Two Lee’s Summit superintendents left abruptly. The new one says he’s here to stay
David Buck was all smiles and glad-handing Thursday night in Lee’s Summit, where the school board approved his three-year, $235,000 contract as the district’s new superintendent.
The smile did not reflect the heavy issues he may soon face.
Buck, who won’t officially start until July 1, is coming from a tiny district just west of St. Louis to one nearly 10 times its size.
He is stepping into a position that has been fraught with controversy for the last four years: His two immediate predecessors left the post early with substantial contract buyouts.
The district is heading into a school board election in April that will potentially be contentious. Buck could be starting his new job with a board that is substantially different from the one that hired him.
But Buck, who was chosen from a pool of 24 applicants, say’s he’s not worried.
“This is a great district,” Buck told The Star this week. “I don’t know why there weren’t 500 applicants for this job.”
He said that while “every district is unique,” he has a philosophy that has worked for him the five years he’s been leading the Wright City school district and for the seven years he served as assistant superintendent there.
“All we need to do is talk about how we can meet the needs of kids,” Buck said. “We have to find out where the barriers are and remove them. … I really focus on collaboration and facilitation. I think that ‘we’ is so much more powerful than ‘I.’”
Buck says he’s passionate about clearing the path for students to succeed in school as well as in their lives. And he plans to stay in Lee’s Summit as superintendent until his career as an educator is finished.
“This is my last stop,” he said. “I’m retiring from here. Stability is important. This is a destination place. I am here to serve.”
The last two superintendents — David McGehee, who had been the highest paid in Missouri, and Dennis Carpenter, the district’s first African American superintendent — both left abruptly after clashes with the school board and the community.
McGehee, who led the district for nearly 10 years, resigned in 2016 with a $450,000 buyout after being embroiled in controversy for nearly a year over his salary and his relationship with one of the district’s lead attorneys, which board members said was a conflict of interest.
Carpenter replaced him in January 2017. Less than three years later, last July, he resigned with a $750,000 buyout. Carpenter and the board had wrangled for about a year over his plan to bring diversity and equity training to employees in the predominantly white district. Carpenter was attacked on social media and threatened.
Lee’s Summit’s resistance to the training put the district under a national spotlight and bruised the reputation of Missouri’s fifth largest district.
But the district has also been lauded as among the highest performing in the state.
Who is David Buck?
Buck has never worked in a district as large or as diverse as Lee’s Summit but says he has spent much of his career surrounding himself with students who were from racially, socially and economically diverse backgrounds.
Buck was born the youngest of three children in Dogtown, the old Irish section of St. Louis south of Forest Park. Where the family lived in a tiny one-bedroom house. His mother, he said, was a high school dropout who made a living as a factory worker. His dad worked as a machinist.
“We were on the poor side,” Buck said.
When he was five-years-old, the family moved to Jefferson County, southwest of St. Louis. That move came “after my oldest brother’s best friend was stabbed to death right in front of our house,” Buck recalled.
At Herculaneum High School, Buck was a joiner: captain of the football team, president of the Spanish Club and a good student. He graduated near the top of his class with a full scholarship to Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, where he studied botany. With an educational specialist degree and his master’s from the University of Missouri, Buck went on to earn a doctorate from Missouri Baptist University.
He worked a variety of jobs, including one as a botanist with the U.S. Department of Interior and another as an herbarium — a librarian for dried plants — at Southeast Missouri State.
Working as a botanist was fun during the summer, but in the winter, “I ended up behind a desk in front of a computer and I didn’t want to be behind a desk,” Buck said. Teaching science was attractive. “I could go from working a passion to a passion with people.”
He taught in some small Missouri districts and became a high school principal before landing at Wright City.
For years, while he taught or supervised in public schools, Buck worked his summers at the Missouri Scholars Academy at MU. There, more than 300 of Missouri’s brightest high school juniors from a variety of backgrounds came from all corners of the state for intense learning.
“It was learning on fire for 14 hours a day. And I taught botany,” Buck said.
But he gave that up in 2007 to help out his wife, Jennifer Buck, a horse therapy specialist and former circus performer who started a latchkey program teaching what he described as “at-risk children” to ride horses and perform acrobatic tricks on them. They called their troupe the Ianna Spirit Riders and they performed at circuses around the state.
They spent a few years living out of a cramped trailer behind a circus tent. Later, after the second of their three children was born, they rented a farm with a barn for the horses and space to train young riders, some of whom had never been out of the inner city before.
Buck said that while he wasn’t the one teaching the trick riding he spent time with those young horse performers mentoring and being the adult male in their lives.
It extended his administrative desk job to let him work face-to-face with young people, whom he said are at the center of his purpose in education.
