Waterloo native takes reins at Oklahoma City school district
Jamie Polk is graduate of Waterloo West High, Mount Mercy in Cedar Rapids
WATERLOO -- A career educator from Waterloo has been appointed director of the second-largest school district in the state of Oklahoma.
Jamie C. Harrington Polk, a 1980 graduate of Waterloo West High School, who received her undergraduate degree from Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, has been named superintendent of schools in Oklahoma, City, Okla., which is the state capital. The district has 33,000 students and is only surpassed by the Tulsa school district in size in the Sooner State.
Polk, who holds a doctorate from the University of Oklahoma, has been an assistant superintendent of elementary education in Oklahoma City the past six years. But she served 25 years before that as an administrator and assistant superintendent in the Lawton, Okla. school district, near Fort Sill, Okla. where her husband, fellow Waterloo native Chris Polk, served for many years in the U.S. Army as a career noncommissioned officer in field artillery.
The Oklahoma City school board unanimously approved her appointment.
"I'm just blessed to have strong role models in my life," Polk said.
Leadership runs in the family. Polk's aunt is former longtime Waterloo City Council member Willie Mae Wright. And Wright's sister, Katie L. Jordan, was a teacher in Mississippi and a mentor to Polk.
"When I went to visit, she allowed me to help in the classroom," Polk said "And so I just knew that my pathway was education."
Polk, who grew up on the east side of Waterloo, was bussed across town and attended West Junior High before going to West High. She participated in student-faculty advisory committees on race relations and integration, respectively, at each school according to Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier archives.
"We had to desegregate, and I wasn't able to go to my neighborhood school," Polk said, under a desegregation plan implemented in the 1970s. Black teachers greeted the students when they got off the bus. “We know if students see teachers who look like them, they're more likely to go to college.
”Being able to see African-American educators, I think, Iowa got it right,” she said. “When we did desegregate, it was very intentional in terms of assuring the African-American students felt comfortable. That worked. They greeted us as we got off that bus, and it made a difference."
Being bussed as a youth, and hearing parents express concerns about the amount of time students spent on the bus, was a lesson that stuck with her.
"It has stayed with me even as I make decisions now --- how long will kids be on buses," she said. "That's non-instructional time. You're not in activities; you're riding a bus. They wanted to do what was important for the kids.”
Polk’s appointment marks the first time in the history of the state of Oklahoma that its two largest school districts will be headed by Black women. Ebony Johnson heads the Tulsa school district.
Local civil rights history in Waterloo and Oklahoma City are parallel - and intertwined at one point.
In a 2015 interview with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, longtime Waterloo civil rights activist Anna Mae Weems related how she was roughed up and arrested at a whites-only restaurant in Oklahoma City in 1962, in what an Associated Press article described as a "one-woman sit in."
Weems was acting as a representative of the United Packinghouse Workers of America, which supported the civil rights movement. Weems had been active in the union as an employee of The Rath Packing Co. in Waterloo. The sit-in movement in Oklahoma City was led by local teacher and activist Clara Luper. The district now has historical memorials to Luper’s life.
It's coming "full circle," Polk suggested, that she, as a young Black girl bussed across town to go to school in Waterloo, is now heading a large school district with a civil rights history parallel and very similar to Waterloo's.
Polk noted she has been bolstered by support from her now-retired husband.
"One of the nicest things he said was, I had followed him, now he will follow me," she said.
Polk was asked if she gets questions or comments about Iowa's and Oklahoma's shared history and long rivalry in freestyle wrestling. "They just ask if there's any other Black people there," she said with a laugh.
While Polk said she and the district face challenges as this new era begins, she noted. "It has been advantageous being five years as the assistant superintendent. We can hit the ground running. A change of leadership is difficult no matter what. But we are really working, so that neither the teachers, nor the students, nor the families will feel the change."
There are common issues facing many school districts; she found that in talking to Waterloo school administrators on a recent return trip home and reception. She said the key is to focus on things a district is doing well and follow through.
In Oklahoma City, the goal is to hit the ground reading, so to speak.
"The major focus for us will be literacy: to ensure every child can read," she said.
Learning is a lifelong process — and Polk says she has an aunt in Willie Mae Wright who can still teach her a thing or two.
”It's awesome to have an auntie who is knowledgeable about local and national issues. To be able to glean from that is priceless,” Polk said. “There's nothing like sitting at the feet of those went before you and hear those stories."
Wright is equally proud of her niece and recently hosted a reception for her in the former council member’s namesake community room at All-In Grocers, the new Black-owned grocery store which opened across the street from her home last fall.
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. Click on their links below to sample their work.
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We’re so very proud of Dr. Polk. She has always been a woman of great character, wisdom and integrity. She will do an excellent job serving OKPS.
She will definitely do a good job, because that’s who she is, my girl do your thang. So proud of you, she will do excellent, plus got a very good support system behind and that’s her husband.