Sowing Results From Joint Labors

Profile

Teamwork, crisis management, perseverance. These cornerstones of the superintendency are lessons Freddie Williamson learned long before he ever reached a classroom. He was raised on a 600-acre family farm in Sampson County, N.C., where everyone helped to produce tobacco, corn and soybeans.

Despite not having graduated from high school themselves, Williamson’s parents valued education deeply and made it a priority for each of their 13 children. After majoring in agriculture education at North Carolina A&T State University, Williamson turned to teaching and soon found himself drawn to leadership.

He served as coach, assistant principal, program director and associate superintendent in surrounding districts before assuming the superintendency of Hoke County Schools in Raeford, N.C., a decade ago, a role he considers his “destiny.” He was named a 2016 finalist for AASA’s National Superintendent of the Year award.

When he arrived at Hoke County, located near Fayetteville, the district was on the verge of a state takeover due to persistently low student performance. Last year, after having more than quintupled the number of students taking AP classes and increasing the graduation rate from 47 percent to 75 percent, it was named the Southern Regional Education Board’s outstanding school district. The turnaround, he says, stems from everyone pitching in, akin to what he experienced on the family farm.

“Low wealth is not an excuse in Hoke County, but it is a reality,” he says. As such, low literacy was one of the principal challenges. Under his leadership, the district developed a literacy academy for teachers to reinforce common understanding of the new expectations and new K-12 instructional guides in all subjects.

These improvements were possible because he built leadership capacity, surrounding himself in the 8,600-student system with highly qualified educators who spoke a common language. “Success is achieved when operations occur in an aligned management system rather than through performance of random acts of improvement,” he says.

That sentiment is echoed by Roger Edwards, principal of Hoke County High School. “He never does anything on the spur of the moment,” Edwards says. “He’s always looking ahead, asking ‘What’s the next step?’”

The next step now is to focus on career and college readiness, which Williamson views as one and the same. “The skill sets needed for college and job entry are basically the same, so you’ve got to give equal weight to both,” he says.

Nick Sojka, the school board attorney, was awed by the way Williamson spearheaded the opening of Sandy Grove Middle School in 2013, the first net-zero energy, LEED Platinum-certified school in the nation to be leased from a private developer.

“The school was desperately needed in terms of student capacity,” Sojka explains, “but his leadership extended far beyond just being the CEO of the school system. He had the single-minded vision to build that school and finance it in a way that had never been done in North Carolina. It became a rallying point for the whole community.”

Though he’s come a long way from the family farm, Williamson still prefers to spend as much of his free time outdoors as possible. When he and wife Shirley are not with their four sons and seven grandchildren, Williamson is back to working the earth as a gardener. “If it’s green and growing, we love it.”