Wharton to Retire at the End of Next Year

With his support on the Board of Education waning, Dr. Peter Wharton has announced that he will retire after his contract expires at the end of the 2009-2010 school year. Wharton ran into trouble in the spring of 2008 when the district announced that it faced major budget problems. At public hearings board members expressed frustration with the way the administration had handled the budgeting process. That frustration remained evident last June when the board broke with precedent and did not approve a new three-year agreement for the superintendent, letting the clock tick on his existing contract instead. This week, as it appeared increasingly likely that the board would let the clock run out on his contract, Wharton bowed gracefully to the inevitable.

Wharton came to Rapid City in 1998 after serving as a superintendent in Michigan. It was a pivotal time in the history of education in South Dakota. A new funding formula adopted by the Legislature foreshadowed tighter budgets and increased accountability. When he arrived, the district, like many in South Dakota, had a healthy fund balance — equal to 20.4 percent of the annual budget for operations. The district began that year with 13,882 students taught by 940 teachers and other certified staff.

Over the next five years, the number of students in Rapid City schools fell by 5 percent. While the number of certified staff fell by an equal percentage, a sustained pattern of declining enrollments and state aid increases that failed to keep pace with inflation, dried up the district’s rainy day funds. The general fund balance fell to less than 10 percent of general fund spending.  

As superintendent, Wharton encouraged the board to take significant steps to cut costs. He recommended closing several aging elementary schools, increasing teaching loads at the high schools, expanding class sizes in the elementary schools, cutting foreign language instruction in middle school, trimming the counseling and gifted education staffs and introducing pay-to-play programs for middle school sports. 

Using the district’s capital outlay funds to lower operating costs, Wharton presented the board with a plan to internalize the district’s busing program, eliminating the need for an outside contractor. He and his team also built two new elementary schools — Valley View and General Beadle – to improve the learning environment for children and lower the cost of operations. 

These efforts, combined with a series of one-time funding increases from the state, began to improve the district’s financial position. Although state aid continued to decline in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars, the district’s general fund balance began to rise again to a healthy 15.5 percent in 2006.

While the district worked to keep spending in line with declining enrollment, however, student achievement began to raise serious concerns. Between 2003 and 2007, the district’s reported drop-out rate rose from 2 percent to 5 percent while the graduation rate fell sharply. Meanwhile, the average score for college-bound students on the ACT decreased from 22.3 in 2003 to 21.8 in 2006. Perhaps most importantly, student scores on the state’s Dakota STEP test did not keep pace with the state’s expectations and the district was put on the state’s academic watch list.

Wharton worked with the board to address both the declines in academic achievement and the drop out rate, paying particular attention to the needs of low income and Indian students in the district. The district built a widely-praised new “community” school at General Beadle and, with grant money from the Bush and Vucurevich Foundations, sought to develop strategies and interventions to encourage Indian students to finish their education.

But new strategies for increasing student achievement raised costs for professional development and literacy and math intervention. Although enrollments had levelled off at about 13,000 students, the district was once again in deep budget trouble. By 2008, the general fund balance had once again fallen to roughly 10 percent of annual spending. There was a growing sentiment that Wharton did not have a long range strategy for dealing with the district’s financial and academic problems, and a growing number of employees had lost faith in Wharton’s leadership.

When he first came to Rapid City in 1998, Wharton was widely praised for his openness to change and enthusiasm for education. He is still seen by many as a leader with a strong heart for teachers and children and as an individual who wants to be a problem solver. His relationship with staff, however, has suffered with reports of incidents of intimidation and harsh responses to dissent. Many teachers assert that morale has never been lower. 

After ten years at the head of South Dakota’s second largest school district, any superintendent would be scarred by tough budgets and run-ins with employees and constituents. Dr. Peter Wharton says he plans to enjoy his retirement and expects to keep on learning. In the meantime, as the board begins the difficult task of recruiting, selecting and hiring a new superintendent, the district seems to be at a new inflection point. Tight budgets are not likely to ease for several years. Meanwhile, the pressure on student achievement is likely to increase. The next superintendent of the Rapid City Area Schools will need to win public support and build employee morale just to hold onto the quality of education the district delivers today.