Dr. Sonia Dinnall, a former Springfield principal and teacher, was selected by the school committee late Thursday to replace retiring superintendent Daniel Warwick.
The final vote was 4-3 - decided just after 9:30 p.m. in the Van Sickle Academy and Springfield Renaissance School auditorium.
Dinnall will be both the first woman and first Black woman to lead the district, according to the school district’s official announcement.
Her resume includes three years as the principal of the Springfield High School of Commerce and a decade with Hartford Public Schools, where she worked as its executive director of college and career readiness.
“I vow to work collaboratively, to ensure our students have the best education that we could ever offer, our families instill their trust in us once again, and that we operate from a lens of equity, from every department and classroom, in our district,” Dinnall said before the committee.
One last interview for the road
Before their decision, the committee held public-facing interviews with each of the three finalists up for the job. Also interviewed was the Champlain Valley School District’s superintendent, Rene Sanchez, and Springfield Public Schools’ lead chief schools officer, Kimberly Wells.
The three had taken part in a community forum and public interview of sorts the night before in the same auditorium.
Questions ranged from what their biggest priorities would be if hired to what they would change from the previous administration.
In Dinnall’s case, she highlighted a transition plan she developed – one that involved committing to empowering families and community members, meeting one-on-one with school administrators, and conducting a review of the district’s strategic operating plan.
Another big theme – equity.
“I am determined to continue to use my career to level the playing field, champion equity, and mitigate barriers to empower our students to achieve their greatest goals and their biggest dreams,” she said.
The committee began its deliberations after the final interview, with two favored candidates quickly emerging – Dinnall and Wells.
Wells, who has filled in as Springfield’s superintendent in the past, was favored by Mayor Domenic Sarno and committee members Christopher Collins and Attorney Peter Murphy.
In the district for the past decade, Wells used her interview time to detail plans of digging into its strategic plan, with an eye on expanding access to AP courses and creating roles for implementing new strategies as well as conducting equity audits.
“It's a lot of work to do this, and a lot of work falls on [a] few individuals’ shoulders, and so, the first thing I would do is re-institute the assistant superintendent [role], who would work closely with me on these practices in these initiatives,” Wells told the committee. “The second position, which goes along with equity audits that I’ll talk about, and because it's really important that we're looking at everything through the lens of equity, as I would bring on and create a new position for a chief equity officer.”
A dose of scrutiny, questions over past decisions
The candidates also faced their fair share of scrutiny during questions. For Wells, committee Vice Chair Joesiash Gonzalez asked why plans for equity audits or to expand AP access were not already underway, given Wells’s current position.
She said work on expanding AP course access is already happening in some capacity, and before equity audits can be held, a broader audit of the district landscape in general is needed.
In Dinnall’s case, committee members such as Murphy and Sarno called attention to how the candidate departed her role at Commerce – that she was allegedly not renewed as a principal, and that she was also not being renewed in her current role with the Springfield Empowerment Zone, either.
Sarno also said Commerce saw a dropout rate increase of 16 percent during her tenure.
Dinnall responded that Commerce experienced significant budget cuts during her time as principal – impacting staff and student morale in her final year - but that during her first year on the job, graduation rates rose from 61 to over 80 percent in 2021.
Regarding her departure, she claimed that in the face of a $6 million budget cut faced by the school last year, she had been told by leadership that they could not keep her on board.
She said the Empowerment Zone, which oversees over a dozen schools in the city struggling with performance, including Commerce, reached out to her.
By July, she was a “principal on assignment” before becoming chief of family and community engagement. She indicated she and Zone leadership agreed they would part ways on mutually agreeable terms as she seeks a role as superintendent.
Past issues over Springfield superintendent search process resurface
Both matters came up again during deliberations. Wells was ultimately voted down, 3-4, during the final phase of the meeting.
At one point, Collins claimed it was not the fault of Wells for the lack of equity audits at SPS, but the fault of the committee itself – something committee member Denise Hurst heavily disputed, saying efforts had been made to bring up similar matters in the past.
“All of us, myself included - we didn't bring it like we probably should have, to make those things go forward,” Collins said.
“I'm sorry, I - would absolutely disagree because this body doesn't ever have a just say - it's always a 4-3 vote,” Hurst said. “It's never about the body, it's about the majority and when it was brought to our attention by Mrs. Naylor, it was shot down immediately - we couldn't even have a conversation. For goodness' sake, we can't even have a transparent DIRE meeting, So, there's no way that we we're going to talk about equity audits.”
Hurst, as well as Gonzalez and fellow members Barbara Gresham and LaTonia Monroe Naylor, voted for Dinnall.
The same four committee members had been critical of the process throughout the superintendent search – at one point walking out on a school committee meeting in protest.
Issues included a lack of student representation on the committee that screens superintendent applications, as well as the vetting of applications themselves.
Some members contended applications that did not meet minimum standards should at least be looked at by screeners.
The matters not being put on school committee agendas were also an issue.
Committee and subcommittee leadership maintained that altering the search process and other facets would open up the body to legal issues – something the law firm assisting with the search detailed in several legal opinions.
During the final interviews and before the vote, candidates were asked what they made of the search process and how they would proceed as superintendent.
Dinnall said restoring trust with the community is a priority.
“I appreciate the passion that people had for the process,” she said. “I would love for us to harness that energy, shift it and move it in the right direction, so we can be unified and move forward together. School committee - we need each other. You all are the elected officials that your constituents voted for - they trust you. We need to restore that, and repair and be able to coalesce our resources and really tap into the collective wisdom that you each bring to the committee.”
Details on when a formal offer to Dinnall and contract discussions were not immediately released.
