Shawn Joseph
Metro Nashville Public Schools director Shawn Joseph will leave his post soon, one way or another.
The Nashville superintendent tells The Tennessean that he will not seek a contract extension. The daily reports that Joseph says he has no plans to resign, but will "seek to finish out his contract through 2020 or work with the board to transition in a new leader."
Meanwhile, NewsChannel 5 reports that Metro school board member Anna Shepherd will bring a motion at the board's April 9 meeting to terminate Joseph's contract.
Joseph, who was hired in a 2016 as the city's first African-American director of schools, has been mired in multiple controversies over his leadership of the school system. (NewsChannel 5 in particular has been covering Joseph aggressively, while defenders have rallied behind him.)
All this comes as Will Pinkston, a school board member whose tenure has been marked by clashes with charter school supporters and hostile Twitter exchanges, announces his resignation. In his resignation letter, Pinkston calls the board "impossibly inept" and laments the presence of "board members who lack the intellectual capacity to focus on large-scale change."
Pinkston has also come to Joseph's defense, and in his letter he writes that the "dishonest and unfair treatment of the first African-American superintendent in the history of Nashville should give the entire community pause."
