After a July 3 start date, Elizabeth Grant is officially the new leader of the Salt Lake City School District and the fifth superintendent to lead it since 2020.
Grant succeeds interim superintendent Martin Bates, who was appointed in October 2022 after Timothy Gadson III resigned a little over a year after he started. Gadson was the first Black educator to lead a Utah school district and left after ongoing conflict with the district’s school board.
Most recently, Grant was an associate professor in The George Washington University Graduate School of Education, but has previously worked as a principal in the Salt Lake City School District and is a graduate of the district herself. She holds degrees from the University of Utah, Harvard University, and Stanford University.
As she looks to a future with the Salt Lake City School District, Grant said she will focus on teaching, learning and reaching out to the community.
On July 6, Grant visited the summer school programs at North Star Elementary where she participated in a game of hot potato with one classroom of students and then spoke with students in another class who were building towers out of dry spaghetti noodles and marshmallows. Grant helped some of the students with the task, which she said was more challenging than she was expecting.
After the classroom tour, Grant answered questions from journalists, which she did not do when the district’s school board announced her appointment in May.
Grant acknowledged the district faces some challenges, like concerns over dropping enrollment and school closures. A 2022 state audit criticized the district for keeping so many elementary schools open, despite declining enrollment. The district is currently conducting a population and boundary study to determine which schools to close.
“We’re looking at that carefully, trying to gather information from the community, talking to parents, neighborhoods,” Grant said. “The board will be moving forward with those decisions in the coming weeks and months. So that’s certainly an issue that I’m hearing about.”
Grant is also concerned about the social-emotional learning of students as they come out of the pandemic and the well-being of teachers.
But Grant said her biggest priority is teaching and learning.
“We’re focused on what’s in the classroom,” Grant said. “It’s about increasing learning. It is always about that.”
Grant said she also wants to make the district “the place that teachers want to work” by creating a healthy work environment.
With a revolving door of superintendents over the last few years, Grant said she’ll work to show the community that she’s the right person for this job by spending the next few months going out and building connections.
“My goal is to listen to them and to learn about what their perspectives are on schooling, what’s working well for our children, what we ought to be doing better,” Grant said. “Education is a community endeavor. This is about everybody involved.”
While Grant is coming to this position from the world of education policy and research instead of another school district, she sees her background as an asset. She said she’s been able to observe different schools and districts across the country, talk with the top education researchers and “understand what we know about teaching and learning.”
Gadson and Lexi Cunningham, the last two superintendents that were not interim, left amid conflict with the school board. When asked if Grant had any concerns about working with the district’s school board, she said that was an important question but she wasn’t in Salt Lake during that period.
Grant said she has been impressed with the commitment of the new school board, but that “issues of the past need to be attended to” going forward.
“I think there were charges of racism at that time and that’s what I mean by an issue that requires our serious attention,” Grant said.
Grant said those issues will be addressed head-on and through lots of conversations. An open dialogue is also Grant’s plan for addressing societal and political issues that come up in schools.
“I think the remedy for uncivil discourse is more conversation,” Grant said.
Mohsen Ghaffari, a teacher at North Star Elementary and Utah’s 2015 Teacher of the Year, said Grant has an impressive resume and he is happy about the choice. But he wishes that the district had involved educators and stakeholders more in the selection process.
The district did have a stakeholder committee of more than 40 people that evaluated the applicants, but unlike when Gadson and Cummingham were selected, the district did not release a list of finalists before announcing that Grant would be the new superintendent. It also did not hold public forums where community members could meet the finalists in person.
“We’ll have to wait and see what happens,” Ghaffari said.
John Arthur, a teacher at Meadowlark Elementary and Utah’s 2021 teacher of the year, feels more hopeful about the new superintendent because of her experience in both schools and education policy.
“She’s very knowledgeable in all things education,” Arthur said. “As a teacher who’s gone through the pandemic, along with everybody else, I err on the side of hope.”
Like Ghaffari, Arthur wishes there would’ve been more teacher input solicited, but “we can’t go back. The choice has been made and I want to put my faith in the elected school board members.”
Arthur said he wants to believe that this leadership change will stick and that the students of the district will benefit from it. As superintendent, Arthur said Grant will work for the board. But he said he hopes she turns to the community whenever she needs help.
“We are all resting our hopes in her success. And we will do whatever we can to make sure that she is successful,” Arthur said. “On the flip side, if she listens to the people that she’s going to be directly affecting, whose lives she can very well change with every decision that she makes, I think that we will move our district to a healthier, happier place.”
