Next month, Thomas Parker will become the Allentown School District’s new superintendent — its fourth in seven years. Among the youngest to hold the position, Parker, 38, brings a passion for urban education nurtured in the Detroit School District, where he started his teaching career, and a reputation for turning around distressed schools. But Parker’s experience makes him an unconventional choice, as the district he has overseen for the past three years is tiny in comparison to Allentown.
In Ecorse, Mich., where parents and teachers say Parker put the schools back on track, about 1,000 students fill kindergarten through 12th grades. That’s about half the number at Allen High School alone. While Parker supervises 50 teachers there, he’ll oversee about 1,200 in Allentown. The $9.3 million Ecorse district budget is about 30 times smaller than Allentown’s. And although Parker is a familiar face in Ecorse’s three schools, it might be challenging for him to regularly visit the 24 buildings he’ll inherit here.
What Parker lacks in comparable experience, he makes up for in his understanding of urban schools, said David Zimmerman, Allentown School Board president and a member of the search committee that recommended Parker above two other finalists.
“I feel really positive about this,” Zimmerman said recently. “We’re creating a completely different environment.”
Parker will face numerous hurdles. Academically, Allentown’s schools rank near the bottom among Lehigh Valley schools on state standardized exams. The graduation rate for both high schools is about 20 percentage points below the state average, at 65 percent for Allen and 68 percent for Dieruff, while the dropout rate is more than three times the state average at Allen and nearly twice the average at Dieruff. Student discipline has been an issue with violent episodes in 2015 capturing national headlines as a group of Allen students brawled with police and a Dieruff student pushed a teacher off bleachers during a pep rally. Poverty plagues the student population, putting more pressure on the schools to provide such things as breakfast and homework help.
Parker is undaunted by the challenges. And he is undeterred by the rocky relationships two of his recent predecessors had with the board. Russ Mayo stepped down in 2016 after five years on the job, the last of which was spent on a sabbatical for health reasons. Before him, Gerald Zahorchak, a former state education secretary, resigned after only one year. Gary Cooper, interim superintendent since last summer, did not apply for the job.
In Parker, Allentown will get a new perspective and a fresh start. One thing his current district and Allentown share is a high minority population. Parker, who is African-American, will be Allentown’s first minority superintendent and will oversee a student population that is nearly 90 percent non-white.
“It’s absolutely important for students to see people who look like them in leadership spaces,” Parker said. “However, I think it’s more critical for them to have good leadership.”
Those who have worked with Parker in Ecorse and Detroit say he has that quality. Growing up on a farm in Tillatoba, Miss., he was the first in his family to graduate from college. Despite his rural upbringing, he found a love for urban education and spent about five years teaching social studies in Detroit public schools. He quickly rose to the rank of principal before shifting to a suburban Detroit district, where he was a middle- and high-school principal for three years. After that, he went to Ecorse, which is about a 20-minute drive from Detroit.
His legacy there includes full-day pre-kindergarten, an honors program at the high school and an initiative that enabled children to use iPads and computers in the classroom. To engage more parents, Parker and his administration put laundromats in Ecorse schools. That gave parents a chance to see what was happening in the schools while they washed clothes.
In Allentown, he wants to formulate a strategic plan focused on students’ health needs. He wants to improve attendance, reduce suspensions and — though it may be time-consuming — visit at least one school per day. He also wants to get more involved in education policy issues.
His interest won’t strictly be as superintendent, a job that pays $175,000 a year and comes with a five-year contract. Parker also will be a district parent. He and his wife, Laurin, plan to enroll their 9-year-old daughter, London, in an Allentown elementary school.
If Parker is nervous, he refuses to let on.
“I see this as a great opportunity to become a leader in the state and in the nation for how we support students and provide critical learning,” Parker said. “I will be here for the long haul.”
‘He saved us’
When Parker started in Ecorse schools in 2013, the district was on the verge of state takeover.
