Every employer would want to have a Kendall Massett on the payroll.
“I love my job. I love my job. I love my job,” she says. “I love getting up in the morning. This is not work to me.”
Massett, a 42-year-old mother of two who lives in Holly Oak, is bringing her enthusiasm to the Delaware Charter Schools Network, a nonprofit organization founded in 2001 to promote and advocate for the state’s 22 public charter schools. She took over as the organization's executive director in January.
Massett wasn’t thinking of a career in education when she was growing up outside Annapolis, Md., or when she studied management at North Carolina State University. After working as a restaurant manager and a hospitality industry consultant, she volunteered to help run the Brady Kohn Foundation, an organization that encourages pregnant women to donate their child’s umbilical cord blood, which would otherwise become medical waste, for potential use in life-saving stem cell transplant procedures.
While serving as the Kohn foundation’s unpaid president and working part-time in New Castle County for Community Blood Services, a New Jersey-based organization that manages cord blood donations, Massett participated in the 2010 class of Leadership Delaware, a nonprofit that trains about 20 men and women, aged 25 to 40, in a nine-month program that prepares them to serve in community, nonprofit, political, professional and corporate leadership positions.
At the time, she said, she hoped participating in Leadership Delaware would help her “figure out how I could make a difference in Delaware for the Brady Kohn Foundation.”
Then, during one of the leadership program’s weekly lectures, she heard Chuck Baldwin speak.
More Coverage: Delaware rated middle of the pack in national charter school report
Baldwin, more properly called Command Master Chief Charles Baldwin, had a distinguished career in the U.S. Navy before moving into education. He served as a teacher and principal in the Christina School District before becoming one of the founders of the Delaware Military Academy charter school.
“He said something that resonated with me, touched me, and I knew I needed to do something,” Massett recalls. Baldwin talked about how, in the early days of Delaware Military Academy, his former colleagues from regular public schools didn’t want to visit DMA “because he stole their best kids from him.” She says Baldwin replied by saying “that’s wrong. Every child should be your best child…. Children will rise to the expectation that you set for them.”
Listening to Baldwin convinced Massett to redirect herself into a career in education. Near the end of her Leadership Delaware training, she had coffee with Baldwin and pointedly told him, “I want to work for you.”
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Delaware Charter Schools Network Executive Director Kendall Massett interacts with students during her recent visit to Kuumba Academy in Wilmington."]
That didn’t happen, but Baldwin, now president of the Charter School of Wilmington, did become her mentor, and they kept in touch, meeting regularly for coffee and to discuss education topics. Late last year, Baldwin learned that Susan Harris, then executive director of the Charter Schools Network, was resigning. He mentioned to Massett, she applied for the job, aced the interviews and started in her new position in late January.
“She’s something we definitely need,” Baldwin says. “She’s young, she’s concerned about education and she’s fearless. She’s not afraid to stand up to anybody.”
Says Greg Meece, acting president of the Delaware Charter Schools Network and director of the Newark Charter School, “Kendall is smart, she’s energetic, and she brings a real passion for the charter school movement from a parent’s perspective.”
With a staff of one, Meece adds, the network “can’t do everything we’d like to do, and what we do we have to do well.” Under Massett’s direction, he says, “we will be more strategic, more focused.”
New Delaware Charter Schools Network exec. director Kendall Massett
Excerpts of DFM News' interview with Massett during a visit to Wilmington's Kuumba Academy.
[flashvideo file=http://www.wdde.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/kendall.xml width=680 height=680 playlist=bottom playlistsize=280 /]
One important part of Massett’s job is to be a facilitator for individual charter schools, helping them solve their problems and directing them to find resources when they need help with finances, planning, legal issues, marketing, printing, ordering textbooks or uniforms, or just about anything else.
“We need someone to serve as a voice for charter schools,” Baldwin says. “She can work with school leaders, she can work with parents, she can work with students, she can work at all different levels.”
Meece points to Massett’s understanding of education from a parent’s perspective. Since parents choose charter schools for their children, charters have a built-in constituency of parents. However, what Delaware’s charters don’t have right now, Meece and Massett say, is a broader organization of parents who can speak out for charter schools as a group, not merely for the one school their children attend.
“I would like to create a network for parents,” Massett says. “Parents want to be involved but don’t know how.”
She’s also looking forward to working as an advocate at the state level, pressing for the needs of charter schools with state education officials and with members of the General Assembly.
To become an effective advocate, Massett set herself the goal of visiting the state’s 22 charter schools during her first three months on the job.
She is already seeing plenty she likes, like going to the Kuumba Academy in downtown Wilmington and watching an assembly where children in kindergarten through second grade celebrated achieving eight months of academic growth in five months. “The kindergarten kids had this chant, ‘Work hard. Get smart.’ And this second grader got a T-shirt for having the most growth in his class, and he was so excited running back to show the shirt to his mother. I still feel the pride for him,” she says.
While there can sometimes be prickly relationships between traditional public schools and their charter cousins, and between the adults who support one and blame the other for their program’s woes, Massett wants to be a collaborator who builds lasting relationships between the different programs and constituencies.
She believes she can be a strong public advocate on behalf of public schools, both charter and traditional. Meece and Baldwin are confident she has the skills to succeed in that role. One important purpose of charter schools, Massett points out, is to create successful programs so that they might be replicated not only in other charters but in traditional public schools as well.
“I believe all children deserve an excellent education, and I believe I can help children by finding out what their needs are and by working to give that to them,” she says.
Asked why she is now dedicating her career to education, Massett’s response is clear and simple: “Because I’m a mom.”
