Educator likely to become next Lincoln County school superintendent noted for her dynamics, professionalism — and ability to step in immediately

 

By KENNETH LIPP/YachatsNews

The Lincoln County School District’s board is on course to make a young, dynamic senior administrator its new superintendent, bypassing a professional search or internal application process to replace its retiring chief administrator.

Majalise Tolan, 43, is an educator of two decades, an author, LCSD’s secondary education director and apparent successor to superintendent Karen Gray, 65, who is retiring July 1 after five years heading the district.

The superintendent is the county’s top education executive, overseeing a general fund budget of $84 million serving about 5,000 students, with 600 employees spread over four high schools, 10 elementary and middle/junior high schools, one online K-12 school and three public charter schools. School locations range from Waldport in the south, Eddyville, Siletz and Toledo in the east, through Newport and north to Lincoln City.

The school board voted 4-1 Jan. 10 to enter an initial agreement with Tolan pending completion of the application process, and to potentially offer a contract during a Feb. 14 board meeting. Waldport’s Senitila McKinley was the lone dissenter, but board members made no individual comments on their votes outside of an earlier executive (closed) session.

Board chair Liz Martin said before the vote that they chose between hiring a consultant to conduct a national search, taking internal applications, or negotiating with Tolan. She said she was “very confident” in their decision and stressed the board’s explicit power to make it.

The process

The move to hand pick a known entity rather than chance a poor match with a national search was a strong signal that most board members like the district’s direction. The outgoing superintendent is also an ardent supporter — Gray at one point composing a list of 30 reasons why Tolan should be the next superintendent.

But the closed nature of the process raised concerns from some community members, the teacher’s union president and one board member.

In interviews Wednesday with YachatsNews, three board members who voted yes confirmed they were motivated by a desire to keep the district on the same track.

Martin said hiring Tolan was a great opportunity — a highly qualified candidate who’s familiar with the district at a time when demand for superintendents, like for all other positions in education, is extraordinarily high. Martin has taken part in hiring three superintendents during her 14 years on the board.

“Each one was unique to that specific time that we were hiring for what we thought the district needed,” Martin said.

She said there are 28 open superintendent positions in Oregon, with a turnover of 70 percent out of 197 superintendents the last three years. The district would be competing with many others for scarce candidates.

National recruitment can also cost up to $40,000 and take six months, Martin said.

“The board has an opportunity, and I say ‘opportunity’ very loudly, to hire a nationwide candidate right here, established in our district,” she said. “We just weathered a very difficult time with the pandemic, and we now have the right person to continue with advances we have made in student achievement and getting two schools out of ‘school improvement’ status. A strong leadership team is in place that has worked with this person, and they will continue on to do great things that need to be done in the district.”

Board member Mike Rawles echoed Martin’s comments.

“We’re in a position right now where we’re in pretty good shape compared to most school districts,” Rawles said. “We weathered the pandemic well and we’re moving forward well.”

Rawles said Tolan had an amazing background, was highly intelligent and “an in-hand individual.”

“If we go through a process where we have to go outside the district, it might take us longer, and then that person might come in and try to make changes to what we’re doing right now,” he said.

Rawles added another consideration — the difficulty in finding housing even for higher-paying positions — complicates recruitment and retention from the outside.

Peter Vince, who taught at Toledo High from 1989 until 2016, said he understood concern about not having an open process.

“Part of it is, we have this really great person in our district who is a really great fit,” Vince said. “But there’s this saying that I’ve heard before about hiring a superintendent: ‘If a district needs to go in a different direction, that’s a good time to do a search’.”

Vince said Tolan played a big part in improving professionalism among district employees and has given presentations on professional development with national experts. The district is also in good financial condition, he said, and Tolan has an aptitude for budgeting.

“I think what’s significant about her capabilities is, among other things, is her ability to form teams and be a part of teams to run things,” Vince said. “The old model of the single — dare I say it, male — superintendent who has authoritarian power within the district has been shown to be much weaker than the ability to cooperate.”