The elementary and high schools were considered “priority schools,” meaning their achievement and growth were in the lowest 5 percent of all schools in Michigan. The dropout rate was 18 percent, well above the state average. The district’s deficit was so large that, “we were getting ready to sell furniture,” high school principal and longtime Ecorse employee Ken McPhaul said.
“Ecorse was in a challenging spot when I arrived fiscally as well as academically,” Parker acknowledged.
Just south of Detroit and across the river from Canada, Ecorse is a hardscrabble city covering just under 4 square miles. The streets are populated with shuttered businesses, liquor stores, bars and churches. The median household income is $28,000, and just 10 percent of Ecorse’s 10,000 or so residents have a bachelor’s degree, according to the U.S. Census.
Parker came to Ecorse intent on changing the schools. And many in the community say he’s done that.
“He really is leaving?” Harold Woods, a 65-year-old Ecorse resident replied when told of the news. “I’m really sad now. Oh man, he’s good. We’re just on the brink of getting back to where we should be.”
One thing that sets Parker apart has been his willingness to get personally involved in helping students. Joann Johnson is a case in point. She was in summer school after finishing fourth grade with the reading skills of a second-grader. A speech impediment made it difficult for Joann to read out loud to her teachers and to ask for help, said her mother, Sandra Johnson.
After her daughter spent a couple weeks in summer school without noticeable improvement, Johnson requested a meeting with someone at Bunche Academy, Ecorse elementary school. She didn’t meet with her daughter’s teacher as she expected, or even the principal. It was Parker who patiently listened to her.
Parker said he wanted to get Joann’s reading up, too, Johnson remembered during an interview in February. He gave Joann “Hooked On Phonics” and “Leap Frog” workbooks. But most impressively to Johnson, he found a reading program at a public library in a nearby town that was designed for children with speech impediments.
When Joann completed that program, she went up a full reading level, Johnson said. Now an avid reader, Joann visits Ecorse’s public library almost daily, and has a bet with her mother that as soon as she reads 100 books, she’ll get $100.
“I know he has to go and help other children,” Johnson said, of Parker’s move to Allentown. “And I have his email address, so I can still pester him.”
School Board President Shaunda Miller-Giles also recalled Parker going beyond the call of duty.
They were both working late at a school function when a mother called Miller-Giles to tell her that she got a flat tire with her children in the car. Minutes later, Parker was on the side of the road changing the flat tire.
Parker made a good impression on the board as well, Miller-Giles said. When he interviewed for the job, he listened without making lots of promises, she said.
As soon as he took over in Ecorse, Parker told the district’s principals what was expected, said Elijah Rozier, Ecorse’s middle school principal. He wanted to see progress.
“He said, ‘If you’re not about change, if you’re not about these children, you can put your keys on the table and walk out the door,'” Rozier said.
Over the next four years, Ecorse’s schools improved. The elementary school was removed from the priority list in February. The high school has implemented Project Excel, an honors program for students. Next year, Parker hopes the high school will add AP classes to its curriculum.
Administrators say he also has been innovative with the district’s limited resources. Early on during his time at Ecorse, the decision was made to eliminate the high school music teacher to save money. So Parker formed a partnership with a local college to offer music lessons to students.
And while Ecorse has had a dropout rate that crept up to 16 percent during Parker’s time, the Michigan Department of Education’s most recent numbers for the 2015-16 school year show the rate at 8 percent — just under the state average of 9 percent.
Still, Ecorse schools are struggling. The 2016 graduation rate was 68 percent, more than 10 percentage points below the state average, and Ecorse High School is still considered a “priority school.” The Michigan Department of Education investigated Ecorse for misuse of a School Improvement Grant during the 2015-16 school year. Department officials declined to give more information, except to say the investigation has been handed to federal officials and the elementary school lost its grant.
According to a report on WXYZ, a Detroit television station, investigators are looking into allegations that the district used some grant money to purchase gift cards for teachers and that thousands of dollars in gift cards were then missing.
The federal Office of the Inspector General, which investigates fraud, would not confirm nor deny investigative activity, according to a spokesperson with the U.S. Department of Education. It is the office’s policy not to comment on investigative cases.
