ACPS Superintendent Honored by CCNA

“I Dreamed of Being a Superintendent”

By James Cullum

Alexandria City Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Gregory Hutchings was honored by the Concerned Citizens Network of Alexandria in July. Hutchings, an Alexandria native and graduate of T.C. Williams High School, was presented by CCNA leadership as a welcome home party for a son of the city.

“This is just an excellent opportunity for us to come together to show our appreciation and support to our native son who has come home to set the course to forever change the way we educate our children,” Gwendolyn Hubbard Lewis, the outgoing CCNA executive director said.

The fundraiser event for CCNA, which is a nonprofit dedicated to reducing the high school dropout rate in the city, was attended by School Board Member Heather Thornton, former Mayor Allison Silberberg, former School Board Members Sheryl Gorsuch and Charles Wilson, and former ACPS Superintendent Rebecca Perry.

Hutchings, who graduated from T.C. in 1995, and before coming back to Alexandria was the superintendent of Shaker Heights Schools in Cleveland, Ohio, from 2013 to 2018. Back in 2009, however, he’d applied to be the principal at T.C. after the Washington Post revealed the school to have the highest dropout rate in the Commonwealth.

“I dreamed of being a superintendent,” Hutchings told the audience. “In 2009, I read the same article about T.C. in the Washington Post – the persistently lowest achieving high school in the state of Virginia. I actually applied to be the principal at T.C., and got runner-up. Suzanne Maxey was chosen. I decided that if I was going to make I difference, I was going to be the superintendent of Alexandria City Public Schools. My mission was to come back to this community. This was something that I was going to have to do in my lifetime.”