It’s going to take more than the resignation of Dr. Pascal Mubenga to set things right with Durham Public Schools.
The school board chairman called Dr. Mubenga’s resignation “necessary,” presumably not because he was responsible for a devastating fiscal error – the system’s CFO has already resigned because of his culpability – but because Dr. Mubenga waited two months after learning of the error to inform the school board.
That’s unacceptable, but it seems a weak reason to call for the head of the man who oversaw DPS’s shift to remote learning during the pandemic and helped convince Durham voters to support a record-setting $243 million school bond. Mubenga was named Superintendent of the Year in 2020-21 by the Central Carolina Regional Education Service Alliance.
A recent study of the pandemic’s impact on public education by the New York Times stated that while students in most poorer districts and some wealthy districts are further behind than before the pandemic, some poorer districts – Durham singled out among them – are almost back to pre-pandemic levels of learning.