When LaMont Cole made his successful, last-minute bid to become Baton Rouge schools superintendent, Pamela Whitley was watching remotely.
Whitley followed her old family friend as Cole stepped into that whirlwind, ending what had been a long, rancorous search for a new top educational leader in the Capital City.
Fourteen months later, Whitley is one of Cole’s closest advisors. Her name, though, is not on any district organizational chart. She is a hired professional. Her contract with the East Baton Rouge Parish school system was recently renewed for a two-year term, through July 2027. The arrangement works out to $105,000 a year for Whitley.
Old tasks, new tasks
Her latest contract, which was approved on Sept. 18 by the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board, continues her facilities work, including the development of a master facilities plan for the state’s second-largest traditional school district.
Cole has given Whitley several new tasks:
Assessing current data systems, workflows and other district operations.
Recommend ways to better manage student enrollment and sustain district finances.
Building public and internal dashboards to enhance transparency and decision-making.
Help set up and support an “annual resource prioritization process.”
“She’s going to be doing some internal evaluation of our processes so we can streamline and be more efficient,” Cole explained. “We’re trying to transition from an old way of doing things to a new way and I needed a person on the ground.”
Whitley said people with jobs like Cole’s are so busy dealing with a steady stream of daily crises that they can’t devote the time they need to plan for the future and dive deep into the operations of a system as complex as the East Baton Rouge Parish school district.
“The day-to-day is overwhelming,” said Whitley. “So, unless you have a person focused on strategy, on long-term things, (the organization) suffers.”
When her contract came to vote, several board members sang Whitley’s praises.
“You can’t right-size a district if you’re not doing the work behind the scenes,” said board member Dadrius Lanus.
“We’ve had much success working with her,” said Board President Shashonnie Steward.
Board member Patrick Martin V said having one dedicated “right person” doing this work has advantages over “having a lot of overhead from a large corporation providing services we don’t need.”
Board member Mike Gaudet, who played a similar role to Whitley before retiring from Albemarle, said the school system badly needs someone who can help it make better use of a new data system known as City Suites, which school leaders have been slowly rolling out over the past few years.
“We bought a really nice car and we’re operating it as a 1920 Chevrolet,” Gaudet said.
Small world
Whitley and Cole know each other from way back. They both grew up in Baton Rouge. Cole was a childhood friend of Whitley’s younger brother.
Whitley left Baton Rouge in 1987 after getting a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Southern University. She ended up making a career for herself in Washington, D.C., working for the Federal Aviation Administration.
Meanwhile, Cole rose in the Baton Rouge educational and political worlds. He became a prominent middle school principal and spent 13 years working for a Baton Rouge-based charter school group. He was also elected and served nine years on the Metro Council.
The two kept up with each other during her time away from Louisiana.
“Is there anyone LaMont doesn’t keep up with?” Whitley asked, with a laugh. (check)
Soon after starting his new job, Cole was trying to hire her. He needed help with one of the first tasks he was assigned: school consolidations. It’s an area where Whitley had ample, relevant expertise.
During her FAA tenure, Whitley ran its Next Generation Air Transportation System, or NextGen. It’s a section of the federal agency with a $2 billion budget and 900 employees. Much of NextGen’s work involved a 25-year effort to upgrade airports and related facilities to accommodate modern technology. As part of that effort, some facilities ultimately closed.
Homecoming
Whitley retired from the FAA in 2021 to help take care of her ailing father, who died the following year. While not keen on starting another day job — she says it would cause problems with her retirement pension — Whitley agreed to work on a consulting basis.
She’d already set up a one-person consulting business known as The Edgewood Group LLC. In spring 2023, Whitley landed a nine-month contract to improve the grant-writing process for East Baton Rouge Parish city-parish government. At that time, Cole was serving as mayor pro tempore for the Metro Council.
Whitley’s initial contract with the school system was for $48,000. That’s just shy of the $50,000 threshold above which contracts need to go before the school board.
While new to the school world personally, education is in her blood. Her grandfather, Milton Charles Simmons, was the principal of Valley Park Junior High. And her mother, Y. Jean Whitley, was a career teacher.
Whitley said she’s had to learn new things throughout her career and also has extensive training and experience in leadership.
“For me, it’s about building a rapport and a respect for educators, and then allowing my skill sets to augment their detailed knowledge of education to improve operational efficiency where we can,” she said.
One of Whitley’s signatures is the use of dashboards. For instance, within days of the approval of the “realignment” plan, a “Realignment Project Status Dashboard” was posted online to allow people to track the changes over the summer that needed to occur. Nearly 1,100 tasks were uploaded, with descriptions, deadlines and the percentage of the task that was complete. As of Friday, only 12 of those tasks were as yet incomplete.
Another change that Whitley said worked well over the summer was twice-a-week standing meetings.
“It gave us two weekly touch points,” she said.
Monday’s meeting was for administrators implementing the changes and Thursday’s meeting was where school principals could get answers to problems that cropped up.
“As we came to the end of it all, we decided that we need to look at using the same kind of process during every summer just to prepare for school,” she said.