New Central Bucks superintendent wants to 'leave politics out of schools.' Can he do it?

The whispers started in May, as soon as Dr. Steven Yanni's picture appeared in newspapers announcing him as the new superintendent of Central Bucks School District. It was a Saturday morning, and Yanni was at Wawa — where he likes to order a large Diet Coke before the gym — when he heard a man murmur to his wife.

"Is that our new superintendent?"

Yanni had "a moment of panic," he said, about his pre-soda, pre-gym appearance. "Do I look a wreck right now?" he recalled thinking, and laughed. But the new superintendent is happy to be seen around town.

"I never do anything that I wouldn't want other people to see," he said. "So many people have introduced themselves, and I feel tremendously supported by that."

That's exactly why Yanni took a paycut for this job: to work in the community where he's lived since 2016. It also eliminates his commute — an hour to Ardmore, where he was the superintendent for less than a year of Lower Merion, before starting at Central Bucks on July 1.

Now, his commute is 5 minutes. "Seven minutes, if I hit a light," Yanni says.

The road to Central Bucks's top job

It was a long road home for Yanni, who began his career teaching fourth grade in Gastonia, North Carolina.

But home is Pennsylvania. There weren't enough teaching jobs in the Johnstown area, where he's from, Yanni said, and southern public schools were recruiting teachers from a job fair at Penn State.

He returned north the next year to teach in Chester County, while studying for his master's at Immaculata University. Then, when two principals retired in one year, Yanni became principal of an elementary school in Enola. Every Monday, he drove 90 minutes to Immaculata for six hours of class, getting home near midnight.

After earning a doctorate in education in 2015, he became superintendent at New Hope-Solebury and then Upper Dublin, before his brief stint at Lower Merion.

Now, he runs the state's third-largest district and the county's second-largest employer, managing a budget of nearly half a billion dollars for 17,000 students across 23 schools.

A district this size requires a leader who "understands large systems," said Dr. James Scanlon, who spent decades as a superintendent for other districts leading up to his six-month gig as acting superintendent at Central Bucks this year. Yanni got a taste of that at Lower Merion, which has two high schools, Scanlon said.

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The new superintendent is happy to work where he lives, but he's private about his personal life — very private. When asked if he had any pets, Yanni said, "I don't really talk about my family life because, you know, the district hired me, not them, but I do have several pets." He did not elaborate on said pets. (This news organization believes he has at least two dogs.)

Maybe Yanni's reticence to share is fair enough, given that he now heads a district known nationwide for its contentious, and often personally vitriolic, school politics.

News in March that a school board director, Dr. Mariam Mahmud, would resign this year because she's moving out of her school board region, came not from Mahmud, but during public comment from a parent, who'd obtained a copy of the deed to a house Mahmud bought, and accused Mahmud of misleading the public. (Mahmud still lives in her school board region; her family plans to move into the new house in August, she confirmed last week).

"I am very much looking forward to having Dr. Yanni‘s experience and leadership to provide consistency for the district after the last few turbulent years," said board president Karen Smith.

Setting priorities in Central Bucks

Board members held a retreat with Scanlon and Yanni this summer to brief the new superintendent on what had happened in the first half of 2024, and where the district needs to go next.

Both Yanni and Scanlon said that the grade realignment, full-day kindergarten, and building renovations are the top priorities. There are eight buildings without air conditioning, one school has a dirt-floor basement, and some feel as if they haven't been touched in half a century.

Scanlon, who graduated from the district in the 1970s, was shocked to walk into Warwick Elementary as acting superintendent and find his fifth-grade classroom exactly how he left it in 1968, down to the wooden closet door. One would think that Central Bucks "would modernize [their] schools by now," Scanlon says, but "they were so focused in the 90s on just building a school a year."

One of the reasons grade realignment didn't happen sooner, he said, was because the high schools never had room to add ninth grade.

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Dr. Yanni's approach in Central Bucks

Yanni has had a by-any-means-necessary approach to meeting goals at his previous districts.

"My parents told me I'm stubborn since birth," he said.

At Upper Dublin, he responded to slow progress on getting air conditioning into schools after a string of 90-degree days by turning off the AC in the administrative building until a plan was made — and it worked. But, he was quick to add that Central Bucks wouldn't need such extreme tactics, since HVAC plans are already in place.

And during his time at Lower Merion, the district approved delayed high school start times, an intiative that had failed there in the past. But Yanni plans to save discussions of delayed start times in Central Bucks until after the "seismic" grade realignment and full-day kindergarten happen, he said.

Taking on more than education and healing community in Central Bucks

With the presidential election looming, Yanni also hopes to get a jumpstart on the political climate in the district.

"One of the things that I feel really strongly about is we have to leave politics out of schools," he said, adding that it's a "lofty" goal. That may start with clarifying publicly what speech rights student and faculty have in school settings, which he plans to present at an upcoming curriculum committee meeting.

"We're also working on some supportive documents for our community internally and externally to know where the boundaries are," he said.

And he hopes to help teachers learn how to have sensitive conversations "in a more neutral way" — a skill, he said, that educators generally lack. Yanni hopes that students can be taught to discuss issues they're passionate about "objectively."

That may be an especially difficult task at the largest district in Bucks County, which has a razor-thin party divide that just switched back to a Republican lead last week.

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There's a lot to address that has splintered relationships within the district.

Last school year, some Palestinian and Muslim students were upset to learn that a student group had written letters of support to Israeli soldiers during the genocide in Gaza. Meanwhile, parents complained about posts by a high school student group and its advisor that the parents considered antisemitic, and an inappropriate blurring of boundaries between the teacher and students. Though the district found that the teacher had not violated existing policies, the school board is now revising its policies to address what faculty and student groups are permitted to do on social media.

Ironically, said Scanlon, the students themselves seemed to resolve their differences well, with the Jewish Student Union and Muslim Student Association holding a joint event and making a video together. Meanwhile, parents continued to speak on the incidents at board meetings this summer, some demanding additional consequences for the student group advisor.

The challenge goes beyond the district itself, Yanni said.

"We need the community, we need families, we need everyone to adopt this stance that we might fundamentally disagree, and I might think you're absolutely wrong, but I don't hate you as a person because we have different beliefs."

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Yanni: New superintendent wants to be a 'unifier'

Yanni addressed the political climate head-on in a recent email to parents, describing himself as a "unifier."

And the board, at least, seems united in their enthusiasm for Yanni.

"As I fully expected, Dr. Yanni is doing a fantastic job," said board member Jim Pepper.

The new superintendent "hit the ground running," Mahmud said, and is "expertly responsive" to the school community. He's already been out and about in the district, Scanlon said, attending meetings, visiting buildings, and meeting staff.

"He has such a good way about him, with listening to everyone’s ideas and pulling together the most salient points and finding common ground," Scanlon said.

The new superintendent plans to be an active presence in the district, visiting at least one school every day.

"No decisions in an organization like this can be made in a vacuum," Yanni said.

That's the approach he took with delayed start times at Lower Merion high schools. The initiative passed, but not before reviewing the findings of an adolescent sleep working group. Then, a new schedule was developed by an advisory committee made up of staff, parents and other community members.

Lifelong learner bringing lessons to Central Bucks

Yanni started a new school at age 9, when his family move from Scranton to Johnstown for his dad's job. He attended a Catholic high school, Bishop McCort. He served for three years on the yearbook commitee, which was run by his favorite English teacher, Lorie Regan.

Out of the thousands of kids she's taught, