Miskia Davis woke up this past Tuesday morning, cleaned her house and got ready for some Zoom calls.
That routine is not completely out of the norm for her, but one thing was different for sure.
“Yes, today is different, because it's official now. Sunflower County (Consolidated School District) is no longer mine professionally,” Davis told The Enterprise-Tocsin in an interview on Tuesday. “They will always be mine personally, but professionally, it no longer belongs to me. I've officially handed the torch.”
And what a torch it was to hand to new Superintendent James Johnson-Waldington, who officially began his first year as head of the district on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the Drew native has taken a new position at The Kirkland Group in the consulting firm’s Performance & Accountability division. She is serving as a director of District and School Performance and Accountability.
Davis said that she has been working these past few months with Johnson-Waldington and William Murphy, who was appointed this week as assistant superintendent, to make sure that the transition of leadership went as smoothly as possible.
The transition, she said, will help SCCSD continue to be a B-rated school district.
That is a status that Davis holds very close to her heart.
She will admit that the students, parents, teachers, principals and countless others contributed to the district’s success over the past eight years, but that all came under Davis’s leadership.
“The most memorable moment of my career was when we finally cracked the ceiling and became a Successful school district and we had that big parade, that was by far the highlight of my career,” Davis said. “Everybody came together for the first time. I felt like, okay, now we are a unified school district.”
The journey began in January 2017 when the SCCSD board appointed Davis as the interim district leader. When that status was changed to full-time, she really began to bring her high-energy approach and plans to the schools’ principals and teachers.
“I got way worse than a few eyerolls,” Davis said. “But those who stuck with me see why I had to be the way that I was, because the leader I was when we were a Failing school district, hopefully, I’m not the same leader, because I had to lead differently.”
The road to success these past few years had its share of challenges as well, Davis said.
Right when the district was just starting to click and become unified, the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
That did not only disrupt school activities, but it also brought a lot of heartache for the students, many of whom lost parents, grandparents and other close relatives during the height of the virus’s spread.
Davis also faced a devastating loss during that time, losing her own mother to COVID-19.
“It was easier for me to deal with it, and that was the most difficult thing in my life, so I can’t imagine how the children were dealing with it,” Davis said.
The bonds that Davis had built with faculty and staff her first two years, she said, sustained the district through the hardest part of the pandemic, and that is why SCCSD returned to school, seemingly without missing a beat academically.
The year that students returned to the classroom, the district asked the taxpayers of Sunflower County to float a bond issue to pay for renovation projects that totaled over $30 million.
That bond issue passed overwhelmingly, and the district ended up with virtually two new high schools at Gentry and Edwards in Ruleville.
At the same time, Davis and the board of trustees were making the difficult decision to close two rural schools, Inverness Elementary and East Side Elementary in Sunflower.
“Some of my board members lost friends because of that, and people don’t talk to them to this day because of that decision that we had to make,” Davis said. “By far, that was the hardest decision that I had to make during my time as superintendent.”
Davis said that she and others received death threats after the decision was made public, and she said that several very good teachers left the district.
The students and parents made adjustments, and the district continued to grow academically over the past three years.
Looking forward, Davis said that she has every confidence that SCCSD can continue to grow and continue be a successful district.
“The people are here to continue this trend that we began several years ago,” she said, adding that the systems that were built over the last eight years are going to remain in place, at least for now.
Davis will take a wealth of educational knowledge to her new role and hopefully help many other schools accomplish what SCCSD has in the past few years.
“Everything that I have learned and everything that I love about education I learned it in and love it because of my time in Sunflower County,” Davis said. “It has been the most rewarding experience of my professional life.”
