The Harrisburg school district’s Lincoln administrative building.
The search is on for the Harrisburg school district’s next chief recovery officer.
Audrey Utley, who was appointed as the district’s CRO in 2015, will retire when her contract with the district expires on June 30, she confirmed today.
She submitted her letter of resignation to school board President Judd Pittman last week.
As CRO, Utley was charged with overseeing the implementation of the district’s five-year recovery plan, which outlined more than 100 initiatives to bolster its academic success and fiscal health. Utley oversaw an amendment to that plan shortly after she took office, but said that she never planned to serve after its expiration in June 2018.
“When I accepted my position, I understood that the plan was for five years, and I would finish the last three,” Utley said.
Utley was employed with the district on a year-to-year contract. Her salary was capped at $144,000 per year, according to a PennLive report.
She expects that 80 percent of the recovery plan initiatives will be complete by the end of her tenure in four weeks.
Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse said that the city is working with the school board and the Pennsylvania Department of Education to find Utley’s replacement. The new CRO could become the district’s state-appointed receiver, if the state decides to put the district into receivership later this summer.
Even if the state rules against receivership, the district is required to employ a CRO as long as Harrisburg retains its Act 47 designation as a financially distressed city, Utley said.
Papenfuse praised Utley in 2015 when a panel of local and state officials unanimously appointed her to the CRO seat. But, today, he said that she did not choose to exercise the full power of her position.
The mayor hopes that the next CRO will be “someone who will hold the administration accountable and promote transparency in the school board, and who will not accept another day of fiscal mismanagement and academic failures of this district.”
Utley dismissed the mayor’s criticisms of her job performance. She said that the district has a standards-aligned curriculum for the first time in its history, which will help propel academic growth.
“I’m not sure what part of my job he would say I did not execute,” she said. “I was hired to monitor the implementation of the recovery plan, and we pushed the district along as quickly as we could.”
In addition to serving as CRO, Utley served as acting superintendent of the school district for fewer than two months in 2010. She left that post to become superintendent of Steelton-Highspire School District.
