education FACTBOOK 2011
Hinojosa at the helm a
e ojos h T in H le fi
AGE: 54 NICKNAME: Doc FAMILY: He and his wife Ki y have two sons, one a student at Havard and one a student at Princeton; Hinojosa has a grown son in the Atlanta area who will soon make him a grandfather. EDUCATION: He received a bachelor’s degree from Texas Tech University and earned his master’s degree at the University of North Texas, and he received his doctorate from the University of Texas at Aus n. PREVIOUSLY: He was superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District with 150,000 students, 21,000 employees and a $1.2 billion budget. He also served as superintendent of the Hays Consolidated School District in Aus n and the Fabens Independent School District in El Paso. HONORS: He was chosen Superintendent of the Year in 2002 by the Texas Associa on of School Boards and earned the same award in 2005 from the University of Texas at Aus n. He was named a Dis nguished Alumnus by the College of Educa on at Texas Tech University. HIS STYLE: Wednesdays are Hinojosa’s school-visit days, showing up at 15 to 20 schools a month. ‘I’ve done that my whole career, and it’s made a huge difference,’ he says. ‘People see me as a regular person. I don’t go to ‘snoopervise’ ... I’m an advocate.
Staff/Jon-Michael Sullivan
Dr. Michael Hinojosa, the new superintendent of the Cobb School District, visits with Cobb School Board Chair Alison Bartlett. Cover: Dr. Hinojosa is sworn in by Cobb Superior Court Judge Reuben Green.
Cobb School District welcomes new superintendent From staff reports
MARIETTA — Dr. Michael Hinojosa is doing a lot of listening these days, since taking over as superintendent of Cobb County Schools on July 1. Hired by the school board on June 5, Hinojosa (pronounced e-no-ho-sah) said his first 90 days will include an entry plan of listening to staff members, parents and the community to understand the needs of the 25th largest school district in the nation. He intends to meet with more than 100 people in the community to listen to their concerns and ideas. After that, he will meet with the board and administration to discuss the district’s needs and vision for the future, he said. “I’m certainly not going to come in here and re-engineer anything,” he said in a video interview posted on the district’s website. “I’m going to listen for 90 days. I have an entry plan that I’m going to execute. After those 90 days we’ll be able to see where the needs are … I want to make sure that we honor what’s going on in the district and then figure out where we, together, not me, but we, together, can move it to the next level.”
Hinojosa, 54, said he plans on crafting a “shared vision” for the district that includes teacher students to be college- and workforce-ready when they graduate. The former superintendent of Dallas Independent School Dis-
that e r u ke s n g o n i n a m t to at’s goi figure n a ‘I w or wh hen r, not t d n n o e we h istrict a , togeth can , d the here we ogether vel.’ t w out ut we, next le e b me, it to th e trict, Hinomov josa was announced as the Cobb School board’s sole finalist for the superintendent position on May 19, after a six-month long search. During his two public visits to Cobb before his official hiring, Hinojosa met with
MARIETTA DAILY JOURNAL l SUNDAY, JULY 31, 2011 l MDJONLINE.COM
parents, district staff and community members at Campbell, Sprayberry and McEachern high schools. At the Sprayberry forum, Hinojosa was met with some criticism from community members and forced to field some tough questions. But he answered them with a simple “bring it on” and seemed unfazed. One of the first questions at the Sprayberry forum asked Hinojosa if he actively recruited Spanish-speaking teachers in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Spain and South America to teach at Dallas ISD. “When I was hired in 2005 we had 1,000 classrooms where we could not provide the services for students that were required by the state of Texas and Texas education code,” he said. “So in order to fill those classrooms we had to immediately find the staff that could do that. We looked internally, we looked all over the state, but there were very few qualified people. So the district launched a program where we did recruit internationally. We had a pretty good success rate in hiring the people that we needed to hire and the results have been phenomenal.” See Hinojosa, Page 62
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