After 13 years as the head of the Milford School District, Dr. Robert Smith passed the torch on June 30 to Sharon Kanter, Milford’s latest superintendent of schools.
“I’m happy here,” she said. “There are a lot of great people that I’m working with and I’m excited to be back among teachers and professionals.”
Kanter spent her entire career in the Baltimore City School District before retiring to Rehoboth Beach in 2008. But by November she was getting back into education.
“I saw the job posting in November and I thought, ‘Hmm. I do qualify for this,’” she said. “On some level, when I left Baltimore, I knew I’d make that choice — I saved a lot of my administration materials.”
Kanter was picked to succeed Smith in April. Since then, Kanter said, she has made regular visits to Milford, in addition to working side-by-side with Smith during his last week on the job.
“I’ve been getting to know the people here — the administrators, the teachers. I’m loving it,” she said. “I want to be a hands-on superintendent.”
As a regional superintendent in Baltimore, Kanter was in charge of just part of the district — 15 high schools. In Milford, she’s overseeing a district that totals five schools.
“There are a lot of similarities, just on different levels,” she said. “Student behavior, education, test scores — the same issues every district has to deal with. It’s education. That’s what it’s about.”
She said she’s happy to be working with children of all ages again. She started her career as an elementary school teacher before moving to administration.
“I love being back with the little kids,” she said. “I visited Banneker earlier in June; I sat down and talked with these kids, and wow.”
As superintendent, she inherits two major construction projects — a new elementary school next door to Lulu Ross Elementary, and the Central Academy on the high school grounds.
“I’m excited about the academy,” she said. “It’s going to be a green school, it’s going to have technology in every classroom. And it’s a great idea to have the eighth and ninth grades, the ones most at risk in school, together there. It’s going to be unique.”
Across the district, Kanter said, she wants to focus on more rigorous classroom education.
“I think we need to do a better job of that for all children,” she said. “Students everywhere need to learn what they’ll need so they can contribute wherever they go … we want to have kids see the relevancy of what they’re learning,” she said.
The policies she introduces toward that goal, Kanter said, will be products of the entire district, not just her. She talked about assembling students, parents and teachers to inform decisions on matters like the district-wide dress code.
“I’m a firm believer in having input from all the stakeholders — not just making an arbitrary decision,” she said. “That never works.”
Milford, Del. —
