Jamie Polk was quite comfortable working at Lawton Public Schools, having spent 25 years in the Comanche County district and rising high in that district’s leadership. But on a trip to the Oklahoma City metropolitan area while participating in the Leadership Oklahoma program, she learned about the struggles of the Oklahoma City Public Schools district .
The district had 30 schools on the Oklahoma State Report Card’s “F” list at the time. Polk went home to Lawton and told her boss, Thomas Deighan, that she could make a difference for Oklahoma City. Deighan, now an East Central University professor, called then-Oklahoma City district Superintendent Sean McDaniel, and within a few weeks, Polk had joined McDaniel’s staff as the assistant superintendent for elementary education.
“It was just a list of Fs and it kind of was intriguing to me,” Polk recalled. “I kind of deem myself a ‘systems leader,’ meaning that I can look at, analyze and try to find a pattern or a trend where I can jump in. … I told (McDaniel), ‘You’ve got a pattern here. Perhaps if someone just came in and did a disruption … By the time I was headed home, he was offering me a job.”