On Sunday, one week into his Arkansas residency, Oregonian Charles McNulty faced off with the summer heat and tackled Pinnacle Mountain.
On Monday, McNulty began another challenge -- superintendent of the 12,000-student Pulaski County Special School District.
His plans for leading the district are not dissimilar to those for a family climb of an unfamiliar peak: strategic planning, collaboration and innovation.
"We just need to create the foundation of good practices -- instructionally, financially, leadership-wise -- and then we add the signature programs that our students deserve," McNulty said Monday about his intentions for the school system.
He said he plans to spend his first days and weeks in the district listening to what the parents, faculty and staff have to say about the system.
Last week, he devoted some of his pre-superintendent time to visiting summer school at Sylvan Hills Middle School. Monday's first day on the job included getting a preview of district results on state-mandated Aspire tests and planning for meetings later with principals at the district's 25 campuses.
His first session with principals for the 2018-19 school year won't be the typical "sit and get" session "in which you sit for a very long time and you are acquiring information you may or may not retrieve," he said.
"That's not how I approach leadership. I expect our meetings to be decision-making meetings. And our first one will be about how can we start building collaborative leadership across the county," he said.
"We want to preserve the uniqueness of each of our schools and our communities, but we also want to be able to leverage our system to create a foundation where our professional staff can lead to excellence."
The School Board for the Pulaski County Special district voted 6-1 in April to hire McNulty, 55, who is coming to central Arkansas from the associate superintendent for educational services role in the 10,800-student Waterloo, Iowa, Community School District, a job he had for four years.
He also has been a university faculty member in addition to holding various school and school district roles in Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin.
At the time of his hiring, School Board President Linda Remele cited McNulty's enthusiasm about the job as well as his knowledge about the district's issues and his plans to address them.
Board member Shelby Thomas said he liked McNulty's focus on closing the achievement gaps between student groups and the initiative he took in researching the district's voluminous federal school desegregation lawsuit.
Board member Tina Ward cast the single "no" vote. She wanted to expand the number of applicants interviewed to more than two.
McNulty replaces Jerry Guess, who was fired from the superintendency almost a year ago in a dispute with the Pulaski County Special School Board over the district's legal team. Janice Warren has served this past school year as interim superintendent. Warren, who was an applicant for the permanent job, now resumes a previous role as the district's assistant superintendent for equity and pupil services.
The new superintendent will oversee a school district that includes some of the wealthiest and some of the poorest areas of metropolitan Little Rock.
Stretched over both sides of the Arkansas River, the district includes the cities of Maumelle and Sherwood and parts of Little Rock and Shannon Hills, as well as smaller communities such as Wrightsville, Scott and Roland.
Jacksonville recently detached from the Pulaski County Special district to form its own 4,000-student district. The new superintendent faces the possibility of further splintering of the Pulaski County Special system as residents of Sherwood and Maumelle have also taken some steps to form their own districts.
Pulaski County Special remains a party in a 35-year-old federal school desegregation lawsuit and, as such, is obligated to improve the condition of its school buildings in poor and high minority-group neighborhoods to match those of the much newer schools in more affluent and predominantly white sections.
To that end, the district is in the midst of constructing a brand-new Mills High on Dixon Road and relocating Fuller Middle to a new site this summer.
It is also finishing construction of a new Robinson Middle School on Arkansas 10 and has recently started to significantly expand Sylvan Hills High in Sherwood. The construction has contributed to financial straits that led to the elimination and freezing of some key staff positions this past spring.
McNulty anticipates asking the School Board in the near future to allow for some filling of those affected positions.
District challenges for the coming year include competing for students and state funding with an ever-expanding number of independently run public charter schools in central Arkansas.
The district is also participating for the first time this new school year in interdistrict school choice by students and their families as allowed by state law, creating the potential for the district to gain -- or lose -- student enrollment and state funding.
Additionally, the district is converting all four of its high schools -- two for the 2018-19 school year and two for 2019-20 -- to schools of innovation where participating students will not be bound by traditional class periods and school hours.
Like all school systems, the district is also dealing with the best ways to use technology -- most Pulaski County Special students are assigned Chromebook laptop computers -- and with improving the safety of students and staff from the threats of violence.
On the latter, McNulty said he is most familiar and supportive of the use of school resource officers, who are armed law enforcement officers assigned to school campuses.
"Our plates are full," McNulty said about the tasks at hand.
He also said that the potential for the system is great and that there are daily moments of excellence throughout the district that need only to be harnessed, expanded and made known to the public.
Regarding the district's desegregation case, McNulty said he has read the district's current desegregation plan as well as previous plans.
"There are certainly obligations that have to be met and should be met," he said. "One of the things we look forward to doing as we move toward unitary status is making sure at the same time that all our children are getting an excellent education and that discrepancies based on race, class, gender are whittled away.
"When students don't achieve, they aren't getting the same high expectation, rigorous curriculum and instruction as other students," McNulty added. "We have to have honest and upfront dialogue around why, and then look at the data -- the Aspire scores -- then look at trends and patterns."
McNulty is insistent that the way to excellent achievement is through innovative, engaging programs, and not just remediation.
"The perception of the gap sometimes creates barriers for innovation," he said. "We can't get to excellence only by intervening in what we consider are deficits. Enrichment is really the only way to get to excellence.
"That's easier said than done," he acknowledged. "However, if you do it, you are further down the road. I've been fortunate to observe high-yield instructional approaches that have been enrichment-based that have also mitigated skill deficits."
McNulty has a doctorate in educational leadership from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a master's degree in special education from Portland State University in Oregon, and a bachelor's degree in political science and psychology from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore.
The Oregon native worked as an assistant professor at the University of Northern Iowa at Cedar Falls before accepting the Waterloo Community Schools job. He also is a former superintendent of the 500-student Blackhawk School District in South Wayne, Wis., and was once principal of the Carl Sandburg Middle School in Freeport, Ill. He started his education career as a special education teacher.
McNulty's wife, Yaa Appiah-McNulty, is also an educator, having last served as an elementary school principal in Iowa City. She is seeking a job in the central Arkansas area, McNulty said Monday.
McNulty's family, including a daughter who will be attending ninth grade here in August, has found a home in the Chenal neighborhood of Pulaski County.
Metro on 07/03/2018