Sean McDaniel ready to ‘listen’ and discover what comes next after OKCPS

OKLAHOMA CITY — For 39 years, Sean McDaniel spent the month of August waking in the early hours of the morning and preparing for the start of school.

This year, what would have been his 40th working in education, teachers will ready their classrooms, schools will open, buses will roar to a start and students will arrive, but McDaniel will be elsewhere, preparing for what comes next after leaving Oklahoma City Public Schools.

“It’s weird, yeah,” he said. “I’m going to have to get used to this, I guess.”

McDaniel shocked the Oklahoma City community when he announced in February he would resign as the superintendent of OKCPS after the end of the school year, citing differences with the district’s school board. His six years at the helm of the district made him its longest-tenured superintendent in three decades.

The transition away from OKCPS has been a period of reflection and reset, he said, as well as an opportunity to spend extra time with his wife and family.

Now, McDaniel hopes to leverage his experience in school leadership to launch a consulting business to help school districts and other entities to improve their organizational structure or iron out operational challenges, like financial accounting, curriculum auditing and leadership development.

The business concept isn’t new, he said, but “there’s never enough support” for the more than 500 school districts in Oklahoma.

While optimistic the venture could succeed, McDaniel, 61, said he would be open to working as a superintendent again. Nor did he rule out running for public office, though he said the idea of campaign politics “does not appeal to me sitting here today.”

“I’m in a place in my life right now where I’m just going to listen,” McDaniel said. “I’m not going to take anything off the table.”

In his next chapter, McDaniel said he aims to focus more on service with the daily grind of administrative work out of the way. The concept of servant leadership — which he described as solving problems without caring who gets the credit — was fundamental for his team at OKCPS, he said, and their buy-in to that core value carried them through the turbulence of the past six years.

In McDaniel’s first year on the job, OKCPS rolled out a massive consolidation plan to close 15 schools and reconfigure 17 others. 

The plan, called Pathway to Greatness, at times faced contentious pushback over school closures. OKCPS leaders said the goal was to right-size the district’s budget by shedding low-occupancy buildings, leasing them out and consolidating more resources in the remaining schools.

Everything changed the following school year with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers and families began to navigate a new reality of distance learning while district leaders fast-tracked the purchase of individual devices for every student and air filtration systems in schools.

The pandemic delayed by two years the district’s plan to ask voters for a new bond issue. OKCPS finally launched its bond campaign in 2022 and passed a $955 million package, the largest in district history.

“When you see a bunch of people who are committed to servant leadership … a lot of cool things can happen,” McDaniel said. “You can pass a billion-dollar bond. You can navigate COVID pretty effectively. You can close 15 schools and then reopen them in different capacities. That was our foundational building block was just that servant attitude.”

The consolidation plan and bond issue tackled a “generational challenge” of matching the district’s infrastructure to the modern size and needs of its student population, Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt wrote in a social media message at the time McDaniel announced his impending resignation.

“I just can’t exaggerate how challenging that could have been,” Holt wrote of the Pathway to Greatness effort. “There’s a reason it hadn’t been done before. Sean led our community through that incredibly complex journey.”

But near the end of McDaniel’s six years, his relationship with the OKCPS school board began to decline, he said. His resignation letter referenced differences of opinion over the proper level of board involvement in day-to-day operations.

Six months after writing that letter, McDaniel said there wasn’t any single issue that caused the rift between himself and the board, but rather it was a deterioration of the relationship over time. Both he and the board tried to work things out, he said, but “we just couldn’t get there.”

“Sometimes you get to a point in a relationship where the best thing to do is to shake hands, hug a neck and say, ‘We’ve done the best we could do for as long as we could do. Let’s move in a different direction,’” McDaniel said. “That’s where I got. I just got to a place where I thought there was a better solution than the path that we were on. I saw things a little bit differently than the board did on some issues. Not right or wrong, just different.”

Chairperson Paula Lewis, who has led the board since 2017, said the bond between both sides was positive, as evidenced by the length of time McDaniel stayed. She thanked the former superintendent for his strong leadership of OKCPS while noting the decision to resign was his alone. 

“It was really a successful relationship between the board and Dr. McDaniel,” Lewis said. “We’re proud of the relationship. It was a solid run.” 

Despite reaching what his resignation letter called an “irreconcilable” point with the board, McDaniel expressed enthusiasm for the board members’ choice of his successor. They promoted Jamie Polk, the district’s head of elementary schools, into the superintendent role.

Polk joined McDaniel’s leadership cabinet in 2019, coming from a 25-year career in Lawton Public Schools. She said she plans to emulate McDaniel’s ability to build strong partnerships with local businesses, higher education institutions, organizations and community leaders.

“Over the past five years, I have learned how Dr. McDaniel utilizes community partnerships to give students additional resources and opportunities,” Polk said.

McDaniel described Polk as having an “unbelievable resume” and a reputation as a respected leader. She knows how to leverage data to improve a school’s performance, he said.

Although it’s her first superintendent job, there’s no question she’s ready to lead the district and take it to another level, McDaniel said. 

That’s why his departure — and this new chapter outside of a school building — is “not the end of the world,” he said. District leaders will carry on in a new direction, and OKCPS classrooms will continue to have “the best teachers anywhere.”

“The six years was fantastic,” McDaniel said. “Yeah, I could have stayed longer. That was my plan. But, I’m a believer. I believe there’s a greater plan. My time was up, and that’s good. We passed the torch, and I think good things are in store for Oklahoma City with Dr. Polk.”