Atlanta Public Schools are preparing to move into a new era with the selection of its next superintendent this week.
Dr. Bryan Johnson, who was announced as the “sole finalist” to be the next superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools on Tuesday. Johnson, a former superintendent of Hamilton County, Tennessee., schools, was most recently executive vice chancellor and chief strategy officer at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. He still faces a 14-day vetting period in which he’ll conduct meet and greets with parents, educators, and district stakeholders before board members vote on his hiring one final time in early July.
On Tuesday, APS detailed a hiring process that included a strategic plan, board interviews, individual interviews, focus groups, APS meetings, and a stakeholder survey. The district says it worked with more than 60 groups that varied from student-led organizations, Atlanta City Council and the Mayor’s office, and parent-led groups to identify what the community wanted in a leader.
APS Board Chair and District 5 representative Erika Mitchell stated that the district completed a comprehensive search that included intense community engagement and was extended until the district was able to find the right person for the job.
“We found the best-fit candidate for our district,”’ Mitchell said. “Our process was thorough … we secured a high-quality pool of candidates and selected the best fit that was aligned with our leadership program.”
Still, Atlanta residents and parents are hopeful that Atlanta Public Schools’ new superintendent will make the district more equitable by improving outcomes for its 50,000 students.
Paulette Montague is mother to a rising ninth grader who is heading to join her junior at the Early College at Carver High School this upcoming fall.
“My hope is the same as it’s always been: evening the playing field,” Montague said. “It’s drastic and it’s unfortunate, and I feel like we pay the same taxes as the people do on the north side.”
Some who had input in the hiring process said there’s lots of room for improvement.
“I wish we could have facilitated different types of conversations as community leaders that were trusted by the board, that the board wouldn’t have been able to have on their own,” said Kanesha “KaCey” Venning, co-founder and executive director of Helping Empower Youth (HEY) Atlanta, who was among the Atlanta residents selected to participate in the search process.
“I just think that we have to do the work of figuring out why within our system we can’t ever seek someone that can lead our system, having been cultivated by APS,” Venning said. “Year after year, we have to go outside our very own city and our very own system to be able to find a leader. We need to figure that out.”
APS first announced its superintendent search in June 2023, after the district declined to renew then-superintendent Dr. Lisa Herring’s contract beyond June 2024. The board then voted last August to hire Dr. Danielle Battle as interim superintendent, a contract that was extended twice during the search process.
A Nashville native, Johnson ran Hamilton County Schools from 2017 to 2021. He was named the Tennessee Organization of School Superintendents’ Superintendent of the Year in 2020. Hamilton County Schools serves the larger metro of Chattanooga, with more than 45,000 students across 78 schools.
According to a presentation shared with community members at Tuesday’s press conference, Johnson helped turn his former district around, increasing first-year teacher retention by 18% and helping the district rise from 130th statewide to Tennessee’s second highest performing district for student academic growth. He briefly left the industry to serve as chief of staff for U.S. Xpress, a Chattanooga-based trucking and logistics company, before being appointed to his most recent role at UTC.
