Interview: Hamilton Southeastern Superintendent Pat Mapes

Pat Mapes, who led Perry Township Schools until 2023, now oversees Hamilton Southeastern's more than 21,000 students after the school board appointed him this month. 

WFYI spoke to Mapes last week during his first full week on the job to discuss his plans for the district that’s struggled over the last year with changes in leadership, administrative departures and public divide surrounding the school board’s decisions. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Rachel Fradette: What’s one thing you want to bring from your time in Perry Schools to HSE Schools?

Pat Mapes: One thing that people really don't think about when they think about Hamilton southeastern schools is that the English Language Learner population is growing here. I'm going to be a great resource for our administrators and teachers on how to handle that when we had over 1,600 dual language students in Perry Township Schools and that's a different way to educate a student. 

When you have students of different cultural backgrounds, and some maybe newcomers into the United States who come into your school district, you’ve got to make certain your teachers and administrators have professional development that recognizes you've got a different learner now sitting in the classroom.

They've already implemented some really strong practices here at Hamilton Southeastern as I walked around with principals and talked to them about that. But I don't see that population slowing down here.

Fradette: You serve on the State Board of Education. What do you bring to the superintendent role by having a lens on what's happening statewide?

Mapes: The first thing is I try to keep kid focused. My whole career is about students and I really got back into this because I miss seeing students each and every day. And so I think what I bring to the state board is that voice that we look at all learners and even here in Hamilton Southeastern Schools we're just not going to focus on the kids at the top and high ability.

We're going to look at all of them and make certain we have opportunities for those students. At the same time, we understand that success can be student academic growth, not just proficiency because we get them at all different levels. We have to strive every day to be a little bit better.

Fradette: Board members have spent most of the last year entrenched in some controversies. Much of that stems from how the school board has shared information with the public from what I've heard from the community. How do you intend to lead in this next chapter? How do you build trust?

Mapes: I'm not going to dwell on the past. I've always led a very transparent organization whether it was Delaware Community Schools or whether it's at the state level or Perry Township. We're going to be really honest with people. We're going to listen to concerns and we'll seek out whether or not they're true.

If something maybe not favorable for us is happening, we're going to address it and say it out loud. We're not going to try to polish something up that isn't true to make it look good. We're a public school with 21,000 students. There are going to be things that happen in high schools and middle schools that we're not going to be real proud of, but guess what, we're going to fix and we're going to address it and we'll say it out loud. 

Fradette: For the Diversity and Inclusion and Equity director, do you have any plans to propose to the board, whether you support or don't support, keeping that program and keeping that position?

Mapes: I really think that within our buildings, our individual administrators and counselors should be providing and looking at access of all of our subgroups... we're going to make certain our kids have access, no matter who they are, and our administrators and counselors will understand that because it'll be on our plate each and every day. I really don't need a separate position to make that happen.

Fradette: There were a couple things that were undone by the school board last year, one being that they voted to remove microaggression language from student handbooks. I just wanted to get your thoughts on whether that'd be something you would ever recommend to bring back.

Mapes: Well first of all, this place has not had the greatest leadership for a while and they've kind of been going a lot of different directions with no focus. We're going to put together a strategic plan so that everybody knows the direction that we're going. They have established a handbook committee now that has input from teachers and administrators and students, and they'll bring recommendations to the board for a handbook for the 2024-25 school year.

I haven't seen a draft of that yet. That usually happens in May or June for approval for the next school year. I really think our principals and administrators know buildings as part of their responsibility. 

We hope that everyone gets along. But once again, I said it before, we're a public school system and we take everybody and at times, they're young adults, and they make mistakes, and sometimes they make comments that they don't understand what their comments mean, and they can be offensive to different groups.

Once again, doesn't matter the color doesn't matter the sexual orientation of the person. We have to make certain that our students understand the recognition of everyone's rights and everyone's feelings and really focus on random acts of kindness more so than anything else and, and just respect of everybody.

Fradette: What do you see to be Hamilton Southeastern's biggest challenge going forward, and what you're most excited about?

Mapes: The biggest challenge is trying to figure out where all the growth is and whether or not students are going to come with that growth... the exciting thing is what's getting ready to happen at the state level with some graduation pathways, and whether or not we can create even more partnerships with our local community to give students an opportunity to experience careers, whether it's work-based, or whether it's just job shadowing.

Rachel Fradette is the WFYI Statehouse education reporter. Contact Rachel at rfradette@wfyi.org.