As enthusiastic about their decisions as those board members are, the call was not unanimous.

McKinley told YachatsNews Wednesday that her opposition was not about Tolan but rather the board’s failure to apply its equity principles to the hiring process.

“Picking a superintendent is a top priority as a board, and I feel like we’re rushing the process,” McKinley said. “We’re not getting a feel from the staff and community, and I feel like we’re taking a shortcut. It has nothing to do with the person selected. For me, I’m here to hold the door open for equity.”

Teachers union president Peter Lohonyay has also criticized the direct job offer as premature and lacking public input.

From the beginning

The district has scheduled four public forums next week where Tolan will introduce herself and answer questions. She met with YachatsNews on Monday to talk about her background and vision. The interview took place between a meeting in Newport and heading off to Lincoln City to help coach a basketball game.

Athletics have always been an important part of Tolan’s career, from playing sports in school up to her current doctoral work focused on recruiting and retaining women athletic directors.

Tolan grew up in Rochester, Wash., an unincorporated community off Interstate 5 roughly halfway between Portland and Seattle. Her high school was bigger than Toledo, smaller than Taft and culturally similar to the former, she said.

“It’s a very rural bedroom community to Olympia, and when I’m in Toledo, it does remind me of friends from high school,” she said.

Tolan said she always knew she would be a teacher, just like her parents, except for a few months during which she wanted to be a college athletic administrator.

“Education was our family lifestyle and continues to be so,” Tolan said. “I grew up at Rochester High School, just like our own children have grown up at Taft 7-12.”

After earning her master’s degree in teaching from Eastern Oregon University in La Grande, she taught and coached at the high school there for two years until her husband, Jake, completed his degree. They both then moved for teaching jobs in Milton-Freewater in far northeastern Oregon, where they stayed for three years while she also earned her initial administrator’s license.

Tolan sought an administrator path relatively early in her career, always gravitating toward leadership roles – from team captain and student body president in Rochester to activities director and union bargaining committee member in La Grande. Her practicum, the applied portion of earning her administrator’s license, focused on athletics but also involved a lot of work at the elementary level.

In 2008, Tolan applied for the open assistant principal position at Taft 7-12. She didn’t expect to get the job after just five years teaching but had a connection to principal Scott Reed from graduate school at Eastern Oregon. She got the job and moved with her growing family to Lincoln City, where they’ve been since.

Tolan’s husband is a career-tech teacher in forestry and coach at Taft 7-12, and has taught at elementary and middle schools in Lincoln City and Newport. They have four children: Claira is a Taft graduate and now a sophomore at Arizona State University; Alicenn is a junior and Kol is a freshman at Taft 7-12; and James is in sixth grade at Taft Elementary-Middle.

“It was a party in the parking lot when we took (James) to the last day of elementary school,” Tolan said. “We’ve had kids in the schools here for 15 years. We moved here when Claira was in kindergarten. Now we’re finally graduating out of a building for good.”

Tolan had been at Taft 7-12 for a year and a half when she was moved to Newport Intermediate and Isaac Newton Magnet schools to fill in for the principal during maternity leave. That principal ended up not returning to the position and Tolan was appointed principal.

Isaac Newton had a separate instructional model — with less than 150 students in sixth, seventh and eighth grades, and later just seventh and eighth — housed within Newport Intermediate’s facilities.

“It had a lot of integrated learning components,” Tolan said. “Seventh and eighth graders were in blended classes … and then they would have a projects-based period with a hands-on application of whatever they were learning.”

She also oversaw dozens of teachers responsible for hundreds more students in fourth through eighth grade at the intermediate school. Three years after she returned to Lincoln City in 2013, the district closed Newton and redistributed grades among Newport schools.

The district brought Tolan back to Taft 7-12 as principal for five years. She made the move to the central office in 2018, first as school improvement and secondary curriculum administrator and now as director of high schools and the district’s athletic director.

