Dispatch: Sex and the School District

In 2004, when the Arlington school committee went looking for a new superintendent, it realized it had a momentous opportunity. The reputation of the town's schools had been slowly improving for decades, but now ambitious parents could finally hire a change agent from beyond the academic bureaucracy, somebody who could finish the transformation of the school system from, as they said, "good to great." The man they settled on was Nate Levenson, a 44-year-old with a Harvard M.B.A. and more than a decade of experience running a multimillion-dollar company. The outsider seemed like exactly the kind of leader Arlington wanted.

For the first two years of his tenure, as test scores improved and he got the school budget back on track, Levenson's businesslike approach won him a devoted following. So it was a surprise when, in March 2007, an angry mob poured into a school committee meeting to demand his head.

At issue was Levenson's decision to get rid of a popular middle school principal named Stavroula Bouris. Wearing a tie decorated with yellow school buses, Levenson sat in the center of the room as the crowd of 250 parents and teachers encircled him, the way teens close ranks around a schoolyard brawl in the hope of seeing some blood. 

"It is truly a sad day for Arlington," a middle school teacher said, when a principal can be subjected to "such a callous and immoral act on the part of the superintendent." Playing to the crowd, the teacher told them the faculty at Bouris's school had just taken a unanimous vote of no confidence in Levenson. Then he addressed the superintendent directly: "I know that you think we will go away, but we will not. Realize that truth may be hidden for a while, but it will never die." The shouts and tears and applause that followed didn't die down for more than four minutes.

Levenson's decision—and the reaction to it—caused even one of his strongest allies on the school committee to turn against him. "I could go on and on about how I've seen your shortcomings...about your lack of understanding of this community and the people in it...about your self-promotion, and about your hubris," Martin Thrope said. "Whether or not Stavroula Bouris goes or stays," he added, "you're finished in this town."

What followed over the next few months, in what would come to be known as "Nategate," was a series of revelations that forced Levenson from his job, divided the town, and even called into question the grand ambitions that had led to his hiring in the first place. In the end, it turned out that Levenson had made the mistake of thinking that when Arlington residents said they were ready for change, they actually meant it.

It's only a slight exaggeration to say there are two types of people in Arlington, and you can tell them apart by where they do their grocery shopping. The townies prefer the rough-around-the-edges Johnnie's Foodmaster because, well, it's good enough. Then there are the newcomers, who go to the newly renovated Stop & Shop (but wish it were a Whole Foods). When it comes to most things, townies tend to like Arlington as it is, thank you very much; newcomers look to neighboring Belmont and Lexington and covet their farm stands, yoga studios, and—most of all—superlative schools.

In 2004, the hunt for a new superintendent seemed the perfect time to remake Arlington's schools in the image of its neighbors'. "We felt that Arlington was ready," says Suzanne Baratta Owayda, who chaired the search committee. "With the right leadership, we thought we could compete with the Lexingtons and Needhams, and even the Wellesleys and Westons."

To fulfill that ambition, in 2005 the committee picked Levenson, making him the first superintendent in the state not to have come up through the ranks of the education system. It was thought he would bring dispassionate business principles to the task of managing cash-strapped schools. And, perhaps in a sign of how badly the committee wanted drastic advances, it was willing to overlook the fact that, save for two years assisting a small-town superintendent, Levenson had never worked in a school system.

Levenson jumped into the new job. He knew he couldn't compete with wealthier school districts in raising cash, so he had to be creative. He found huge savings when he hired a staffer to troll eBay for used textbooks, and came up with a plan to make thousands in profit by charging foreign exchange students to come to town.

Some thought Levenson was cavalier, however, when it came to stickier personnel decisions. He eventually dismissed a broad swath of school administrators, along with some 15 other employees (and briefly considered shuttering an elementary school). Though he redirected $500,000 of the cash he saved into programs that cut the number of students reading below grade level in half, the layoffs did not sit well with many in town. "These were people, not commodities," says one longtime resident.

For Levenson, Ottoson Middle School symbolized much of what needed fixing. In 2005, it was the lone Arlington school that failed to meet certain federal standards in math. As much as this frustrated Levenson, he also knew that many of the Ottoson faculty saw him as little more than an MCAS-obsessed theoretician. "Nate was from outside of Arlington," says Glenn Koocher, executive director of the state's association of school committees. "He brought a different perspective that posed a threat to the people whose main opposition was never having done it that way before."

It was inevitable, then, that Levenson would butt heads with Stavroula Bouris, the Ottoson principal, who liked to consider her staff and students part of one big family. She arrived early each morning to greet the kids and teachers, chatted easily with parents, and once stood in the rain to direct traffic when a crossing guard didn't make it to work. For his part, the balding and bespectacled Levenson would never be mistaken, as one friend admits, for someone "warm and fuzzy."

When Levenson decided Bouris wasn't buying into his plans for improving the school, he moved to oust her, a decision that plenty saw as New Arlington trying to get rid of old Arlington.

Shortly after that heated school committee meeting in March 2007, Levenson backed down and agreed to keep Bouris on. But just two months later, something curious happened: A school employee gave Levenson a stack of e-mails between Bouris and one of her teachers, Chuck Coughlin. By the end of that summer, Levenson had fired them both.