Kansas Superintendent Says He Wouldn’t Be Office-Bound Gregory Also Says School Administrators Should Connect With Business Community

Richard Gregory is Montana-bred. After four years in flat, muggy Kansas, he longs for the pine-scented air of the Northwest.

He hopes to breathe it in Coeur d’Alene, where he’s trying to land a job as school superintendent.

Three finalists for the position are being brought to town this week and next. Each will spend a day visiting schools and meeting with staff members and the public.

Gregory, 55, was in Coeur d’Alene on Thursday to see and be seen. He and his wife, Sharon, had arrived two days earlier and already had been to most of the schools.

The chairman of the Emporia, Kan., school board said Gregory is a strong leader who is good at strategic planning and good at getting staff members to “buy in” to necessary changes, said Dr. James Barnett. “We hate to lose him,” Barnett said in a phone interview. “Whoever gets him is going to be very fortunate.”

The Emporia school district has 6,400 students compared with Coeur d’Alene’s 8,500.

This month, the Coeur d’Alene school board will choose a replacement for Doug Cresswell, who is retiring. For the first time, the board hired a consulting firm to help with the task.

Each finalist will spend a day full of school meetings, tours and handshaking. After meeting the candidates, parents, staff members and other interested residents are invited to fill out “comment forms” giving their impressions.

Gregory started Thursday at the school district office, where coffee and rolls were served to anyone who wanted to stop by and ask him questions.

Speaking in a deep voice and gesturing frequently, he talked about the problems and pitfalls of technology, the need for “character education,” the need for administrators to connect with the business community.

Superintendents should be on the local economic development board, as he is in Emporia, Gregory said.

He said he’s not an office-bound administrator.

“I’ll be in every classroom in the district before December,” he promised. “That’s not insurmountable. That’s what a superintendent ought to do.”

He said he’d have an early discussion with school board members, asking, “How far can I go before you want me to bring things to you for approval?”

By late afternoon, after touring schools and being interviewed again by the school board, Gregory had heard some questions repeatedly.

Among them: “How do you get school bonds passed? How do you deal with population growth?”

Gregory said it’s vital to get broad-based support for elections, and he noted that he hasn’t had to deal with the “supermajority” two-thirds vote that Idaho requires, in most cases, to build schools.

The Emporia district, like Coeur d’Alene, has won voter approval to build some new schools in recent years. But voters there also have turned down two chances to supplement school budgets with their taxes.

Gregory had been through Coeur d’Alene in past years, but he said he was surprised by the number of people now living in the area.

Before going to Emporia in 1993, he was curriculum director and then superintendent of schools in Powell, Wyo. Before that, he worked as director of instruction, grade school principal and teacher in Livingston, Mont.

He has a doctorate in educational administration and curriculum from the University of Wyoming. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education from Montana State University.

He also has taught educational leadership at Emporia State University for two years.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: CANDIDATES Two other superintendent candidates who will visit Coeur d’Alene are David Rawls of Moses Lake on Monday and Richard Cole of Colville, Wash., on Wednesday.