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There’s a new person in charge at the Monroe County Community School Corp. (MCCSC).
Dr. Markay Winston, who formerly served as MCCSC’s deputy superintendent, stepped into the role of interim superintendent in the beginning of July, following former superintendent Jeff Hauswald’s contract buyout.
An educator of 30 years with a background in school psychology and administration, Winston has been with the MCCSC community since 2017. She first joined MCCSC as assistant superintendent to Judy DeMuth after working in the Cincinnati school system for more than 20 years.
Winston took the helm at MCCSC just weeks before the start of the 2024-2025 school year and on the heels of an especially contentious year for the district’s administration and school board. Ahead are implementing a merger of Childs and Templeton elementary schools and a discussion about aligning high school schedules. Lack of communication under Hauswald’s leadership about those plans eroded trust between the corporation and community members.
In an interview with The Herald-Times one month into her tenure, Winston emphasized her commitment to transparency with the MCCSC community, her goals for pursuing equity through the Childs-Templeton merger and potential redistricting, and broader challenges to public education.
Questions and answers from the following interview have been edited for brevity and clarity.
The Herald-Times: Tell me a little bit about yourself and your background, both at MCCSC and education in general.
Markay Winston: Well, I’ve been in this game for probably 30 plus years. I came here in 2017 as an assistant superintendent, worked under Dr. DeMuth for several years, and then was promoted by Dr. Hauswald to be his deputy superintendent — and now, superintendent. So, I’ve been here since 2017 and feel like I know a lot about the community. I’ve really invested a lot of time to learn our schools, to learn and get to know our teachers and our administrators.
Prior to that, my experience has primarily been in Cincinnati. I worked with Cincinnati Public Schools, went to the University of Cincinnati, got my masters degree in school psychology and counseling from there and got my Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati as well. I did my administrative licensure work at Xavier University, and then began working with Cincinnati public schools for 10 to 12 years.
I went out to the suburbs, to a school district called Princeton City Schools, worked there for about 10 years, and then came back into administration.
I’ve had the opportunity to serve a variety of roles; I’ve served as a psychologist, I’ve served in administration, I’ve been a director. I’ve done a lot over the course of my career, and I think each of those experiences has led me to be able to step into this type of role. And that’s what’s been exciting to me, is to be able to leverage a variety of experiences, in a variety of settings, to today.
There’s no higher calling in my mind than educating our students and making sure their needs academically, socially, emotionally and psychologically, are met. And we have a unique position in the schools to be able to do that.
H-T: The past year saw some sweeping changes from the school board, and there seems to have been an erosion of trust, between the administration and board, and the community. What do you see as your role in ensuring transparency, and how do you go about that?
Winston: I think just being an ambassador for the schools. When you serve as superintendent, you have an opportunity to kind of share all the good news.
We are not media specialists; we’re educators, and sometimes we get so caught up in the doing of the work, that we don’t always remember to tell all the good stories. That’s who I am personally, and that’s who I am as a leader. And I feel that, as the public school system in our community, we have an obligation to communicate with our community and let them know all of the wonderful things that are happening.
H-T: After the last school board meeting, I think some people were surprised to hear your comments that the merger plan would not include discussions about “whether the merger should or should not happen.” For people who are concerned this is a bygone deal, what are the ways that people can still give input on merging Childs and Templeton?
Winston: Back in April of 2024, the school board did vote that they were doing the merger. Now, we are engaged in a pretty robust series of meetings and sessions with teachers, principals, parents and community members over the next several months to provide them with an opportunity to have face-to-face time to kind of share with us what their thoughts and ideas are.
The goal is having a successful merger, and one of our questions is, “What does a successful merger look like?” And I want to hear from our teachers who are on the “front lines,” so to speak, to share with me what they think that looks like.
We want to start with teachers, for all the obvious reasons, so we’re going to have a number of sessions with teachers, and then we’re going to expand that to the community.
In addition, on our website, on our homepage, we have a link where any member of our community has an opportunity to provide feedback on what they think a successful merger would look like.
I think that we’ve been quite intentional in creating a series of forums — over 30, actually — over the next few months for people to be able to share with us; primarily the teachers who are impacted and the parents who are impacted.
H-T: When we talk about involving stakeholders, and your background in child psychology and school counseling, I think we know children are not always the most vocal advocates for themselves. As the merger happens, how will you try to make sure children are supported as they navigate the difficulties of acclimating to a new school?
Winston: Amazing question. We are going to be asking the students, probably working with some of the older students, to make sure if they have thoughts and ideas, we take them into consideration.
I’m also tasking my team to be thoughtful about putting together a system of support for our children. Transitions are hard. Transitions can be really difficult, and we don’t want to leave anything to chance. And so we want to have a system of support for our students as they transition, but we also think it’s important for us to have a system of support for the teachers. This is a change for everybody.
And so members of my team will be working with folks at the buildings to come up with a plan for how we support everybody, including families who are going to experience a change. I don’t want them to feel like they’re all alone. And we will ask them, “How can we best support you? What does that look like?”
I know we’ve got a lot of really smart people. And we’re going to have them at the table, and they’re going to help us build that together. We don’t want to leave it to chance.
H-T: MCCSC, as a board and corporation, emphasizes equity and has made several efforts toward pursuing that. What does equity mean to you, and what do you see as your role in helping MCCSC pursue it?
