New Asheville City Schools superintendent talks achievement gap, putting students first
ASHEVILLE- Hopeful for the future of Asheville City Schools, new Superintendent Maggie Fehrman spoke with the Citizen Times July 18 about her goals as the new leader of the school district.
Fehrman, who said she's in her mid-40's, started her new role as the superintendent of city schools July 17. The district has had six superintendents in the past 10 years, making Fehrman the seventh.
She moved to Asheville from Georgia where she called home for the past 23 years. She served as the superintendent for City Schools of Decatur since May 2021. Under her leadership, Decatur, a suburb of Atlanta, ranked No. 1 in Georgia for student performance in third-grade reading, fifth-grade reading, and English language arts.
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The district also received above a 95% high school graduation rate and secured the top spot in the state for SAT and ACT performance in 2021 and 2022, according to a news release from ACS.
Fehrman is no stranger to public education. She has also served as assistant superintendent, executive director of schools, principal, assistant principal, and was a social studies teacher for a little over four years.
Protect public education
While Fehrman was finishing up her anthropology degree at Clarion University in Pennsylvania, her adviser at the time told her that she wouldn't get a job without a master's degree. Being reluctant in going back to school she went and got her teaching certificate instead — and finished up her masters while teaching social studies.
"I never thought I wanted to be a teacher, and when I got in front of the students, it was like, all the lights went on. I knew this is where I was meant to be, and I loved it," Fehrman told the Citizen Times.
"Public education is a place where no matter who you are, where you're from, you have the opportunity to get the skills and the knowledge and really build relationships with people so that you can become the most successful person. We need to protect public education like we protect our lives, because it is really the livelihood of what makes the United States such a great country."
Like City Schools of Decatur, Fehrman loves that Asheville City schools is small, she said that's the way you get to know everyone by name, from teachers to custodians.
"That's important to me."
City Schools of Decatur is a district with nine schools and had 5,637 students in the 2021-22 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Asheville City Schools had 4,218 students in the same year.
One thing that drew Fehrman to ACS was the equity work that has been done across the district. While the achievement gap has been a concerning topic of conversation for many, this isn't Fehrman's first time working with disparity in a district.
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Her first teaching job was at Summerour Middle School in the Gwinnett County public schools district in Atlanta, Georgia, where around 95% of the students were students of color, and were on free or reduced lunches. Fehrman said while it wasn't necessarily an achievement gap that she had to close but instead she needed to raise the achievement of all of the students in the district.
In the Gwinnett County public schools district her middle school was ranked last out of 26, but with the goal in mind to raise the achievement standard she was able to help in moving them up to top 10, said Fehrman.
Building relationships
Fehrman told the Citizen Times that one of the most important things she can be doing right now to learn about ACS and build relationships is to listen.
"I want to hear from people. I want to know what their thoughts are, what their ideas are, and really get to know them as people. I want to know things they are proud of outside of work. I want to know about their family. I want to know about the people that work in the school system, and same with the families here. I want to know what our parents value about our school system, I want to know why they keep sending their kids here and why they're so invested," she said.
Bringing the students into the conversation when important decisions are being made was a topic that Fehrman felt strongly about.
"I remember in my second interview, I said, 'you don't even need a superintendent just hire the students to do the job.' They are that knowledgeable about what could be done. The best thing about talking to students is they have ideas that are fresh and new, that we maybe haven't ever thought of," she said.
"I'm a firm believer that they are first and foremost, our customer, and you've got to listen to the customer. We are building a school system to meet the needs of the students. They're the first people we need to talk to."
Fehrman's response to parents who may be concerned about the high superintendent turnover rate in ACS is that she moved here intentionally. She told the Citizen Times that Asheville has been an area that she and her husband have been looking at for quite some time.
She loves to mountain bike and be outdoors, so Asheville seemed like the perfect place.
"We plan on staying here for a long time," she said. "I even told one of my colleagues today that I plan on working for another 30 years here."
'You teach because you love kids'
Due to Fehrman's background in public school teaching, she is even more aware of the salary issues that teachers face and it's not just in ACS — though it's even more of an issue in North Carolina with the state's salary ranking as one of the worst in the country at 46 for starting teacher salaries, according to the National Education Association.
From Buncombe County Schools 2022-2023 data there were 101,808 teachers in North Carolina with 2,700 schools. The average teacher pay in the state from 2022-2023 was $57,805.
According to the fiscal year 2022-23 state salary schedule, a new teacher with a bachelor's degree must make a minimum of $37,000 annually. A new teacher at ACS has a starting salary of $40,330.
According to previous Citizen Times reporting, the average price of an Asheville home in May was $457,007, which is higher than major cities like Chicago at $286,482 and Atlanta at $384,388.
Asheville's living wage is $20.10, which comes to just about what a starting teacher makes.
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"No one takes a teaching job because of the pay. You go to teach because you love kids. You're passionate about your curriculum. Asheville City Schools is a place where teachers who are passionate about education, who love teaching who do it for kids can come and teach," Fehrman said.
She said one of her top priorities moving to North Carolina is to advocate for public education in the state, and to make sure the legislators and commissioners understand why it's so critical to invest in public education.
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Fehrman will be the district's seventh leader since 2013, not including Rick Cruz, who was supposed to start as new superintendent on July 1 but was unable to assume the position due to a family medical emergency, according to previous reporting from the Citizen Times.
Fehrman will make an annual base salary of $215,000, not including any local or state supplements, according to previous reporting from the Citizen Times.
Following Jim Causby, the interim superintendent, who had an annual salary of $183,000.
Gene Freeman was the last superintendent hired by the board, in 2019. Freeman left two years into his four-year contract, taking with him a $94,000 buyout, about $23,500 more than he would have made in his final 5 1/2 months had he stayed in the job.
Fehrman wants to spread the word that ACS is hiring. As of July 18, there were 51 openings, 16 of which are classroom teacher positions, according to Dillon Huffman a spokesperson for ACS.
The district has a total of 661 staff members.
Follow the new superintendent on her Twitter @SupFehrman.
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McKenna Leavens is the education reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA Today Network. Email her at mleavens@citizentimes.com or follow her on Twitter @LeavensMcKennna. Please support this type of journalism with a subscription to the Citizen Times.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Maggie Fehrman new superintendent of Asheville City Schools
