MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Approximately 13,000 students sit in the classrooms and roam the hallways of the schools in Monongalia County.
That’s about 13 times as many as Dr. Eddie Campbell is accustomed to worrying about.
“In Tucker County, as a Superintendent, you’re very hands on, you basically do everything,” he said Monday on WAJR’s Morgantown AM. “I was the personnel director, the curriculum director. In small communities and small systems like that, you have to play a much larger role from the standpoint of the day-to-day operations.”
The new Monongalia County Superintendent of Schools, who succeeded the retiring Dr. Frank Devono July 1, said delegation and teamwork become much more important in a larger school system.
“A lot of those tasks and those responsibilities are assigned to those people,” he said. “Your role as a Superintendent in a much larger school division like this one becomes the oversight of really the day-to-day operations, but you are not down in the trenches so to speak.”
In a much larger system with significantly more employees, it also means knowing when to take a step back, Campbell said.
“School systems are not run by an individual,” he said. “The Superintendent is not the leader of a school system. I always felt like you needed to give building-level principals the opportunity to make decisions. We hire a building-level principal to run their school, and that’s what I’ve always told principals.
‘You got hired to run the school, and that’s what we want you to do.’ We want you to make decisions in the best interest of the students and the teachers in your school.”
Dr. Campbell believes his job is much easier thanks to his staff and the county-wide staff of educators.
“Teachers in all 55 counties need to be treated fairly,” he said. “We are the future of the state of West Virginia — the teachers in the classroom are the future. They are teaching our future.”
“We pay our teachers better than any other county in the state. We pay our service people better than any other county in the state. I think that’s a real testament to the people in this community that they support teachers and our school employees to the extent that they are willing to go out there and they are willing to pay a little bit extra out of their pockets to make sure we do have the best people in our classrooms for our kid.”
Dr. Campbell appeared on the entirety of WAJR’s Monday, July 23 edition of “Morgantown AM.” The story detailing the second half of his interview will be available Wednesday.