New school year, new superintendent for Lexington 1. What are his goals?
When students come back to class in the Lexington 1 in a few weeks, they will have a new superintendent running the school district covering central Lexington County.
Keith Price replaced Gerrita Postlewait on July 1, a year after Price came to Lexington as a “superintendent-elect” to work alongside Postlewait in preparation for taking over for her this school year. A Camden native, he spent 24 years in education in the Midlands at the Richland 2 school district before becoming a superintendent in Georgetown County. Now that Postlewait has retired, Price will lead the county’s largest school district into its next chapter.
The new superintendent sat down with The State to discuss the challenges facing the growing district and where he sees Lexington 1 going next. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The State: I know you’re new to this position, but you’re not new to the district. You had this kind of unique arrangement where you were “superintendent-elect” to Gerrita Postlewait for a year before you took over as her replacement. Was that period helpful for you and introducing you to the district? And what did you take away from that time with working with her?
Keith Price: Absolutely, it was. I picked up a lot of the responsibilities that a deputy would have, but having a year to transition, it was really, really beneficial, not only for me, but for the team here in central services, as well as our school leaders and educators. I’ve heard and talked with others who’ve been through a similar experience, and it really comes down to three things on whether or not that experience is successful: How does the board embrace the dynamic of having a superintendent and superintendent-elect at the same time? How does the leadership accept it with having both people in place? And then how does the outgoing superintendent embrace it? And in my experience, over the past year, it’s been absolutely phenomenal, in all accounts, great working relationship with our board, a growing working relationship with our central services leadership team. And then I couldn’t have asked for a better colleague for a year than Dr. Postlewait.
We had this conversation early on about what this year might look like. And she basically said, “Anything that impacts life in this school district after this school year, I’m going to relinquish that all to you so that you can be engaged with it, and anything that’s happening right now, I’d like to keep that off of your plate.” But at the same time, she kept me informed of everything. She was very inclusive of everything going on in the district.
One of the things that we did last year is we embarked on a salary study committee. And she said, ‘That’s going to be your salary. Any changes are going to be your salary with the new budget year, so why don’t you lead that?’
You were in Georgetown for four years. How does that compare to Lexington, in terms of the similarities and differences between those two positions?
Community-wise, Lexington 1 is growing and booming. It’s a largely populated area. In Georgetown, we were a countywide school system there, but we had about 8,000 total students. And here in Lexington 1, we are one of five districts that encompass Lexington County, and in Lexington 1 alone, we have over 26,000 students. So size-wise, it’s more similar to what I was accustomed to in Richland 2, but much, much larger than Georgetown County.
After working with Postlewait for a year, do you think there is anything you would do differently from her going forward?
Whenever I went through the interview process, the board was very clear with what they were expecting from me as the next superintendent. Our school district had just gone through a strategic plan redesign process and had adopted a five-year plan, and they attributed a lot of the leadership and the development of that plan to Dr. Postlewait, and they were really, really happy with the product. So for me, coming in, their expectation is that “We have the strategic plan that we’ve adopted, that we are invested in, and we want you to help us see it through.”
I worked with our district leaders on any key pieces as far as the implementation of that plan. I think we’ve had great success in year one with the efforts that we’ve made, and we want to sustain that and improve on that. So there’s not going to be any sweeping changes. Lexington 1 is a highly effective and highly successful school district, and we want to sustain that and grow that.
What are your goals and priorities?
Right now, we have three primary focus points that we’re giving our attention to. One is on academic excellence. We want to continue to grow the achievement and the growth rates of our students. Number two is about fostering a positive culture throughout our system. And how do we do that? The experience of the students, the experience of employees, the experience of the families. And then number three, to be good stewards of our resources.
As we move through the year, our focus is going to be on those things. If there’s an initiative, an idea, a concept that comes up that doesn’t fit into one of those three categories, we’re probably going to be a little hesitant about bringing something like that on.
What do you see as the main challenges facing the school district right now?
Lexington County is growing, and as we grow, as we watch our student enrollments grow, it will be very important for us to protect the Lexington 1 way. We have an expectation of excellence in many different categories — in athletics, in academics, in arts. We can’t sustain that level of excellence if we don’t put appropriate effort towards it. So as we grow, we want to continue to attract, recruit, retain the best educators possible, so that we can maintain the Lexington 1 way.
As a part of that growth, are you going to need to look at potentially adding new schools or maybe refurbishing some of the existing facilities in the district in the near future?
Last year, we completed a demographic study looking specifically at our school district and what our growth and population trends are going to look like over the next 10, 20, 30 years. Now we’ve turned the page to part two, and we are in the midst of a comprehensive facility study. We’re working with a group who is taking the results of this demographic study, and now they are visiting every campus in our school district to see how these growth projections are going to impact us and how we need to best accommodate that.
