Education Week - February 6, 2013 - Special Report - S5

LESSON LEARNED

Lisa Krantz for Education Week

“You have to honestly
confront the problem.
When I first got to
[Pharr-San JuanAlamo], no one
had ever told the
community just how
bad the dropout
problem was. I got
blasted some for airing
dirty laundry, but until
everyone was honest
about what was going
on, we wouldn’t have
been able to move
forward.”

munity still reeling from the fallout of the federal
corruption case.

‘Stopping the Bleeding’
King says that in his first several weeks as superintendent, he spent hours inside each high school, listening to the frustrations of teachers who had come to
deeply distrust the central office, and coming up with
concrete steps to address many of their grievances.
But his most urgent effort in the early weeks of his

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superintendency, he says, was “stopping the bleeding
of dropouts.”
That required an initiative that King and his team
called Countdown to Zero, a block-by-block, door-to-door
campaign in the summer of 2007 to bring every student
who’d dropped out the previous school year back into
the district.
In his previous job as the superintendent of the
nearby Hidalgo school district, that brand of on-theground, intensive effort had paid off, King says. He
believed it would work in Pharr-San Juan-Alamo, too,

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even though it’s 10 times the size of Hidalgo.
For a few weeks, the district team fanned out in
search of students, and each day, met to tally up who
had been located and who had agreed to come back.
King says he and his team knew they had to offer
dropouts something other than a return to the
comprehensive high schools where they had not
succeeded. Foremost in his mind were the more than
237 seniors who had come so close to graduating the
previous spring.
“We had to give them something that they would see

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Casey Shellenberger

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February 6, 2013

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Education Week - February 6, 2013 - Special Report

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