King

King

Announced as the new superintendent of Sampson County Schools on June 20, Dr. Jamie King is coming to town with listening ears, but ready to get to work. He’s ready to become a part of the community and have the opportunity to make a difference in Sampson County, he said during a telephone interview Friday.

King will be in town today, Tuesday, June 27, at a special-called meeting of the Sampson County Board of Education to meet the staff and the public. That meeting begins at 4 p.m. in the Sampson County Board of Education Auditorium at 437 Rowan Road.

Seeing an opportunity to make an impact on a town in his home state made King feel that the job of superintendent in Sampson was one he wanted to apply for. “Sampson County will be a great place to live,” he said, noting that the decision to accept the job was an easy one.

“For me, the beginning is really about listening — it’s really about hearing from people, going around visiting every school, every building we have to make sure that I know what we’re doing, where we’re going — that I know who the people are,” King said, explaining the style he intends to implement as he takes his post.

“You realize the effect that you can have in those situations, and I know for me that’s something I really enjoy, so this is me continuing that progress to impact the most kids and the most families that I can.”

The new superintendent said he intends to hit the ground running, and hopes to make an impact on the children who will soon be under his charge.

“As you move through jobs, you realize, ooh, I could have a bigger impact if I do this,” said King of his early growth as an educator. “As the teacher, they always say, you only have your four walls, so you only get to have an effect on the kids that are in your classroom. Then, as a principal, you have an effect on the whole school and community.”

As superintendent, he noted, you have to see an even bigger picture.

“I’m very hands-on, but, though I hold the position, I have to listen to the people around me to know what the wants and needs are in Sampson.”

Though his general vision of what a superintendent should be is heavily rooted in listening, there is also a responsibility for academic evolution and keeping things running within a large network of things to address for students.

“Ultimately, it’s a large organization; it’s not just educating kids, it’s also getting kids to school with bussing, keeping them healthy with school nutrition, providing mental health counseling, helping parents figure things out when they don’t know what’s going on around the school. There are so many things that have to happen before a kid can even walk in that classroom,” expressed King, recognizing the scale of keeping a school system going, having been a teacher, principal, superintendent, consultant, and more over his 25-year career.

King also acknowledged the unique circumstances under which he will be taking on the job. The National Assessment of Educational Progress released a comparison of 2022 data with 2019 data and found that average math scores are now back to what they were in 1990, with the average reading score falling to 2004 levels.

“There’s definitely a nationwide trend of student scores declining, especially in math, unfortunately,” King acknowledged. “I would say when we look at math, most of us are still teaching math and doing the math the same way we learned it when we were in school. We have to make sure that we focus on kids understanding the concepts — too many times, we teach students rote memorization in math and tell them the answers before making them struggle, yet we know from research that kids need productive struggle. They need to grapple with the subject in order to truly learn it.”

His response didn’t jump to Covid as the sole reason for such a decline in scores, rather he addresses the underlying flaw in the way math, for instance, is taught at its core.“In 2023 we can’t be still doing education as we did in the 1980s or 1970s — we have to always be looking at updating the ways we think about education. There’s no one size fits all.”

“We know that having kids sit at home for months on end, not having interaction with other students or a lot of interaction with their teachers, it did cause a lot of mental anxiety for kids, and we can’t forget about that, but at the same time we can’t stop learning so we have to find a way of adding and backing up concepts that may have been missed over covid,” King said of the long-term effects of the lockdown.

“We have to keep evolving because we want our kids in Sampson to be the best, and the only way we can do that is by making sure that the professionals and the employees in Sampson are the best as well,” he said, acknowledging that it takes an active effort, community-wide, to find ways to mitigate the long-term effects of having education styles that make the students all feel included and accepted within schools and communities, given the challenges they face in trying to take in all who come to the schools.

“A great strength of public education is that we take all kids. I think that there’s a lot to be said about that when every student that walks up to our door, we enroll, we register, and we educate them.” This is far different from the ability of private schools to pick their students. “When one school is judged on every kid that walks in the door, and another is judged on a group of kids they hand-pick, that’s not comparing apples to apples,”

This makes Dr. King feel skittish about the effect of the proposed expansion of the programs, like the Opportunity Scholarship Program, that uses tax dollars to then allow families to support their kids going to private school. “When we continuously take money from public education, we keep taking money and resources from those who need it the most, and public schools cannot continue to do more with less,” said King.

“Ultimately, we all have to play on the same playing field, so if tax dollars are going to private schools or charter schools, then they should be playing by the same rules,” King said.