“I won’t get into details until they close the book on it, but there were some structural issues at one of the schools, and we were able to clear up those issues and move forward,” Parker said, when asked about the investigation.
When the district hired Parker, board members had expected he would stay longer than four years, Miller-Giles said. But in that time, she believes he’s given Ecorse the tools for success.
“We’re still facing challenges,” she said. “But we’re a lot further ahead than where we were. He saved us.”
Turnaround years
Early in his career, Parker earned a reputation for his diligence in and out of the classroom.
Garnet Green, who was principal of Cleveland Middle School in Detroit when Parker was a young social studies teacher in the early 2000s, remembered Parker getting kids so excited to learn that he’d often hear them passionately chatting about Parker’s class at lunch.
Green was the one to move Parker from the classroom to the administration in 2006. As dean of students, Parker shined, Green said.
“He was there in the morning by the time I arrived. And when I left at night, I had to remind him that it was time to go,” Green said. “He’d say, ‘OK, Mr. Green, a couple more minutes and then I’ll go.’ And I’d think, ‘Yeah, that’s not going to happen.'”
After graduate school from the University of Michigan, Parker spent 10 years in Detroit schools, including serving as a principal at Osborn College Prep Academy, which has a history of gang and violence problems.
Cleveland Middle School was in a rough neighborhood, too, Green said, its 1,400 students living amid drug-dealing and gang activity.
Parker was a mentor for many children who didn’t have fathers, Green recalled. And he connected with parents so they would use him as a resource. If a kid acted up, Green said, Parker wasn’t above calling the parent in the middle of class or even making a house call.
“He had a bank of parents that he would call before PTA meetings,” Green said. “His parents would show up faithfully just because Mr. Parker called.”
Green remembered one dismissal time when he was stuck in a meeting and Parker handled the flow of students to their buses by himself. When Green walked outside, he expected the worst, but instead found Parker standing at the flag pole, not barking directions to students, but using hand signals as the kids obediently walked to the spots Parker directed them to.
In 2010, Parker left Detroit to be the principal at both the middle and high schools in Harper Woods, a suburban district just to the north of Detroit with fewer than 2,000 students. Harper Woods’ racial makeup dramatically had changed in a 10-year span, from mostly white to mostly black. That change, however, wasn’t reflected in the teaching staff, which remained mostly white, resulting in a division between students and staff. Parker saw it as a challenge.
The first African-American principal at Harper Woods, Parker brought in speakers and groups with a history in the black community to help teachers better understand their students.
He created a mentoring program for teachers and students that’s similar to the one used at Allentown’s new, innovative high school, Building 21. Each teacher met every morning with an assigned group of about 15 students, who were encouraged to talk about whatever was on their minds.
Even Parker mentored a group.
“One of my babies sent me a text today,” Parker said in a March interview with The Morning Call, referring to a past student. “We’ve been working on her graduation project. She’s finishing at Miles College in Alabama. Those kids in my advocacy group, they are my babies.”
Parker’s cellphone is full of numbers of former students and their parents. “I think I have 200,” he said. “At least.”
His Twitter account includes photos of himself biking to school with children and selfies with the Ecorse high school band.
Parker stayed three years at Harper Woods and during that time, the district’s graduation rate — which was in the high 80s when Parker started — crept up to 94 percent, with the dropout rate plummeting to as low as 3 percent, an 8 percentage point drop from the year before Parker arrived, state records show.
“Thomas has career aspirations, and that’s consistent with being driven,” said Todd Biederwolf, Harper Woods’ superintendent and Parker’s former boss. “He was ready for the next step in his career.”
When Parker told Biederwolf he was offered the job in Ecorse, Biederwolf told him not to take it.
“Ecorse Public Schools were in trouble,” Biederwolf said. “I advised him not to take the position in Ecorse because I didn’t think you could win there. I thought the challenge was so great that it couldn’t be done.”
But Parker insisted he could fix Ecorse schools.
