Interim schools superintendent Roy Mullins faces long challenges in a short term

by Betty Bean

Roy Mullins spent the Fourth of July weekend wrestling big nasty tangles of rusty barbed wire—a potentially useful exercise for someone just named interim superintendent of Knox County's schools.

Mullins, 59, works his daddy's 197-acre Corryton farm. He does it out of love and out of duty. His father, Worth Mullins, died of liver cancer 18 years ago; his mother, Mildred, is 86 and lives there yet. There were fences down and cattle eligible to run loose, so he fixed what was broken.

"Cattle are pretty good not to stray too far—they know where their parameters are," says Mullins the following Monday morning. He is back in his office in the Andrew Johnson Building contemplating the job of riding herd on classrooms and lunchrooms and zero tolerance and buses and 50-something thousand students and 6,000-odd employees who generally lack the compliant, bovine nature of the residents of his pastures.

Soft-spoken and quick to smile, he is taking on the job of interim schools superintendent in a year of too little money, widespread discontent among teachers, and tension between the school system and County Commission, which holds the purse strings—a robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul kind of year that he inherited from former Superintendent Allen Morgan after he announced his retirement last month.

Will his administration be primarily in a holding pattern, or will he lead a move to persuade a post-election County Commission that money for the schools must be found?

"Both," he says. "My priorities are to deal with the fact that we certainly didn't get the amount we requested in the budget. We're not going to have the money to hire the new teachers we need to meet the BEP [Basic Education Plan—the state's "blueprint" for education, which requires lowered pupil/teacher ratios]. We need to work toward selling Commission on the proposition that we need to have a tax increase in order to meet our needs—the BEP, teachers' raises, and technology. I will push for funding to meet those needs."

Mullins faces what looks to be an uphill, well-nigh impossible, and ultimately thankless job—a job for which he was drafted. Some local pundits who want to ensure a national search for a new schools chief insist that the interim superintendent should agree not to seek the permanent position. Others, including influential Edison School proponents who favor handing over management of Maynard Elementary School to the private, for-profit school management firm which is the last vestige of the Whittle Communications empire, want someone more sympathetic to their point of view.

"I guess I drew the short string," he says, smiling his easy, country-boy smile. "I've never applied for a position, except teacher. I guess I was asked to do this because everybody wants to see continuity. I'm very proud of our progress."

Proof of this progress are last year's test scores showing that Knox County's fifth graders, for example, are grading out on the 73rd median national percentile and far outperforming their peers in the state's other three major metropolitan areas—none of which rank any higher than Chattanooga's distant second-place 57th percentile standing. This is accomplished with the lowest per-pupil annual spending in the four big cities ($4,979 here compared to Nashville's $6,165, Memphis' $5,712, and Chattanooga's $5,553).

And what about the Edison School?

"I am a proponent of public education and using tax dollars to support it. I do have concerns about for-profit education, and I sincerely believe that our democracy is based on the fact that we've got a free public education system for everybody who wants it. I won't support anything that erodes support for public education."

Philosophically, he says, it's unfair to require the interim superintendent to be excluded from consideration for the permanent job.

"Whether I apply or don't apply is my decision. I feel that opportunity ought to be there rather than be totally eliminated on the front end...I fully expect that the supporters of the Edison School will do what they can to make sure that I don't have a shot at the position."

But there's at least one school board member determined to make sure Mullins has a shot, if he wants it.

Sam Anderson, who has publicly locked horns with the Edison School supporters, supports the plan of having community meetings for input about hiring a new superintendent, and he favors a national search. But he wants Mullins to be included.

"I don't think that he should have to take his name off the list—I think the board has the right to choose whomever the board wants. If that person comes out of the search, fine. But if the board feels no one we interview could do a better job than Roy Mullins, I think the board has the right to make him the permanent superintendent." Anderson says he has vivid personal knowledge of Mullins' commitment to education.

"I took chemistry during the spring semester of my sophomore year at Gibbs High School. I was running track and playing baseball, and had the class 6th period. I was a C-minus, I guess. He called me in and said, 'I'll give you a C if you promise me you'll take the class again.'

"Mullins was promoted to assistant principal the next year, so in the back of my mind I figured he wouldn't even be around. But when I got my schedule my junior year, it said 'Chemistry—teacher, Roy Mullins.' He went back and taught one more semester of chemistry to keep his word to me. That was a sacrifice for him. I ended up with a B-plus—I almost had an A."

