Mt. Edgecumbe High School’s new superintendent David Langford has a long history with the school. He was the first teacher hired when the school reopened as a state-run public boarding school in 1985.
“So I got to be involved in restarting Mount Edgecumbe, from hiring all the teachers, to deciding curriculum, to scheduling students, all kinds of things,” Langford told KCAW in an interview in late July.
He taught at Mt. Edgecumbe until 1992, and he said it was an exciting time to be there.
“We had a very dynamic staff of all very young people,” Langford said. “Starting the school from scratch, we really couldn’t blame anybody else for any mistakes. So we had to own all of our own mistakes, and that turned out to be a really great thing, and also just unleashing the innovation of teaching staff and administrators to really think about, you know, what could happen.”
The first summer after the school reopened, Langford said there was uncertainty about whether the state would keep the lights on. At the time, the superintendent told staff to spend the summer looking for solutions to improve the school’s educational outcomes. That prompt put Langford on the path to his 30-year career running his education consulting firm, Langford Learning.
“I’ve taught kindergarten teachers how to improve classroom performance and behavior using the tools and technology that I learned from business leaders, actually, and then it goes all the way up to administrators, board members, et cetera,” Langford said. “So I just started having districts all over the world, basically, that started having me come yearly and do presentations and training and continual improvement.”
He’s also spent several years leading a charter school system in California. But he hoped to one day return to Alaska. Then earlier this year, Langford saw that Chatham School District in Angoon was looking for a new superintendent.
“So I talked to my wife, and she said, ‘Yes, let’s go back to Southeast.’ And so applied, and ended up getting that job, and was perfectly happy with that,” Langford said.
Then he started hearing about Mt. Edgecumbe’s financial problems. He followed the news about the school throughout the spring, when school leadership anticipated cutting half of the school’s teaching staff to tackle budget shortfalls, and eventually learned of the former superintendent’s resignation in April.
“The next thing I know, I’m talking to the Commissioner [of Education], and then I’m talking to state senators and the governor’s office. And then the idea came about, you know, could I run both districts?” Langford said. “Given my insight about Mt. Edgecumbe High School, I know how to operate, how it runs, how it works. That wouldn’t be a big learning curve. And Chatham only has four rural schools. So it seemed like, ‘Okay, this could actually work.'”
Langford said he secured a three-year contract at both schools, where managing the budget will be central to Langford’s work.
“Chatham School District also has a lot of financial issues going on, and my experience in management is that if you’re going to turn around an organization, whether it’s a business or a school district or whatever it might be, you really are looking at at least three years,” Langford said.
He said before he came on board at Mt. Edgecumbe, five teachers retired and some were laid off.
“Because of the budget problems, the state wasn’t allowing us to hire some back,” Langford said.
“That’s sort of changing,” he continued. “[It] now looks like since we’re going to be at full enrollment, that we’re going to have money to be able to hire some teachers back. So I can’t really tell you exactly a number, but it’s looking pretty stable. I’ll put it that way.”
Langford will be living in Sitka while he manages both school districts. While some of that management will be over Zoom, he hopes to identify possible shared services or other ways the schools can help each other.
