The Montgomery County Board of Education on Thursday is set to conditionally appoint the school system’s new superintendent.
The meeting, set for 6:30 p.m. at the Carver Educational Services Center in Rockville, was announced Wednesday, exactly a year after former Superintendent Joshua Starr resigned.
At the time, Starr said he resigned once it became clear he didn’t have support from enough board members for a contract extension when his contract ran out later in 2015. Larry Bowers, a longtime administrator in the school system, was named interim superintendent.
Bowers put off his planned retirement in July to remain the interim schools chief for the 2015-2016 school year after the board’s first choice for replacing Starr took himself out of the running in May.
The superintendent expected to be appointed Thursday will take over July 1 and his or her contract will run through June 30, 2020, according to a school system announcement. The state superintendent of schools must give final approval to the choice.
Spokesperson Derek Turner said the school system would not reveal the identity of the new superintendent until Thursday night’s meeting.
The new superintendent will take over the largest public school district in Maryland and one of the largest in the U.S. with a record enrollment of more than 156,000 students this school year and 9,000 more students projected to enroll by 2020-2021.
While the well-regarded school system has often been referred to as Montgomery County’s biggest selling point, it faces stark and persistent achievement gaps between students from high-income and low-income families.
The new superintendent will be tasked with narrowing those decades-long gaps while dealing with a constrained budget and a capacity crunch that spurred Bowers last fall to float the ideas of redrawing some school boundaries and reopening closed former schools still owned by the school system.
