Goodbye, Dr. Sternberg

 No one in town ought to be surprised that Greenwich Public Schools Superintendent Betty Sternberg plans to step down after about two years on the job. She is a high-level administrator who might be great when looking at a problem from 30,000 feet, but had scant experience dealing directly with parents and individual schools, day in and day out. She might not have been a disaster for Greenwich, but there were enough missteps to make her a bad fit.

 Dr. Sternberg made a splash in 2006 when she resigned as head of K-12 education for the state of Connecticut to take the job in Greenwich. But she had been a top-level bureaucrat for too long to parachute into a district like ours, where expectations of parents and town leaders are extraordinarily high and where there are real problems to deal with. She was ill prepared — and for all I know, ill suited by nature — to handle life at the rough-and-tumble grassroots in this town. On top of all of this, Dr. Sternberg took an unspecified medical leave over the summer. This morning’s Greenwich Time reported her as saying that her health was not a factor in her decision to leave Greenwich. I hope that is the case. My impression is that she is a spirited woman who fights for what she believes in and is passionate about public education. I admire her for that.

 Some responsibility for this really ought to be left with the Greenwich Board of Education. Let’s hope the school board learns something. The board no doubt was impressed when the state’s top K-12 administrator — a marquee name — applied for the superintendent’s job in our little old district. But when she was hired, I talked off-the-record with several people who had worked with and for Dr. Sternberg at the state Education Department in Hartford. To a person, each was surprised that she had made such a change and, frankly, wondered how effective she would be in a local school district, after working at the state level with a fairly large staff to support her.

 In her two years in Greenwich, she’s had to deal with mold issues and school rebuilding delays; ire from the Boy Scouts and their supporters when she barred them from recruiting during class time; configuring magnet schools; and concerns over academic test scores, among other things. She didn’t need to agree to parents’ every wish — her predecessor, Larry Leverett, hardly was a “yes” man and I think he did a superb job (not a position held by everyone in town, I realize). But she never seemed to get out in front of most of these issues.

 Let’s wish Dr. Sternberg well and hope that her next job is rewarding, exciting and a perfect fit for her experience.