Email
PrintTulsan of the year: Keith Ballard
(page 1 of 4)
In 2011, the Tulsa Public Schools superintendent faced the most difficult undertaking of his career: tackling a much-overdue effort to realign the number of schools in the state’s largest school district to eliminate costly and wasteful under-capacity issues that had crept into the system over time — and restore academic equity.
The resulting initiative, Project Schoolhouse, closed 14 schools to eliminate thousands of empty seats and saved the district more than $5 million per year to reinvest in expanded and more accessible education opportunities for students. Learn why this brave and bold plan, and other leadership efforts to improve Tulsa schools, earned Ballard the honor of being named TulsaPeople’s Tulsan of the Year.
After nearly 40 years in education, Dr. Keith Ballard has never stopped learning.
From his first job as a classroom teacher to his current post as superintendent of the state’s largest school district, Ballard has continually sought knowledge.
Not just from formal education — although he boasts three higher degrees — but also from professional experiences, his personal life and gaining insight from those around him.
He often discusses his wife, Christie, a retired school librarian, who helped Ballard with the first challenge in his educational career — teaching junior high students how to improve their reading skills. He says she has kept him grounded in his leadership positions, reminding him of the perspectives of classroom teachers, parents and others his decisions affect.
He is motivated by his three children — Matthew, a lawyer; Michael, a high school assistant principal; and Michelle Andrews, an elementary school teacher — who have driven his desire to make a difference in the world and with whom he maintains a tight bond.
Ballard cites pivotal experiences that have shaped him — from helping the Oologah-Talala school district recover from a devastating tornado to traveling around the state meeting with school boards as executive director of the Oklahoma State School Boards Association.
But when Ballard assumed the position as superintendent of Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) in October 2008, for the first time, he took the helm of an urban school district — one with 42,000 students, 87 percent of whom live in poverty. It was a district that was facing severe budgetary challenges, declining morale from teachers and staff, and a loss of faith from people in the surrounding community.
And in 2011, Ballard faced what he calls his most challenging assignment yet, an initiative born of necessity but that would result in lasting benefits for the district — Project Schoolhouse.
The unprecedented effort aimed to improve efficiency, equity and effectiveness district-wide and involved a number of elements, including school closings, grade reconfigurations and other issues that troubled school patrons. Yet Ballard believes it has resulted in positive changes for TPS.
In many ways, Ballard’s entire career prepared him for Project Schoolhouse, and life lessons he learned and taught along the way reveal how this consummate student and educator helped lead the turnaround of a school system and affect an entire city.
Lesson 1: “If you don’t think about people and you don’t think about relationships, then you will not lead.”
In late November, Ballard addressed students at the newly renamed Will Rogers College High School, a program where students can earn a high school diploma and an associate’s degree simultaneously. There, he shared his story and how, like many of the students he was addressing, he overcame obstacles in pursuit of education.
He grew up in Kiowa, a small town in southern Kansas, he told them.
His parents, he says, married at 17 and had three children by the time they were 22. Although he hesitates to use the term, Ballard says he grew up poor — his dad worked as the janitor at his school and his mother was a nurse’s aid in a local hospital — but his parents did not let limited economic means keep them from encouraging their children to pursue their goals.
“It was instilled in me from a young age that education was extremely important, and I always knew that I would go to college, and I liked school and I liked learning,” Ballard says.
With no financial assistance, Ballard worked his way through Fort Hays Kansas State University, where he majored in psychology and speech. By the end of his college career, though, he had decided to pursue a different path. A “product of the ’60s,” Ballard desired a profession that would allow him to make a difference in the world. So he set out to become a teacher.
Another event also affected this decision. At age 18, Ballard’s younger brother, Joe, was diagnosed with cancer. He entered college battling the disease but died two years later — just after Ballard earned his degree in 1971.
His brother’s death deeply affected Ballard, and he says it further motivated his desire to change lives.
“I was very intentional about I’m going to make a difference,” he says. “I just didn’t know how I was going to make a difference.”
Fortunately, Ballard had found someone who shared his passion for teaching.
He met his wife, Christie, when the two were teenagers attending a WKY radio-sponsored “teen hop” in Kiowa. She was the daughter and granddaughter of teachers and, like Keith, “loved learning. I loved all subject areas,” she says.
The two married in 1971 and moved to Stillwater, where Christie was finishing her English degree at Oklahoma State University. Although Keith sent out hundreds of letters to find a teaching job, he came up empty and resorted to driving a freight truck, working in the back alleys of downtown Stillwater.
Upon graduation from OSU, Christie accepted an opportunity to work as an English teacher for Coweta Public Schools in northeastern Oklahoma.
The Coweta superintendent understood that hiring Christie would mean finding a position for her husband as well. He told Ballard that if he would take nine college hours of reading, he could become certified in the subject and work with Coweta’s junior high students.
“I’ll never forget him looking at me and saying, ‘Can you do that?’” Ballard says. “And I said with total and utmost confidence, ‘Absolutely I can do that.’ Then, when we left his office, I said to my wife, ‘How do you teach junior high kids to read?’”
Ballard had to learn quickly, and while he says he loved learning to become a reading specialist, his experiences in the classroom were more difficult.
“I learned the only way to control 45 kids in class was to build relationships with them, and that’s what I did,” he says.
