After a week of interviews with the School Committee, Boston has 4 choices for superintendent, Dana Bedden, Tommy Chang, Guadalupe Guerrero, and Pedro Martinez.
It was almost by happenstance that Dana Bedden became an educator, as this was not the career he planned for but the one he found.
Bedden, one of four finalists for the job of superintendent of Boston Public Schools, says he was on the path to become a career military man as a college student. He was a member of the ROTC at the University of Florida when the Gulf War started in 1991.
“The war broke out and I got activated, so I never made it to graduation because I got orders to report,” he said last week during one of numerous public meetings with students, parents, school committee members, community partners, and the media.
But he was never shipped overseas, and the Florida native found himself back home wondering, “What do I do now?”
It took some nudging by his former teachers and administrators, who saw his potential and the need for more African-American men in the classroom, to convince Bedden to give it a try. It turns out, education was his calling.
“I guess,” he says, “it was God’s plan.”
Now, the married father of three hopes that plan brings him to Boston from Richmond, Va., where he is superintendent of a school system with 24,000 students and about 3,500 employees. Most of the students are black and many receive free or reduced-price lunch — demographics similar to Boston, where 85 percent of the 57,000 students are Hispanic, black, and Asian, and about 80 percent come from low-income homes.
Bedden, 48, has been in his current role only about 14 months, and supporters in Richmond have started an aggressive campaign to keep the man who they say has renewed their hope in public education and inspired change.
Nearly 800 people, including the state Secretary of Education Anne Holton, have a signed an online petition to show their support for Bedden, dozens of parents showed up at recent school board meeting carrying blue “#BetterWithBedden” signs, and Governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia met with him the day before he came to Boston to interview and urged him to stay.
“I think it’s flattering that Boston would be taking a look at the superintendent of Richmond . . . but I’m not hopeful that he goes,” said school board member Kim Gray. “There have been so many changes for the better in our school district. It’s tangible.”
Parents, school board members, and community activists say Bedden’s team is transparent and responsive. People tell stories of issues big and small remedied with the needs of students paramount: Classroom air conditioning complaints rectified the next morning before dawn. The school system’s check registry put online, so the public could see how money was being spent. A middle school closed because of extreme mold. Another middle school with a history of chronic poor performance reconstituted to stave off state takeover by making half the teachers reapply for their jobs.
“Some of the changes he was considering, some of the parents liked and some didn’t like, but I feel like we’re being heard,” said Maria Cannady, who has two high school students in Richmond public schools and signed the online petition.
One of those changes would have affected her children by closing their high school and combining it with a middle school, she said. It was part of an effort to reform the city’s middle schools.
“We said ‘heck no,’ ” said Cannady, head of the Open High School PTSA.
A meeting was held with the principal, a district administrator, and parents, who aired their concerns. A districtwide online survey was held, and moving Open High to the middle school was at the bottom of the list. The school, she said, was left alone.
“Not that we’re always going to get our way, but I feel like Dr. Bedden and his team are trying to make it more transparent,” she said. “He only started last January, and here we are not even into March. There are so many things we can do.”
Not everyone is happy with the changes Bedden has ushered in, but he has the support of the majority of Richmond’s nine-member, elected board. Still, his pursuit of the job in Boston has ruffled some of those supporters, including school board member Shonda Harris-Muhammed, whose district includes the reconstituted school.
“We cannot sit and continue to beg anyone to stay in leadership in Richmond,” she said. “When you have the governor asking you to stay, the secretary of education asking you to stay, and you don’t withdraw your name, it’s a wrap for me. We have to move on.”
Richmond is the ninth school system Bedden has worked for in 22 years — movement that caused concern for some at public meetings in Boston. In Georgia, where Bedden worked two positions ago, a school district gadfly likened him to a grasshopper for moving from job to job. Studies show that the average tenure for an urban superintendent is about three years.
Before Richmond, Bedden was the head of public schools in Irving, Texas. He left there in July 2013 after three years, when the dynamic of the school board changed. The tension between Bedden and the new, conservative members “turned board meetings into public theater,” according to the Dallas Morning News.
Bedden came to Irving in 2010, after three years as superintendent in Augusta, Ga. He was hired at a time when the Texas district was undergoing tremendous change, including shifting demographics and a new state test, and struggling with recordkeeping problems and state and federal concerns about racial inequalities.
During Bedden’s tenure, test scores in reading, math, and science rose; the graduation rate increased; and more students took college entrance exams and advanced placement tests.
But there were challenges too, as budget cuts forced layoffs.
On July 1, 2013, Bedden resigned. Six months later, he started working in Richmond.
Boston had been on his short list, Bedden said, calling the role of superintendent of Boston Public Schools “one of the best jobs in the country.” But the search for the superintendent languished here while the city elected its first new mayor in 20 years.
Other school districts have come calling, and Bedden said he turned them down flat because of the short time he’s been in Richmond. But when the search firm contacted him about Boston, it was harder to say no, he said.
“This is one of the leading school districts in the country,” he said. And, he added, if the trend holds, it could be another 10 years before this window of opportunity presents itself again. (Carol Johnson was the head of the Boston district for six years and her predecessor, Thomas Payzant, for nearly 11.)
“The easy choice is I would love to be the superintendent of Boston,” Bedden said. “But the hard choice is the time with regard to Richmond public schools.”
Akilah Johnson can be reached at ajohnson@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @akjohnson1922.