At the Harper Woods board meeting in which Parker’s resignation was approved, the district secretary cried, according to a story on C&Gnews.com. A student publicly thanked him for raising expectations and another for being a role model.
“The level of emotion was high for someone who had been with the district only a few years, but those years were key, turnaround years,” the story noted.
When the board president called for the motion that would free Parker to take the job in Ecorse, all for a moment, were silent until the board reluctantly accepted his resignation.
‘Determined to make it’
Michigan is a long way from Mississippi and for Parker, that was true literally as well as figuratively. Growing up on a farm in Tillatoba, Miss., a rural community of fewer than 100 people about 85 miles south of Memphis, Tenn., he saw education as the key to a better life.
“My daddy always told me, there are two options in life: You can either work with your hands or you can work with your head,” Parker said.
He decided early on he wanted to work with his head.
His mother, who had a high school diploma, worked at a jeans factory. His father, Edward, never graduated from high school, and along with farming worked a multitude of different jobs over the years to support the family, including cutting down trees.
Growing up on a farm “drove me nuts,” Parker said.
His mother, Carolyn Parker-Smith, could tell. As a young boy, Parker did all of his chores, including feeding the pigs and cutting wood. But on his own time, he picked blackberries to sell to neighbors and did lots of other jobs that would enable him to save money, his mother said.
“Farm work was OK, but he always knew that he wanted and could do better,” she said. “He was determined to make it.”
Parker-Smith always knew her middle child was smart. But she realized just how smart he was when his second-grade teacher, noticing he finished his work so much quicker than the other students, challenged him with fourth-grade work.
Knowing he wanted to be the first in his family to attend college, Parker looked to major in forestry at a state university.
But his guidance counselor, Shirley Brown, asked for his help in an informal experiment. In Mississippi, most high school students take the ACT for college entrance, but Brown wanted to see how students would do on the SAT. Knowing that Parker was a good student and impressed that he taught himself how to play chess by reading books, she said she encouraged him to take the PSAT, which is used in scholarship programs.
He took the test without studying and became a National Achievement Scholar, a program created by the National Merit Scholarship Corp. in the 1960s to increase academic opportunities for black scholars.
“I expected the best out of him,” Brown said.
Because of the national honor, Howard University in Washington, D.C. offered Parker a full scholarship.
“I had to go to the encyclopedia to look up Howard and where it was,” Parker said. “I knew its reputation, that it was a very good school, but I didn’t know where it was. It wasn’t even in my thought process.”
The scholarship was a game-changer, he said. “If it wasn’t for that, I would have been somewhere in a forest with those khaki little shorts.”
In October of his freshman year at Howard, Parker’s father died of cancer at 43 years old. He wouldn’t see his son become not only the first in the family to graduate from college but to go on to earn a master’s degree in educational foundations and policy at the University of Michigan.
“His father was a nice, hardworking guy,” said Debra Petty, the assistant superintendent of Coffeeville School District when Parker attended. “And I think Thomas looks like his dad and has a lot of his dad’s attributions. His dad was a good guy.”
During his career, Parker has credited Petty and Brown with inspiring him to make a difference in children’s lives as they did in his and countless other lives.
“I had great educators along the way,” Parker said. “I’ve been able to provide a better place and space for my family in ways that I would not have been able to had these great educators not pushed me on the path.
“And that’s what I preach to my colleagues and administrators,” he said. “We have the ability to make an impact on kids’ lives that they may not realize until years down the line.”
Twitter @Jpalochko
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PROFILE:
Thomas Parker becomes Allentown School District superintendent on July 1.
Age: 38
Hometown: Tillatoba, Miss.
Experience: Superintendent of Ecorse School District in Michigan since 2013; principal of Harper Woods High School in Michigan from 2010-2013; social studies teacher and administrator in Detroit Public Schools from 2001-2010.
Education: Bachelor of arts degree from Howard University; master of arts from the University of Michigan; working on doctorate in education from Eastern Michigan University.
Salary: $175,000 per year, five-year contract.
Family: Wife, Laurin; daughter, London, 9.
