Veteran Educator and District Official Van Ayres Named HCPS

Interim Superintendent

In the wake of former Superintendent Addison Davis' abrupt resignation, Van Ayres, Chief of Strategic Planning and Partnerships for HCPS, has been named Interim Superintendent.

By VIKRAM SAMBASIVAN, CO-EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Addison Davis, former Hillsborough County Public Schools (HCPS) Superintendent, resigned from his post on Wednesday, June 14, leaving the school district without a leader. Six days after Davis’ announcement, Van Ayres, was named as HCPS Interim Superintendent.

As a long-term Hillsborough County educator and administrator, Ayres was the obvious choice. He began his teaching career as a chemistry teacher at Howard Blake High School from where he jumped to administration positions, including being the Principal of Thomas Jefferson High School. He eventually gained positions at a district level, most recently being the Chief of Strategic Planning and Partnerships.

As Interim Superintendent, Ayres will serve an initial 12-month term before the school board will make a decision to determine whether or not to appoint him to serve a full four-year term.

“I’m at the place now, where was offered the opportunity by the board in this interim role. But, whether you’re interim or not, you’re still superintendent, so that’s kind of my mindset of how I’m going about this year,” Ayres said. “But, for me to have the opportunity to lead this district [for a full four years], with all the great history we have, would be an honor.”

In his current one-year term, Ayres is faced with a multitude of issues affecting the district, one of the most being large numbers of students receiving Certificates of Completion.

These certificates are handed out to students, in place of a diploma, who complete all the high school credits required by the district and have maintained at least a 2.0 GPA, a C average, but were unable to pass their Florida Standards Assessments (FSAs). Depending on the type of certificate received, the student is able to take the Post Secondary Education Readiness Test (PERT) and may be placed at a community college. However, these certificates are generally unsatisfactory for their FSAs] walk across the stage and nobody really can tell the difference, [at the time], but they’ll go to the back to receive their diploma and get a piece of paper which says, ‘Certificate of Completion,’ which, basically, is worth nothing more than the paper it’s printed on,” Ayres said.

This disparity between passing district standards, but not the state ones, can be attributed to the method with which state standards are tested. There has been a long debate over whether standardized testing is an effective method with which knowledge is tested.

According to the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, such tests have been shown to be biased towards higher-income students who have had more experience with testtaking strategies, and only test a narrow measure of skills. It is for these reasons that score reporting of nationwide tests such as the SAT and ACT has been made optional by most leading United States universities.