Winston: Equity means a lot of different things, but what I think it means most to me is having a variety of voices at the table and making sure that all voices are heard.
When we talk about educational equity, specifically, we talk about access, we talk about opportunity, we talk about meaningful engagement. Those are the things that matter. And how we do that here in this corporation, it matters.
It means listening to diversity of voices, it means listening to our students, our teachers, our families, our community, and making sure that we have diversity represented at the table where decisions are being discussed. Making sure that every student, regardless of zip code, has access to the kinds of programs and supports that they need. Giving every student whatever it is they need to succeed academically. That’s what I think equity is.
H-T: It’s ambitious work for a school corporation to try and effectively undo the work of the bad histories about how our neighborhoods developed and how they were segregated. How do you try to do that with caution, making sure it’s the right decision?
Winston: We’re speaking about historical housing patterns that happened in cities across this country, and we know some of the factors that have led to those housing patterns segregating families by race, by ethnicity, by [socioeconomic status]. That’s what we see across this entire country, and I think every school system is challenged by figuring out, “How do we work around that?”
I think the way we want to approach that is very carefully. We want to make sure that we’re approaching it from a data perspective and not making any assumptions. I think that our approach can and should be considering all possibilities, looking at the data, and engaging with our community to talk about the “why.” Oftentimes, the “why” is overlooked, or it’s assumed everyone knows the “why.”
There’s been a lot of research on school integration efforts, and there are some practices that we know that are successful in contributing to that, but still, housing patterns still continue to impact what our schools look like.
I don’t have a great answer in terms of the best way to do it, but I am certain that we’re going to pay attention to the historical patterns that have happened and try not to make some of the same mistakes that other cities across the country may have. We don’t want to make any missteps, and we want to make sure that we’re tending to the needs of all of our students, regardless of what school they attend or what neighborhood they live in. They all deserve the best we have to offer, and that’s not just a cliche. That’s real talk.
H-T: On the other side of the merger, there’s a redistricting conversation that got rolling, and MCCSC has now contracted with a data analytics company to explore attendance zone redistricting. What are the updates with redistricting? Is there a timeline?
Winston: The whole conversation about attendance zone redistricting has lingered for a number of years. In terms of a timeline, with the Childs-Templeton merger, we’re required to have a game plan for implementation by Dec. 31. So that’s real concrete, and quite honestly, the primary focus of my time, energy and attention is to make sure we meet that deadline.
As it relates to the redistricting conversation, we have contracted with an external consultant who has expertise in this area and has done a lot of this work across the country, and we’re learning a lot from his expertise and his experiences.
That’s probably going to be on a different timeline; one has not yet been established. The most recent update is that work has begun, literally just now, during the month of July, and we’re optimistic and hopeful that over the next few months, it will continue to inform us, and we’ll be able to have some information that we’ll be able to share in the coming weeks and months.
H-T: Your “project charter” for the Childs-Templeton merger includes a facilities assessment for Childs and Templeton. Prior the merger, a lot of people brought up concerns with the facilities at Childs, and MCCSC’s last facilities report in 2017 showed many schools had low facility scores. Are there any updates on facilities, and are you interested in doing a corporation-wide facilities report?
Winston: I’ve thought about the fact that it would be nice to get an updated facilities master plan, and that’s something that I envision looking at in the next 10 to 11 months.
It’s not something I’m going to be able to tackle right off the bat, but yes, I do think getting an updated facilities master plan established would be good for us as a corporation. As a new superintendent, I think it’s very beneficial to know what’s the “lay of the land.”
H-T: The Indiana Department of Education could soon change what a high school diploma looks like and requires for a student in Indiana. How do you think this will impact MCCSC?
Winston: That’s a high priority for us. My team and I, we’ve already been studying that, and monitoring it and having some internal conversations around what are the implications for our students. And there are some areas of concern that we have as educators, primarily because of the significance of the changes.
Let me cut to the chase: we are in a college town, and you know, a good percentage of our students go on to higher education. I think there’s a concern and a perception that the new diploma changes kind of water down expectations and outcomes, and I can assure you that Indiana University, Ivy Tech and other colleges are not going to be “watering down” their expectations and requirements.
My curriculum, team, they’re kind of digging all in on that to have a deeper analysis of what the implications are. But people are nervous. They’re nervous that it’s going to close doors for children. Are kids going to be prepared to go into the workforce? Are our students going to be prepared to meet the demands of higher education? We don’t know the answers to these questions.
Now, they’ve said it’s not set in stone, they’re taking comment, and what we’re encouraging our high school principals and teachers to do is comment. Tell them what you think. Tell them, because they’re the ones writing it.
H-T: Going forward, what are the avenues of input, to you or other members of the corporation, about the changes going on?
Winston: Certainly our school board members are happy to hear from our constituents at any point in time. They can certainly send an email here to the central office — we are eager to do that. I know Andy [Koop] and his team are working on setting up a number of meet-and-greets and town hall meetings where I can get out and meet families firsthand.
Our intent is to go to them; go into the neighborhoods, go into the community centers and things like that, so we have an opportunity to make it more convenient for our families and parents. We don’t expect you to come to every board meeting.
We want to be accessible. We want to be open. We want to make sure that our constituents, our community, our families, our business partners, our community leaders know what’s going on.
Reach out to us. But part of it, I think, means we need to go out into the community as well.
Reach Brian Rosenzweig at brian@heraldt.com. Follow him on Twitter/X at @brianwritesnews.
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