Narayan Mahon
Jennifer Cheatham will resign as superintendent of the Madison school district at a news conference Wednesday. Isthmus confirmed the news with three members of the Madison school board and other sources.
The district administration formally announced Cheatham's resignation in a news release sent out early Wednesday, reporting that she will leave her post at the end of August to join the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the fall "to help prepare the next generation of equity leaders."
“I have never had a more fulfilling job than serving as the superintendent in Madison," Cheatham said in the release. "This community has surrounded me, my family, our team, our staff and our schools with tremendous support and I am filled with gratitude.”
“Jen has been an incredible leader for our district,” school board President Mary Burke said in the release. "She has put us in a powerful position to continue to move forward, and we thank her for tremendous work, her dedication, and her skill as superintendent. We have a strong team, united board, and we are in an incredibly positive position to move forward in our commitments to our community.”
The board is expected to appoint an interim superintendent in the "coming weeks," the release said.
During an April 28 interview with Channel 3000’s On The Record, Cheatham said she was “really excited” about working with the new school board, which she described as a “new group of powerful women” who are going to help bring transformative change to the district. This school year, Cheatham implemented an updated strategic framework to guide district policy to help usher in that transformation.
“We have a new set of goals. A new set of core values. And a new refreshed strategy for the future,” said Cheatham. “The framework has a new set of core values that are all about voice, racial equity and social justice. Which is powerful. And we are learning how best to make decisions with those core values in mind.”
Cheatham said she planned on working with the new school board to “refresh the district’s equity tool,” which she added, “is essentially the set of questions we always want to ask ourselves when making decisions together. I think that’s powerful and has real potential for the future.”
Cheatham also said during her time as superintendent she built a solid foundation for the district by strengthening core curricula and the human resource system. She also said she has brought instructional technology to every classroom.
In March, the superintendent admitted it had been a “trying” school year. There have been several high-profile incidents involving student safety and teacher resignations. For two years, school board meetings have been dominated by a push from Freedom Inc. to remove Madison police officers from four of the district’s high schools.
The new Madison school board will soon have to decide whether to renew its contract with the Madison Police Department, which expires at the end of this school year.
Cheatham grew up in the Chicago suburbs, but hoped to one day teach in the inner city, according to an October 2013 Isthmus profile. After graduating from the University of Michigan, she instead went to California, which was experiencing a teacher shortage at the time. She taught eighth grade language arts at a district south of San Francisco from 1997 to 2003. After several other stops, she was back in Chicago in 2009 and working for the public schools as the chief area officer or “mini-superintendent,” overseeing 25 schools. In 2011 she became chief of instruction.
When Cheatham first got to Madison she visited every school in the city in an effort to see the district firsthand. She also organized community listening sessions to hear from staff, students and parents. Her takeaway from those meetings was that the district had potential. “It’s not a broken school system, which is different from what I’ve experienced in places like Chicago,” she said. “We’re not a district in crisis.”
She would soon roll out her first Strategic Framework to address the challenges facing the district, including its wide racial disparities around achievement.
At the time, she told Isthmus that she hoped this would be her family’s last stop for a while. “I believe this deeply, as does my husband, that this is a place we can really envision putting down roots and raising our family,” she said.
[Editor's note: This article has been updated to include information from a news release sent out by the school district early on May 8.]
