On February 17, families of the Urbana High School kids were hit by the email:
Greetings, UHS Families,
We are writing to inform you of some changes at Urbana High School for the 2023-24 school year. After thoughtful consideration and evaluation of the needs of the students, staff, and administrators at Urbana High School, District administration has decided to undergo a restructuring of resources and positions at UHS. While not solely focused on high school administration, the District will recommend to the Board of Education at its February 21, 2023 meeting that restructuring include a change in administration at Urbana High School. Affected by this recommendation will be several administrators. District administration and the impacted Urbana High School administrators are currently discussing their assignments for the 2023-2024 school year. We are unable to disclose any more details about this decision and the plans for restructuring until after the February 21st Board meeting and until the necessary decisions regarding all impacted staff have occurred.
While we understand you may have questions, we believe these administrative changes ensure all Urbana High School students achieve at high levels and are college and career ready. The District will begin a national search to fill these positions in the coming weeks. Please continue to monitor communication from the District as we work to start the selection process for a new principal and offer opportunities to include UHS stakeholders as part of this process.
We appreciate your understanding and cooperation,
Dr. Ivory-Tatum, Superintendent of Schools
Mrs. Norton, Assistant Superintendent of Student LearningThe inability to say in plain text what this all is about brings on sweet memories of Pravda accounts on Politbureau reshuffles. Let’s do a bit of Kremlinology, and try to decipher what is going on here.
It is pretty safe to surmise that Principal Nance is a goner. ‘Fresh Principal,’ as he liked to be known, Mr. Nance started his tenure less than two years ago, in summer 2021. His stay here didn’t bring any stability (the school seems to be on lockdown every other week), or academic upsurge.
But he certainly worked hard on publicity. Principal Nance saw his opening amidst the anxiety created by the spike in gun violence in Champaign-Urbana at the height of the Covid disruption (in ’22, local gun violence and murder rates dropped dramatically). In Fall of ’21, “Nance moved into action, eventually creating an organization that he hopes defines his legacy here” – Anti-Violence Collective.
The quoted News-Gazette puff piece on Mr. Nance and AVC, hardly different from a press release had the insights like “the group’s discussions are based around the Socratic Method for Civil Discourse”. The ideas the AVC seems to entertain went from the usual performative acts (“Mardi Gras beads […] repurposed as ‘Anti-Violence Beads’ that [Principal Nance] hands out to students when they complete certain tasks”) to somewhat outlandish projects the Collective never bothered to implement (Mr. Nance proposed to replace disciplinary suspensions with “two-day trips [to Chicago, where Nance] will get [students] dressed, […] may go to dinner, […] may go to a show.”1If this kind of money were available for each case of suspension, I have quite a few ideas how to spend them directly in the district…). One of many organizations of this kind, Anti-Violence Collective had the potential to be a yet another trickle-down vehicle to provide a modicum of support to minority families, along with patronage jobs that the administration of the district loves so much to administer.
So, what went wrong? The News-Gazette, as usual unwittingly, told the truth: “Taren Nance is loud in every sense.” While the Superintendent was expecting to be front and center of any trickle-down initiative, Principal Nance started to organize events on his own. The district told him not to. He didn’t follow their directions.
Worse, last August he registered a company (Anti-Violence Collective, Inc.) at his home address and started to apply for some of the grants the district’s administration so loves to receive. An unforgivable offense.
The administration put its foot down, and told Mr. Nance (last October) to “cease and desist from using the name of AVC or AVC Inc.” Brilliant legal minds of the district didn’t bother to register the words Anti-Violence Collective as a trademark (to be fair, neither did Mr. Nance), and so he ignored their toothless commands. On November 1, the Board of Education, always there to address the most pressing crisis, issued a resolution disowning Mr. Nance’s AVC, Inc.2An equivalent of Vladimir Putin’s government forbidding Dr. Jill Biden to open a bank account in Russian Federation (true fact).
We do not know what happened next, but it is safe to assume that loud Principal Nance just ignored the Board’s admonitions, and proceeded to non-profit from his Incorporated Collective. Which led the administration to finally fulfill News-Gazette’s prediction, making Mr. Nance’s Anti-Violence Collective the defining feature of his exceedingly short tenure.
There is not much to say about Mr. Nance. His initiatives didn’t make much impact. He was dismissive of the students complaining about sexual harassment in his school. (The Board, characteristically, carefully listened to their heart-breaking stories, told them that the victims are always heard and did nothing.) The fact that Mr. Nance chose to funnel his energy into oh-so-non-profit enterprise of his own, while his school was sliding into chaos tells us all we need to know about his priorities.
He won’t be missed.
But the administration is not emerging in shining armor from this episode. It was clear from the start who they hired, and they went willingly along with all the performative bombast. The rift happened when the administration realized that Mr. Nance is way more self-serving than the unwritten district’s rules allow. (Say, Dr. Wiemelt played his cards right, operated as a team player, and was rewarded with a quiet, risk-free position for leading Urbana Middle School to a disastrous “comprehensive” rating, – a term the Illinois School Board of Education uses for a “D” grade.)
The last few months, it is increasingly hard not to characterize the administration’s actions as, I don’t know, – insane? After failing to disperse the Leal school community they jump-started a (probably, hopeless) drive to do the same to Wiley school, attempting to initiate a multi-year, eight-digits budget project over the time-span of four weeks. And while doing it they are dismissing midsemester the Principal of the school of 1,200 students.
I seriously doubt there is method in ‘t.