They’re going to give us recommendations on if we need to do renovations at school campuses, if we need to do additions at school campuses, or if we need to consider new construction. We’re waiting to get that report based off of the population trends, so that we can have a very specific and data-driven plan moving forward. If you drive around Lexington 1, it shouldn’t come as a surprise with the number of developments that are coming out of the ground that many of those folks are going to have school-age children. And so we’ve got to make sure that we plan accordingly and responsibly for any future growth.
Lexington County has put a big emphasis on looking at growth and new housing developments popping up. Do you all coordinate with them or communicate with them at all when they have applications for new developments coming in?
They ask us to submit a concurrency report whenever they’re considering a new development. They give us information about where that development is going to be, and then they ask us for information about the schools that development may be zoned for. So we get questions like, how much growth capacity do you have in those buildings? Would you need to hire more teachers based on how many families move in? Would you need to add bus routes or bus drivers? We have a formula that we use to calculate that. It’s not an exact science, it’s an estimation. And we provide to them data based on the location of the development, and then they use that to make their decisions moving forward. We don’t really weigh in on whether or not we feel a development should be approved or denied. We just provide facts. Our focus is going to be on providing a quality education regardless of how many students we have. That’s our focus.
We’re talking at a time right now when whether some federal funding will be available for local school districts is up in the air. Is that a concern? Are you worried you may have to reevaluate any of the recently passed budget?
Well, there are specific items that are impacted by the freeze, and we learned late last week that some of that funding has been released, and that was the funding that goes to support afterschool and summer programs. We’re being told that it’s still a freeze, it’s not a cut, and so the remaining funds go to things like teacher support and quality. We’ve got some interventionist positions and some coaching positions – when I say coaching, I mean academic coaching positions – that are tied up with some of those funds, as well as services and programs for our multilingual learner students. That’s the funding that’s still frozen.
Right now, with these funds, we’re allowed to build in a certain contingency for carryover, because those funds can fluctuate from year to year, and right now we feel that with our carryover funds, along with some other savings and some federal projects, that we’ve got enough to sustain those programs right now through the school year. But if they’re cut, or if the freeze isn’t lifted, we may need to make some different choices by the time next summer rolls around, and then, of course, the following school year. After the school year, we’re going to need to know whether or not those funds will be available to us if we’re going to continue many of those services.
Of course, that’s part of a larger restructuring in the federal Education Department. Are you concerned about any of those services that you rely on for federal funding or programs there might be affected?
It’s a big question, and right now it’s the uncertainty of everything that’s got everyone on hold on what to expect. What we’re being told is that the services will continue to be available, just they’re going to be assigned to different departments at the federal level, and local states are going to have more authority over the allocation and distribution of funds that typically come from the federal level. So we’re kind of in a wait-and-see mode right now. Hopefully we’ll have some clarity here soon. I know the decision by the Supreme Court last week is new and fresh to everyone, and we’re just waiting to see what that’s going to mean for us.
You mentioned at least the question has been asked whether you might need to hire more teachers or more staff to handle the growth in the area. We’ve written before about shortages of teachers at some schools around the state. Is that something that you all are actively working on?
We’re always trying to recruit the best and the brightest. That’s a year-long effort that’s led by our human resources department. And it’s not just teaching staff, it’s all staff, support staff as well.
Our employees are very important to the success of our school district. I wish I could tell you that we were fully staffed, ready for day one. We are well staffed, and the number of vacancies that we have right now are low, and we’re hopeful that we can have those filled before day one rolls around. In years past, it’s been a little bit more of a challenge, but this year we’ve had a really good spring and summer with regards to recruitment.
When you’re recruiting, what are the selling points of Lexington 1 as a future employer that you sell them on?
I think it’s the educational experience that you have in the schools, and it’s the quality of life that you have in the county. Our towns, our county and our school system work very closely together to provide a quality life experience, and I think it’s a real positive when you can live and work and then also play in an area that’s close to home in Lexington County, the town of Lexington, Lexington 1, provide all of that for folks. So it’s a great package that helps us recruit people to our area.
What else you want folks to know about you and the district as you gear up for the new school year?
When people ask about my vision, I go back to my time as a teacher, and I had some core principles that were really important to me, that I want all of my students to be able to rely on. And I’ve taken those core principles and then I applied them when I became a school-level principal, and I keep them to this day as a superintendent. It’s that every person feels cared for, every person feels challenged, every person feels supported, every person feels heard, every person feels celebrated, and then ultimately, every person feels prepared for what comes next. When I was a teacher, it meant my students, but now as a superintendent, it means my students, it means our employees, it means our community, our family. I feel like if we could guarantee that in every classroom, in every school, in every department throughout our system, then we will have a very high-functioning school district.
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