A year ago, a group of Richmond's leading employers proposed to the Mayor and City Council that they ask the Virginia legislature to change the City Charter, replacing an elected School Board with a board appointed by the City Council in cooperation with the Mayor.

The group's logic was that such an approach would insure that the Board had the ability to not only develop and implement educational policies, which it already does, but also to properly align and support those policies with a budget, which the Board is not now able to do. That's because the City Council and Mayor control the purse strings. (To save space, we will not discuss today the current Council-Mayor spat over the City budget, other than to note that it might be a good idea if some of those offices were filled by appointment as well … )

Providing for appointment of Board members by officials who are elected by the public means that citizens would continue to ultimately control the School Board, the group argued, inasmuch as they would elect the people making Board appointments.

The idea ran into a populist buzz saw and was quickly discarded. However, if you remember the adage about losing the battle and not the war, you should not assume that this group and its broader, business-community constituency, is no longer in the field of battle. To the contrary, it seems likely that the business community will play a decisive role in filling the community's most important appointed leadership position -- RPS Superintendent.

So, on one level, it's great that many of our corporate and institutional leaders support finding a strong new schools superintendent. Many of the CEO's and other organizational leaders interested in helping to improve public education are knowledgeable about the issues. They have talented staff people with the time and ability, not only to rigorously evaluate and assess superintendent candidates, but to go out and find them. It's a safe bet that the best choice for Richmond's next school superintendent is not out pounding the pavement looking for work these days. The best people already have jobs and, like our own recently departed Police Chief Rodney Monroe, are in communities that badly want to keep them.

Richmond's major employers also have strong stakes in city schools that produce more and better-qualified potential employees. And city economic development executives would love to be able to tout the quality of our public schools to enhance their ability to recruit new organizations to the area. Today, they nimbly perform Olympic floor exercises to draw attention away from this topic.

So, there's no doubt that many of Richmond's movers and shakers have valid reasons to be actively engaged in the search for our next public schools' leader. Further, we must face the unpleasant truth that Richmond's embarrassing record of City-Schools discord is a major turn-off in attracting a new superintendent. What do you think a candidate would think after asking departing Superintendent Dr. Deborah Jewel-Sherman how she was treated? You'd better believe that an attractive candidate would demand titanium-clad assurances from the business community that it would walk the walk with a new superintendent, no matter how long and arduous the journey.

Still, the support of these Richmond leaders simply is not sufficient. A new school superintendent must have public support. This requirement, as much as anything else, helps explain why last year's group of 26 leading employers have been so quiet during the past year. They face a tough process in actively supporting meaningful enhancements in public education without that very support becoming a “kiss of death” in the eyes of the general public.

The value of public involvement and support in improving Richmond has been powerfully demonstrated in the process surrounding the Downtown Master Plan. There is absolutely no doubt that the plan now awaiting consideration by the City Council is more strongly oriented to community and public uses because citizens got involved and became passionate and effective advocates.

It's also clear that Richmond's traditional "top down" way of doing things has recently reasserted itself, with Plan changes reflecting preferences of some property owners and companies with a strong downtown presence. Still, the public's voice was effective in this process and public support for the Plan that finally emerges from City Council will be crucial in implementing many of its recommendations.

Getting the public equally involved in Citywide educational issues would be a desirable, impressive and perhaps impossible achievement. Parents and neighborhood residents already are actively involved in issues of their local schools. But taking this parochial commitment and turning it into a unified public voice of Richmond goes far beyond electing nine School Board members and putting them in a room.

Achieving this objective would require an ambitious and extended community education and communications program. Equally essential, it would require willingness by the City's non-elected business and civic leaders to truly seek and value the public's informed thinking.

To date, there is little outward evidence that the public is much interested in its new school superintendent. Information hearings were poorly publicized and attended. They did not seem to be a priority and, perhaps, got lost over the summer in the higher visibility of the elective races for Mayor, City Council and School Board.

Next week, we'll talk about the challenges facing the next superintendent. For now, we'll leave you with the membership list of the superintendent's search committee. Let them know what you think is needed in a new schools leader. Your voice can matter. Use it.

Belinda C. Anderson, Virginia Union University, president
Ben Campbell, Richmond Hill, rector
Jo Lynne DeMary, former state superintendent of public instruction
Wade Ellegood, Richmond Education Association, president
Thomas F. Farrell II, Dominion Resources Inc., chairman
William H. Goodwin Jr., CCA Industries, president
C.T. Hill, SunTrust Bank, Mid-Atlantic, president
David A. Hudson, Linwood Holton Elementary School principal
Melvin Law, a former School Board chairman
Meiko S. Manuel-Timmons, Richmond Council of PTAs, vice president
Marcus J. Newsome, Chesterfield County school superintendent
Thomas J. Shields, Center for Leadership in Education at the University of Richmond, director
Michael E. Szymanczyk, Altria, chairman
James E. Ukrop, First Market Bank and Ukrop's Super Markets Inc., chairman
(City Administrator Sheila Hill-Christian was on this committee prior to her recent resignation; a replacement has not been publicly named.)

About the author -- Phil Moeller, a recovering newspaper journalist, owns JD Communications and previously was a columnist and business editor at The Baltimore Sun and Louisville Courier-Journal.