As Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools goes through leadership changes, it’s getting support from almost a dozen executives on loan from local companies. Private-sector partners from banking, health care and other major employers have stepped in on such projects as tutoring, school safety and staff recruitment.
Six months into a project that’s designed to last a year or two, leaders of CMS and the Charlotte Executive Leadership Council say they’ve established trust and started tapping the benefits of fresh perspectives.
“Sometimes we believe that the only way it can get done is the way that we did it,” says Deputy Superintendent Matt Hayes, the first top CMS administrator assigned a private partner.
The public sector has a reputation for being slower and more bureaucratic than private sector companies, and CMS — the largest local government entity by employee count — is no exception. The executive loan program is designed to help infuse CMS with some business savvy while private partners learn the complexities of running a highly regulated public entity.
Hayes and council President Mike Lamach, former chairman and CEO of Trane Technologies, say the key has been that the executives on loan take time to listen and learn the culture, rather than assuming they have solutions.
“We just keep asking the same questions: What can we do? How can we help you?” Lamach said recently. “We have resources. We have people. We’re not educators, we’re not partisan. How do we help you deliver better outcomes for our students?”
Hayes works with LaShauna Lowry. She had been with Ally Financial for 17 years — and in Charlotte for about a year — when CEO Jeffrey Brown approached her about a special assignment. He wanted her to help CMS roll out a $50 million tutoring projectdesigned to help children overcome pandemic setbacks.
“And after research and talking, I was excited about it,” Lowry said. “Excited to be able to make an impact, excited to be able to utilize my skill set and offer it to the school district.”
She reported to CMS in May, and in October her team launched after-school tutoring in 41 schools, with 24 vendors.
Other than her experience as a parent, Lowry didn’t know anything about teaching kids to read and do math. But she knew a lot about organizing big, complex projects.
“If you think about it, you have to have food for the kids, training for the tutors, recruit the tutors … and have a vendor management program. You have to have people on site overseeing the program. You have to have invoices,” she said.
There are nine executives currently working full-time for CMS and two part-time, coming from Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Ally, Novant Health, Atrium Health, Duke Energy, Rodgers Construction and Central Piedmont Community College. All continue to be paid by their companies, at no cost to the district. More are expected to join CMS’ ranks early in 2023.
Launch coincides with firing
The program’s debut coincided with the departure of Superintendent Earnest Winston, who was fired in April. But Lamach says Winston helped lay the groundwork.
The council has been focused on supporting public education since its creation in 2015, Lamach says: “There’s no way Charlotte becomes a top tier city for economic opportunity if we don’t have really just an unbelievable public school system here.”
Lamach, who recently retired, took on leadership of the council in 2021, as CMS was reeling from the impact of the pandemic. He says it took some time to get on Winston’s agenda and build trust within CMS.
“I think there was just a little bit of ‘we’re moving so fast in CMS we don’t have time to engage,’ maybe a little bit of suspicion around what’s the motivation,” he recalls.
But eventually, CMS and the council identified several areas for partnerships. Those include recruitment and retention of staff, improving school safety and making sure that millions of dollars in COVID-19 aid are properly spent and accounted for.
Dealing with CMS leadership churn has become part of the dynamic. Interim Superintendent Hugh Hattabaugh embraced the partnership, then decided to leave CMS about halfway through his 14-month contract. Former CMS Chief of Staff Crystal Hill takes over the interim job in January. And the November election brought a new majority to the school board.
Embracing differences
Raki McGregor from Novant Health, another executive on loan to CMS, recently presented at a joint meeting of the new CMS board and Mecklenburg County commissioners.
“We were embraced (by CMS),” McGregor told the group. “We were afforded the opportunity, which was very rare, to actually join the cabinet meetings.”
That’s the weekly meeting of the superintendent and top CMS staff, which McGregor and Lowry both attend.
“The great thing about having the executives on loan is that sometimes they ask the questions for clarity that also cause us to pause in the routines that we’ve been stuck in over time,” said Hayes, who is also part of the cabinet meetings.
For instance, as a former principal, Hayes admits he can get bogged down in wanting to know every detail of a project before it starts. And educators can be risk-averse, he said. Lowry helps him pull back and analyze risks without being paralyzed by them.
“There has to be risk. There’s risk in anything you do,” Hayes said. “You just have to be comfortable with it and have things in place, which minimize that greatly.”
Lowry said she has helped with the tutoring roll-out by developing a project plan to track progress and measure success — not just with academic assessments, where CMS has expertise, but with other ways to track vendor performance.
“It’s a whole supplier management program that’s being stood up for these 24 vendors,” she said.
Seeing work in action
Lowry says her favorite part of the new job is making site visits, where she can see her work playing out in children’s lives and keep an eye on performance. She and the CMS team look for such things as enrichment activities, student and teacher engagement, smooth transportation plans and behavior management.
Hayes and Lowry both note that the tutoring being paid for with federal COVID-19 dollars is not the same as after-school care or homework help. Vendors have to have reading and math programs aligned with state standards, and staffing ratios that allow no more than five students per tutor.
At a December visit to J.H. Gunn Elementary in northeast Charlotte, they checked in on a program run by the Raleigh-based Community Technical Assistance. Students used a reading program called Achieve 3000, with tutors checking in to make sure children understood and to explain if they were confused.
For instance, a tutor helped a child answer a question about a passage on baseball, then nudged as he began to type: “We know when we start a sentence, upper case or lower case letter?”
CMS is preparing to expand this type of tutoring to more schools, even as the district works out the kinks. Staffing, transportation and student recruitment have all posed challenges. Currently, spaces for about 6,000 students are funded, with a mix of in-person and virtual sessions offered. Lowry says about 90% of the in-person spots are taken, compared with 40% of the virtual ones. She says one challenge will be marketing virtual tutoring — for instance, as an option for high school students who may have jobs, sports or other extracurricular activities after classes — to parents who are wary of the virtual classes that proved ineffective for many students.
Taking lessons back to old jobs
Lowry is scheduled to return to Ally at the end of the school year, though her stint could be extended for another six months. Lamach says the whole project is designed to last between one and two years. By then, CMS hopes to have a permanent superintendent in place and the council hopes to leave behind some system changes that become part of CMS culture.
Lowry said she’ll return to her finance job with fresh perspectives on a school district that not only embodies the community’s highest hopes, but often becomes a focal point for frustration.
“What I’ve really learned is how hard these people work. They work around the clock,” she said.
Lowry remembers the implicit message she got about CMS when she moved to Charlotte with a son in middle school.
“Everyone was like, ‘What private school are you going to?’ It wasn’t what school district or where are you going. It was automatically ‘What private school?’ And so we ended up doing private school. Because I didn’t know, right?” she recalled.
She said she and her fellow visiting executives can be ambassadors and help bring about change that makes public schools more enticing.
“Those individuals are influencers, they can be advocates for the school district. So I do think it’s an important piece,” she said.
Lowry says she’ll keep her son in private school because he’s doing well there. But her 4-year-old daughter is now enrolled in prekindergarten in CMS.
