Navigating the maze he inherited, Alonso found one thing after another that defied common sense. For example, why was the system spending more to eradicate lead from school drinking fountains than it would cost to bring in bottled water?
That was easy to fix. Other problems were more deeply entrenched.
Each year, thousands of students were suspended for talking back, truancy and other nonviolent offenses, essentially giving them a vacation without meaningful consequences. At the same time, schools weren't removing violent students for fear of receiving the embarrassing label of "persistently dangerous" from the state.
In the nine years before Alonso arrived in Baltimore, the system lost 25,000 students and gained more than 1,000 employees. So why was he hearing so many complaints about excessive class size? What was everyone doing?
At times, Alonso felt, the only way to get answers was to find them himself. "I just have to grab the bull by the horn sometimes," he said. "I can't afford for someone else to play matador."
He started showing up at schools, often unannounced, at all hours. His first summer, he'd start his days checking out the exteriors of school buildings before dawn. He often spent the evening attending a PTA meeting. Within a year, he made it to more than 150 of the system's 192 schools.
One day last spring, he dropped in unannounced at an elementary/middle school where teachers were quitting midyear.
He strolled into the office and signed the visitor log. A nervous assistant principal showed him to a room where, on a chalkboard, nine students' names were written along with "defiance," "disrespect," "insubordination" and "violation of school rules." The principal left a meeting with the parent of a child returning from suspension to join them.
Alonso had been invited to the school's arts night, so he started his questioning on that topic. The principal told him about the full-time art teacher, the two full-time and one part-time classroom music teachers, the instrumental music teacher, the band teacher. "My God," Alonso blurted out, "how many people do you have doing the arts in your school?"
"Seven."
Not that he didn't support arts education, but how was this an effective use of resources? The principal was complaining that she didn't have the money to hire teachers in all the basic middle school subjects.
Alonso pointed out that she was due to receive an $800,000 budget increase.