Mullins, says Anderson, "...really challenged his students. I was just a kid in the class, and Roy was one of those kind of teachers who shapes your life. He raised the bar for all the kids in his class. I would hate to find out that Roy is the best person for the job and not be able to hire him because of a technicality."

For his part, Mullins savors the memory of his teaching years. "I am very fond of those years at Gibbs," Mullins says. "I can still see those kids and remember where they sat in the classroom. There's a 20-year return on your investment in education; it's delayed gratification, but it's the kind of return you've got to invest in."

Mullins has an impressive string of honors to his credit. He served a highly-acclaimed year as president of the Tennessee Education Association, as well as a year each at the helm of the Knox County and East Tennessee Education Associations. After 16 years as principal of Halls High School, in 1990 he was appointed supervisor of personnel and assistant schools superintendent.

He was an innovative and active principal who started incentive programs to encourage improved attendance and grades. He got a grant from the telephone company and set up school activity and absentee voice mailboxes so students and parents could keep up with school activities and see who was cutting class. And perhaps most of all, he is remembered as the principal who empowered the kids.

In those days, Halls High had no cafeteria. Students had lunch in the commons area and ate food that was brought in. There came a time when the student body rebelled.

"It was a very small, inadequate space," Mullins says. "I got the kids together and told them 'First, you need to address the school board...'

"We put together a pretty good program. We had some video, and the kids did the presentation. Once we got through that, it evolved into a pretty big project. We got the new cafeteria, athletic fields, a covered walkway to the vocational building, converted the boys' baseball field to a girls' softball field, and expanded our parking. When we finished, the kids were very proud."

A 1990 application form filled out by teachers at Halls High nominating him to receive the Knox County Principal of the Year award includes a letter from Cavit Cheshier, long-time executive secretary of the Tennessee Education Association. Cheshier, for years one of the most influential voices in Tennessee education, described Mullins like this: "...first, a man of intense integrity." Then he threw in "compassionate, dedicated, committed to education...an immaculate role model, capable, articulate, hard-working, and one of the finest educators in this state." Mullins won the award.

(Schools' PR chief Mike Cohen, speaking of the press releases he has put together announcing Mullins' appointment, says he's thinking about adding "killed him a bear when he was only 3.")

Mullins will be the first schools chief in 50 years to have come up through the ranks strictly as an academic, not as a coach (Mildred Doyle took office in 1948, was succeeded by Earl Hoffmeister in 1976, who was succeeded in turn by Allen Morgan in 1990).

A collection of exotic sea shells graces the bookshelves of his office. A few feet to the right, there's a Charlie Daniel cartoon on the wall showing a school bus on one side of a chasm and a bunch of kids on the other. It is captioned "There are still some glitches we have to work out"—one of the more infamous Mullins quotes.

The shells remind him of the marine biology career he gave up in the early '60s when he left the graduate program at Florida State to come home and teach biology and chemistry. The cartoon reminds him of 1993, which, until now, was his year of living dangerously. The quote is something he said during a meeting when it was his job to answer the questions of several hundred parents who were venting their rage at having their school bus routes changed.

"That was the year we had to do several things at once," he says laconically. "We had to cut the budget, carry out an [Office of Civil Rights] mandate to equalize transportation between the outlying schools, where they had it, and the city schools, where they didn't; start a computerized routing system and do rezonings, too.

"I got eaten alive a few times."

Some joke that during his years working in the central office, Mullins has been Morgan's designated spear-catcher—the guy who gets the job of facing down the public when something really unpopular—like rezoning a bunch of Halls kids to Gibbs or Bearden students to West—needs to be done.

He could be doing a lot of that this year. The budget calls for moving $2.4 million out of capital improvements into operating expenses, which means that major reroofing and other improvement projects must be postponed. Forty-two percent of the teachers will not receive any step raises. Long-planned measures to reduce the pupil/teacher ratio must be postponed, even though the state requires it to be done by 2001. Six million dollars allocated for technology improvements have been whacked out.

"Those things are all gone now, in this year's budget," Mullins says. "These are the things you hate to lose. You just postpone the inevitable."

Mullins won't elaborate further on his long-range aspirations. He's got schools to get open next month. And barbed wire to run.