“My personal mission is that every kid grows up to be an adult we all would be proud to call a neighbor,” Buck said. Even as a superintendent Buck spends his Thursday afternoons coaching chess in Wright City.
Buck’s work in Wright City
Alice Jensen, vice president of the Wright City school board, said she was surprised to learn that Buck was looking to leave the small eastern Missouri district.
“He seemed very invested in Wright City,” said Jensen, who has been a member of the board for six years, including the four years that Buck has been superintendent.
But Austin Jones, who is president of the board, wasn’t surprised, saying Buck always claimed he would not make a lateral move out of the district, but if he were offered a chance to move his career up and forward, he would take it.
“Lee’s Summit is a promotion for him, and he has always been on the lookout for something like that.”
Jensen, who declined to talk about any issues that may not have gone well under Buck’s leadership, was eager to mention that he had been “very successful” helping schools to grow clubs and sporting activities “so our students could become more engaged with their schools.”
Buck said he drew on his own need to be involved in high school when he spearheaded the expansion of school activities.
Jones said Buck successfully managed a growing Hispanic student population, in part by bringing in translators so parents could more easily communicate with teachers, improving English as a second language programs and developing student activities, such as boys soccer and a dance team that allowed the 15% Hispanic student body to feel more connected to the school.
Buck is praised in Wright City for getting the first fire alarm system installed at the district’s high school and adding a buzzer system for security at all the school buildings. Lee’s Summit has upgrades to school security included as part of a proposed $224 million bond issue residents will vote on in April, three months before Buck steps into his new post.
Even though 45% of the Wright City students are eligible for free and reduced-priced lunch, under Buck’s leadership, “our test scores continue to exceed expectations,” Jones said. Like Lee’s Summit, the Missouri School Improvement Program scores in Wright City have been at 90% for the last six years.
Buck said that when he arrived at Wright City in 2008, student performance on standardized tests was among the lowest in the state. “There was not a whole lot of teacher pride,” Buck said. But by 2014, student performance ranked in the top third. And teachers had stopped leaving the district in droves.
Jensen also said the district was proud to have been the first in the state to, under Buck’s leadership, institute an anti-bullying program called RULER, which helps students manage social and emotional behavior and learn from it. This year the district added therapy dogs to the mix.
Clearly excited about progress that’s been made in Wright City under his leadership, Buck rattled off several new programs that focus on career development for students.
“We have become the 13th district, out of 518 in the state, to offer a registered youth apprenticeship program,” which he said allows students to work alongside professionals. The high school students get paid and class credit for the time they spend working toward earning an industry credential, such as welding or machining.
But the needs in Lee’s Summit are likely to be much different from those Buck faced at Wright City.
Wright City has 1,614 students, of whom 20% are minority. By comparison, Lee’s Summit has 18,000 students, of whom 25% are students of color.
“It will be a big transition to juggle that much more,” Jensen said. “But I suppose he feels ready for it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have applied for it, right?”
The Lee’s Summit challenge
Terri Harmon, a former Lee’s Summit school board member, interviewed Buck and the other three superintendent finalists as a member of the district’s community advisory committee and says she was surprised.
“I had concerns going in,” she said. She worried whether Buck could transition from such a small district. “I did not expect to like him. But he not only said all the things we wanted to hear but he gave examples that let me know he also walks the walk.”
So Harmon is happy he was chosen. “I believe the new superintendent does have the skills and perspective needed to help our district and help our divided community heal, and focus on closing the student achievement gap,” she said.
Significant gaps in achievement between students of color and their white peers were a main reason Carpenter proposed equity training for the district. National research indicates that when teachers better understand the cultural differences and similarities among students, student achievement improves. Several districts in Missouri and Kansas have embraced equity training for teachers and staff. The Lee’s Summit board eventually hired an equity training firm. Board member began training in August.
“In my personal opinion,” Harmon said, “even though (Buck) comes from a small district, he has the right personality to balance being superintendent and a liaison with the community. That is a hard job. I don’t envy that job.”
But she said Buck has “a chance to succeed because he has a completely new perspective and he makes educational decisions based on data.” Harmon said she believes that when the district is dealing with emotional issues such as equity and race, “if you can show them the data and come with a solution, that takes the emotion out of it.”
“I feel encouraged that he will make the right decisions for the Lee’s Summit school district,” said Danielle Pearsall, a parent with two children in the district who was also among those who interviewed the finalists.
Even before Buck takes his new post, big changes may be in store for the district in its April school board election.
Of the three board members whose terms expire, Jackie Clark and Dennis Smith are not seeking re-election. Kim Fritchie, who’s been a board member since 2017, is among nine candidates who have filed for the three positions.
Megan Marshall, who is running for a seat on the board, said Buck was the best of the four finalists. “I believe that he is the right person at the right time to move the district forward.”
This story was originally published January 25, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
