Andres Alonso wasn't particularly interested in salary when he took over Baltimore schools two years ago. What he wanted was guaranteed authority, even insisting on a provision in his four-year contract that prohibits the school board from telling him what to do.
Within two weeks, Alonso was interviewing school principal candidates and demanding to personally approve all long-term student suspensions and expulsions. His leadership, aggressive and sure-footed, has mostly served him well as he works to reform a battered school system. Test scores and graduation rates have gone up, and the exodus of students has stopped.
But Alonso's bullish style has a significant downside, city and state leaders say, and it emerged last week when he hired the freshly departed school board chairman - a man who helped hire him and give him the latitude he so desired - to an unadvertised, six-figure administrative job. His pick, real estate developer Brian D. Morris, is mired in financial troubles, including foreclosure and accusations of fraud, which Alonso said he did not know about.
Amid the growing controversy, the school board held a three-hour emergency meeting Friday with Alonso to discuss Morris' fate. Morris, 38, resigned from his new position Saturday. Alonso said after the resignation, "None of us are magicians. A superintendent can stumble. ... The bottom line is outcomes for kids."
Now the charismatic schools chief must deal with the fallout from what some say was a poor decision that smacked of favoritism. Both state and city leaders have oversight of Baltimore schools. Alonso must seek to win back top leaders on both levels, including Mayor Sheila Dixon and state lawmakers, who were dismayed by the entire situation.
To be sure, Alonso must have calculated that the benefits of hiring Morris were substantial. The former school board chairman, an ally of Gov. Martin O'Malley, was well-positioned to serve as a liaison and buffer between the city school board and the schools executive.
Urban schools chiefs, especially those billed as reformers, typically arrive to great fanfare that stretches into a generous honeymoon phase. When the inevitable missteps occur, it is political savvy and stockpiled good will that determine the speed of a leader's recovery. Alonso, who turns 52 today, had yet to be tested in this way.
