Five-year tenure has been remarkable and tumultuous for Revere superintendent

by Sheldon Ocker  

Parents of kids 5-18 years old who pay attention realize that being a school superintendent is no day at the beach. Unless the superintendent actually takes time off to go to a real beach. 

In a manner of speaking, that’s what Revere Schools Superintendent Matt Montgomery felt compelled to do in July 2019: take a mental health break and flee to the beach.   

Montgomery came under intense pressure after learning that Revere High School’s nine-man football coaching staff was consuming alcohol in a basement lounge of a Heidelberg University dormitory while the team was tucked away in rooms at the same dorm during a football clinic between June 10-12 last year.  

A high-ranking Heidelberg administrator phoned Montgomery of the transgression (and others), forcing the superintendent to act. His decision to fire the entire coaching staff was validated unanimously by the five-person board of education. However, the pushback turned into open hostility at a June 28 board meeting, when a police officer had to quell a loud disturbance caused by several of the 75 adults and 10 football players in attendance (the players behaved themselves).  

“After that meeting, I got on a plane and flew to Florida for a week,” Montgomery said. “It was an unplanned trip to try to reset.”  

In the five years since Montgomery was hired away from the Waterloo School District in Portage County, where he was superintendent for two years, he said dismissing the offending coaches was one of the toughest problems he has faced.  

“Absent COVID, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with,” he said. “As a leader of schools, there are certain things that will be most challenging: that’s band, cheerleading and football. … So the idea of relieving a full varsity football staff [of its duties] in June was unthinkable.”  

Revere isn’t as renowned for its football program as schools such as Massillon, Canton McKinley or Hoban. But the people in the Revere district care, and because it was football, word of Montgomery’s actions spread.  

“It made national news,” he said. “Many people were watching what we were doing. And it could have cost me my job. That’s certainly something I was thinking about.”  

To Montgomery, there was only one choice that made sense and aligned with the district’s standards and his own ethical criteria.  

“We thought about all those options [lesser punishments],” he said. “But after I was resigned to the fact that this was the right decision, I believe that if I did anything less, that was questioning my own integrity and my own moral compass.”  

Then COVID-19 hit 

Whereas replacing the football staff was a traumatic jolt, the complexities and seemingly never-ending dilemma of COVID-19 has been the most difficult ordeal of Montgomery’s tenure.  

“This has been the most challenging thing I would argue that any superintendent has had to lead through,” he said.  

The ordeal began with the governor ordering all schools closed in March. In a matter of a few days, Revere students were learning at home via laptops provided by the district. As summer progressed, Montgomery wrestled with three options: start school in buildings, use a combination of in-class and virtual learning or turn the educational process into a 100-percent remote experience.  

The superintendent elected to open the buildings.  

“I’m going to keep us in for as long as possible, because every day will pay dividends when [if] we have to go remote” he said. “Every day we get to see them face-to-face, those relationships, that social-emotional [experience], the content we are delivering will pay off 10-fold when we go to remote. I should say, if we go to remote.”  

Montgomery is ready to send everybody home to learn, but he hopes he doesn’t have to.  

“Nothing replaces brick-and-mortar,” he said. “That’s what we’ve learned; that’s what I’ve learned. Teaching isn’t easy. I know that. … Parents across the country now know that teaching isn’t an easy craft. And an expert is needed to do it really well. More than that, even if you have an expert remotely, it is not the same experience.”  

The rush to virtual learning in March inevitably failed to meet Revere’s usual standards.  

“Our best was not good enough, I promise you that,” Montgomery said. “The kids didn’t learn as much. The remote this year has to be better. This year, when [if] we go to remote, the kids will be following a schedule. It will be Zoom classes every day. They’ll be seeing their teachers and interacting.”  

When Montgomery became superintendent in summer 2015, he took over a district known for quality. But maintaining the status quo wasn’t enough for the then-33-year-old, who decided to check out the landscape before acting.  

“The first thing I did? I learned and listened,’’ he said. “I wanted people to know I had no preconceived notion that I had any answers. … It was a yearlong listening tour.’’

Building project 

Montgomery discovered that since the 1990s, the district had tried to convince voters to pay for new buildings. The community and the board told him so. After determining that Revere needed to replace the high school and Bath Elementary, renovate the middle school and Richfield (then Hillcrest) Elementary and build a new bus garage came the hard part: passing a $68.4-million bond issue.  

By law, neither the school board nor Montgomery can lobby to pass a bond issue or levy. But they can present data. The best vehicle for that was a video.  

“The video we produced was probably the single greatest thing we did in the campaign,” he said.  

The bond issue was approved by more than 60 percent of the voters, and the building project is about 98 percent complete.  

Technology improvements 

When Montgomery arrived, he found Revere seriously behind in the use of technology. He created the one-to-one initiative that ensured every student in the district was provided with a laptop.  

“I would argue at that point we were woefully equipped to meet the technology needs of the students five years ago,” he said.  

Montgomery said one-to-one would have been much more difficult to achieve had he and community stakeholders not generated a five-year strategic plan, which included expanding STEM education, as well as upgrading the district’s technology.  

As in baseball, stats count for a school district. For example, Revere has eight National Merit semifinalists for 2021, and the high school is ranked 39th (of 691) in Ohio by U.S. News and World Report.  

Things changed in five years.  

“There were a lot of conversations coming out of my office then: Yes, we’re doing really well, but how can we continue to evolve and improve?” the superintendent said. “I have the same conversations today, because I think it’s very easy to be even more resistant to change when we’re demonstrating success.”  

Montgomery will soon begin to formulate a new five-year strategic plan to be rolled out sometime in 2021. 

Feature image photo caption: Superintendent Dr. Matt Montgomery reflects on an unbelievable five-year tenure as the Revere Schools’ leader, including building two new schools then having to close buildings because of a pandemic. Photo courtesy of Revere Schools.