She co-authored the January 2022 book “She Leads: The Women’s Guide to a Career in Educational Leadership,” and is a consultant on that topic. After the book was published, Tolan said individual board members asked her if she would ever be willing to take the superintendent job.

Looking ahead

Tolan said describing a vision for Lincoln County schools is not hard – thanks to a solid strategic plan by the board.

“I really see a vision of Lincoln County continuing its trajectory of the board’s strategic plan that they have in place and to find the opportunities that present themselves with time,” she said.

“Time brings opportunity for change. It doesn’t have to be an overhaul every time there is something new if you stay the course on the primary focus, and the board’s strategic plan has a strong focus.”

The goals of the board’s 2020-25 strategic plan are posted to the district website. In summary, the board aims to achieve student success through equity; influence local and state policy; maintain its facilities; study forming a political action committee ahead of a possible 2026 bond election; and enhance community engagement. Those broad goals are broken down further with timelines and indicators of success.

The district faces stark challenges for the remainder of that five-year plan that are common across the nation, including severe staffing shortages and declining enrollment.

Tolan said it remained to be seen how her doctoral work related to athletic directors, which she hopes to complete in spring, might apply to recruiting and retaining staff more broadly.

“The program that (human resources director Tiana DeVries) has put into place with Grow Your Own, it’s a model across probably the country, definitely across the state,” she said.

The Oregon Department of Education has given the district $450,000 for its Grow Your Own Teacher program designed to create a pipeline between county high schools, Oregon Coast Community College and Western Oregon University for students and unlicensed staff to become teachers. Ideally, some return to the district.

On the question of a bond on the ballot in three years, Tolan said the board would evaluate district facilities to decide if they need to ask voters for an increase in property taxes. She said she didn’t know of any specific planned use for such a bond.

Internally, there has been discussion of new construction in South Beach and Lincoln City. With declining enrollment, Tolan said, some people might question why schools need more space.

“Part of it is just the maintenance that goes into existing buildings, or keeping labs in current condition and maintaining best practices in classrooms,” she said.

State officials said last week Oregon schools are unlikely to rebound from a statewide enrollment loss of 36,000 students since Covid shuttered then stuttered in-person classes for two years. Lincoln County enrollment has dropped by about 400, including students displaced by the 2020 wildfires.

Four hundred fewer students means millions less in funding to the district each year, a difference that was made up the previous two years by federal pandemic relief funds. The last of that federal money runs out next year.

The response, Tolan said, involves going to the administrative team to help determine what schools saw enrollment losses, as those 400 students did not all come from one building or evenly from every area.

“How do we make sure we’re providing the right service model to meet the needs of all of our students and then what does that really look like as far as being responsible in running a building and a budget,” Tolan said. “You can go for so long hoping they come back, but when it’s becoming pretty evident that Oregon’s not seeing the recoup of those students right now, then we have to really look at where they left from and then what we’re going to do to keep providing strong education.”

Forums next week

In announcing its initial agreement with Tolan two weeks ago, the school board also announced public forums four days in a row starting Monday, Jan. 30 at Toledo Jr/Sr High.

Tolan has prepared a Powerpoint presentation which starts with a “If you really knew me” section giving her background. She said this is in keeping with the district’s effort to consider the whole student, not just what staff sees at school.

She’ll then take a look at the five major goals in the board’s strategic plan and what she sees being done to further those. Then she’ll open up the floor to questions.

Tolan said she’s heard there have been objections to the hiring process, and she doesn’t want that to keep people away from the forums.

“I hope people come — I’ll email or call them, but I’d rather talk to people and see people,” Tolan said.

The remaining three forums are Tuesday, Jan. 31 at Taft 7-12, Wednesday, Feb. 1 at Newport High and Thursday, Feb. 2 at Waldport High. All will run from 6-7 p.m. and take place in the schools’ libraries.

• Kenneth Lipp is YachatsNews’ full-time reporter and can be reached at KenLipp@YachatsNews.com