Advocates are praising Gov. Phil Murphy’s pick to lead the state Department of Education, Kevin Dehmer , a former interim commissioner and 15-year department veteran known for his expertise in school finance and funding.
Dehmer was the department’s chief financial officer for five years. After a brief stint at Rutgers, he is returning to the agency, replacing Angelica Allen-McMillan, the acting commissioner who retired Jan. 31 after serving for three years.
Insiders say Allen-McMillan was sometimes difficult for department employees to reach, though external K-12 groups have said she was accessible.
Allen-McMillan almost never directly addressed the press after taking over in 2020, even as schools made unprecedented and now controversial changes during the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring some combination of masks, social distancing and remote learning until the public health emergency was lifted two years later.
Then came big drops in K-12 scores and graduation readiness, all linked to the pandemic, and the culture wars that seized local school boards and became political fodder when the state revised its sex education standards to make them more progressive. Allen-McMillan defended those standards with a rousing rebuttal at a Senate budget committee hearing in 2022.