked to Dr. Suggs about the issue, he handled it immediately.He even came out to the bus stop to wait with us to make sure there were no problems.”

Suggs has received awards for his work, including state educator of the year honors in Indiana and a Milken Family Foundation National Educator Award in 2007 for his work at an Indianapolis middle school.

“You appreciate it but it doesn’t define you as a person,” he said of the honors. “You do it because it is your mission, it’s your calling. I got into it because I wanted to make a major difference for children. I know I work for the School Board but in reality I work for the children.”

Little Rock School Board member Jody Carreiro said last week that while in Little Rock, Suggs has made scant mention of his growing up years or even some of his later career accolades.

Carreiro surmised that Suggs has other priorities.

“He’s more focused on the next fascinating chapter of his life here in the Little Rock School District,” he said.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 19 on 04/21/2013

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