Hochman candidate for job in New York
By Mary Carey
Staff Writer
Published on May 16, 2008
Schools Superintendent Jere Hochman is a finalist for a position in Bedford, N.Y., according to the Bedford Central School District's Web site.
The School Committee for the Westchester County district met Wednesday to approve authorization to negotiate the terms of the employment agreement with Hochman.
Hochman was chosen from an applicant pool of 49. The outgoing superintendent is Debra Jackson. Hochman and Jackson are officers of the Minority Student Achievement Network, an educators' group dedicated to closing the achievement gap between white students and students of color.
The proposed salary for the superintendent in the Bedford Central School District budget is $261,700. Hochman's current salary is $134,583.
Bedford, described in a New York Times story, is a community with "expansive estates and horse-country elegance," has a high school, middle school and five elementary schools with a student profile similar to Amherst's. About 20 percent are Hispanic.
Andrew Churchill, chairman of the Amherst School Committee, said the committee likely would seek an interim superintendent to begin in the fall, if Hochman were to leave.
A lifelong Missouri resident, Hochman came to Amherst from the Parkway School District, outside St. Louis, in 2003. "I was one of those teachers hired in the years Parkway was hiring 200 teachers a year (1974)," he wrote on the occasion of the district's 50th anniversary. "I went right from college and student teaching at West Jr. (high school) to teaching at West Jr. at the ripe age of 21."
At a recent forum on desegregation at Hampshire College, Hochman spoke proudly of his participation in the country's largest busing program under a court-ordered desegregation plan by which 13,000 inner-city students from Saint Louis attended suburban schools.
Everything he did in the Parkway schools was based on two premises his predecessor in the job, Don Senti, had laid out, he said - that "everything is connected to everything else and What matters most is that there is a teacher in every classroom - a driver on every bus - a counselor in every office - a secretary at every desk - a nurse in every office - everyone ... who cares that every student is learning every day and feels like a real human being.'"
He took a $38,000 pay cut to come to Amherst, but his $130,000 starting salary was criticized in some quarters as being too high.
Churchill's response at the time was that Hochman's salary was not out of line with similar districts in Massachusetts. Amherst was expecting a lot from Hochman, he said.
"The superintendent's job is one of the most important management jobs in Amherst," Churchill said in a letter to the Bulletin. The public schools are fundamental to the image, property values, and tax base of the town. They are a key reason many of us moved here in the first place."
Churchill said of Hochman, "he really wants to work here because of our commitment to providing both academic excellence and educational equity."
Hochman told the Daily Hampshire Gazette in the weeks after he began the job that what had most impressed him about Amherst was the level of commitment the town has to children and education. He said his hope was "that every student gets off the stage at graduation and says, I had the most amazing 13 years anyone could ever have learning.'"
In recent years, he has publicly defended individuals or groups he believed had experienced some form of injustice. He questioned, for instance, why Town Meeting intervened in the disposition of land owned by Hope Community Church in North Amherst, a congregation founded by the late Norma Jean Anderson and her husband, Laverne W. Anderson, who were black.
Last year Hochman also defended the hiring at the middle school of guidance counselor Talib Sadiq, who had a criminal record.
Hochman recently was among representatives from 39 small school districts in five states to sign a letter to Newsweek magazine requesting that their districts not be included in the coming 2008 edition of "America's Best High Schools."
The rankings are based on the number of students who sit for AP or IB (International Baccalaureate) exams, which is not a sufficient measure of how good a high school is, the writers note.
Mary Carey can be reached at mary.carey@att.net.
