Faith-based leadership north of the border

School Administrator, August, 2004 by Jay P. Goldman

On the surface, Michael Moher's major challenges as a superintendent don't seem so foreign from any other leader who's responsible for the education of 28,000 students. He's been grappling in recent years with budget shortfalls, school closings, a couple of dissident board members and even a week-long teacher's strike.

What sets him apart from others you're likely to see profiled in this magazine is this: Moher runs a Catholic school system in Ontario, Canada. He's one of 66 AASA members working north of the border, and one of the very few in the AASA membership ranks leading a religious school system. Officially, his title is director of education of the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board on the western edge of the province of Ontario.

Yet it's because of the kinship he feels with his brethren in the American superintendency that Moher has been one of the more active Canadian members of AASA for more than a decade. He's enrolled in special workshops (one on total quality management in the early '90s remains a personal favorite) and is a perennial attendee at the National Conference on Education, where he says he "always comes away with a new skill."

At last winter's conference in San Francisco, Moher admits he was all ears to best-selling author Jim Collins's remarks on what the educator calls the "very simple need to have the right people in the right places." Moher takes that responsibility to heart in his current role. He has committed himself to mentoring his building principals while making some hard personnel adjustments recently in the district's senior leadership.

He is known to colleagues as someone who looks outward in earnest pursuit of bettering his own leadership skills. "He works hard at knowing the climate, at knowing the initiatives in [the United States], in the rest of Canada and in Europe," says Frank Kelly, executive director of the Council of Ontario Directors of Education.

Moher, a devout Catholic whose forbearers emigrated to Ontario from Ireland in the 1830s for religious freedom and economic prosperity, is directing his first school district, though he's worked at the upper administrative ranks in three other Catholic school systems, all in Ontario. He's also worked as a Catholic school elementary and secondary principal and spent a year teaching junior high in Lindsay, Ontario, his hometown about 70 miles northeast of Toronto.

Windsor-Essex school board chair John Macri, a lawyer, says Moher is wellsuited for the particular role he's in. "He's very articulate about and very dedicated to his Catholic faith," Macri says. "We saw that right away" when he was hired.

With a nod to his close working relationships with public school superintendents, Moher says he's perfectly comfortable in the religious school setting and sees some distinct advantages. Foremost, he says, is the shared mission of a faithbased education system. "We don't need to deal with all the multicultural issues that other school systems have to," Moher says.

The church-state divide in Ontario is much narrower than in most places because the provincial government funds public, Catholic and French-speaking school systems equitably in its per-pupil allocations (currently about $4,500 at the elementary level). With no authority to supplement the provincial allocation with local resources, Moher has spent his most agonizing hours mending a week-long teacher strike in 2003 and trying to close a $5 million operating deficit, leading to the decisions to close seven schools in one swoop and eliminate about 50 staff positions, mostly through attrition.

At the same time, he's in the midst of a $130 million school construction and rehabilitation program that's breathing new life into the 7-year-old Windsor-Essex district, a forced amalgamation of an inner-city Catholic system just across the river from Detroit with suburban and rural schools around the county.

The consolidation--part of a sweeping, province-wide reorganization in the late 1990s that reduced 166 school districts by more than 50 percent--meant Moher had the unenviable task of melding two disparate cultures, each with its own prized programs and practices. The governing board shrank from 25 members to nine.

Moher admits his work life has its stress-filled days, but he's intent on staying the course. "It all comes down to relationships and trust--one person at a time, one relationship at a time," he says.

BIO STATS: Mike Moher

Currently: director of education, Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board, Windsor, Ontario

Previously: superintendent, Ottawa Roman Catholic Separate School Board, Ottawa, Ontario

Age: 53 Greatest Influence: The networking and intellectual stimulation in my master's program at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education was infectious. 1 was surrounded by administrators who encouraged me to pursue other leadership opportunities as a principal and superintendent.

Best Professional Day: The day I received a phone call offering me the position of director of education with the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board. Books at Bedside: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni and Good to Great by Jim Collins