PORTLAND — The Portland Board of Public Education plans to hire an administrator from the Philadelphia school system to be superintendent of Maine’s largest school district.
The school board will vote July 9 on a motion to hire Emmanuel Caulk, an assistant superintendent in charge of 36 of the 249 schools in Philadelphia’s system, the eighth-largest in the nation.
Additional Photos
Caulk was deputy chief for instruction and leadership support in Philadelphia before he was promoted in 2009 to interim regional assistant superintendent.
The Philadelphia school district has a long history of financial and student performance problems but has experienced improvements since the state took over the district in 2001 and launched several reforms.
According to a report prepared by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, the school district raised its graduation rate 23 percentage points, from 39 percent in 1995 to 62 percent in 2005. The gains were the highest of all major urban school districts in the nation.
The Philadelphia school system is more diverse than Portland.
Of the 156,000 students in Philadelphia schools, 56 percent are African-American and 18 percent are of Hispanic origin.
Portland has 7,000 students, 62 percent of whom are white.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
Success. Please wait for the page to reload. If the page does not reload within 5 seconds, please refresh the page.
Enter your email and password to access comments.
Hi, to comment on stories you must . This profile is in addition to your subscription and website login.
Already have a commenting profile? .
Invalid username/password.
Please check your email to confirm and complete your registration.
Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.
Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.