Youthful Energy Applied in Chattanooga

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SOME OF BRYAN JOHNSON’S best career training came early, although he didn’t know it at the time.

As a child, Johnson, now superintendent of Hamilton County Schools in Chattanooga, Tenn., spent his Sundays at the Baptist church his father led south of his hometown of Nashville. Often, he went with his father after the service on pastoral visits to the sick and elderly.

“It really helped to mature me.” he says. “It still helps me on what’s most important.”

Johnson was just 34 when he became superintendent of the 44,500-student Hamilton County district three years ago. In that time, he has led a remarkable resurgence in the schools. When he arrived in 2017, the district ranked 130th out of the state’s 146 districts in academic growth. By 2019, it was second.

The quick turnaround has gained Johnson notice, including being named a 2020 Leader to Learn From by Education Week.

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way when he was majoring in business administration at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn. Following his junior year, he abruptly changed direction after a football coach urged him to take a summer job counseling at-risk youths. “Within about a month, I fell in love with working with kids,” he says.

After graduate work in education and 13 years as a high school teacher, principal, director of high schools and chief academic officer in the Clarksville-Montgomery County School System, he got the top job in Hamilton County. Johnson’s first big move in Chattanooga was to institute leadership training for principals, assistant principals and principal supervisors, using the McREL Balanced Leadership model to create a common focus and language.

“It’s really moving more people toward a professional learning community,” he says. “You can get the best resource, but if you don’t implement it with intentionality, you’re going to have problems. Implementation is the difference between things being successful or not.”

The superintendent’s most striking initiative to date is creating Future Ready Institutes in the district’s high schools. After gauging student interests and working with area businesses to identify emerging job opportunities, he offered a variety of career pathway programs to the schools. Now there are more than two dozen such institutes across the district, from health careers to architecture to aviation, and Johnson says they have been a key to the academic improvement.

“When you get an interested student, a more engaged student, everything moves,” he says.

How has he been able to get so many people on board with his vision so quickly?

“I think one of Bryan’s superpowers is that he’s very relational and very approachable and likable, and people really get excited about the way he motivates and inspires,” says Nakia Towns, Johnson’s chief of staff.

“Bryan is an A player, and he’s not afraid to surround himself with other A players,” adds Towns, an assistant state education com-missioner before Johnson hired her in 2018.

Johnson hired 30-year education veteran Ken Bradshaw to be his chief operations officer in 2018. A year later, Bradshaw was appointed to the superintendency of the Richmond County School System in Augusta, Ga.

“I give him credit for molding me, even in the latter part of my career, just by my watching him that one year,” Bradshaw says. “He has a very charismatic way of sharing his vision. He’s young, but he has a lot of wisdom for his age.”