Cougar Academy, an online school within the Harrisburg school district that has been expanded under the state’s recovery plan.
The Pennsylvania education secretary today appointed Dr. Audrey Utley, a Middletown native and a former acting Harrisburg superintendent, to oversee the Harrisburg school district’s state recovery plan.
Utley replaces Gene Veno, a Harrisburg-based consultant and lobbyist and the district’s first recovery officer, who announced his resignation in May.
Utley, who the education department said has worked in schools for more than 40 years, taught elementary school in the Steelton-Highspire school district and went on to serve as a superintendent in both Middletown and Steelton-Highspire.
She led the education transition team of former Harrisburg Mayor Linda Thompson after Thompson’s election in 2009, the Patriot-News reported.
Utley later served briefly as Harrisburg’s acting superintendent in 2010, in the midst of a power struggle between the city’s elected school board and a mayor-appointed board of control whose authority was set to expire that year.
“In addition to Dr. Utley’s experience as a superintendent, she also comes to this position with firsthand knowledge of the unique issues that fiscally distressed school districts face due to her time working to improve other struggling schools,” state education secretary Pedro Rivera said in a prepared statement Monday.
He went on, “I have complete confidence that under Dr. Utley’s guidance, the Harrisburg School District will continue on the path toward financial stability, which will allow the district’s leadership team and educators to focus on the goal of ensuring every student graduates college- and career-ready.”
The state appointed Veno as the district’s first recovery officer in December 2012, after declaring the district fiscally distressed under a law passed earlier that year.
Veno’s recovery plan, approved by the state in May 2013, described a district in rapid decline, with test scores significantly below state and county averages and budget deficits that threatened to put it out of business within a few years.
The plan set new targets for academic performance, sought to expand Harrisburg’s in-house options for online education, and called for two years of pay cuts followed by a wage freeze, among other recommendations.
Many proposals were controversial, and though Veno’s plan is generally viewed as having stabilized district finances, Veno himself has faced no shortage of opposition, particularly from critics who believe he has done little to improve academics.
In early 2014, Mayor Eric Papenfuse asked the state to replace Veno following a meeting in which he allegedly told the mayor he believed his plan was unlikely to succeed, a claim Veno subsequently disputed.
By some measures school performance has worsened since the plan was enacted, with state test results last November showing Harrisburg schools had universally failed to meet the plan’s academic goals by substantial margins.
“It was time,” Veno said on May 8 in reference to his resignation earlier that day, noting that he was leaving the district in a “good financial position” from which it could focus on academic improvement.
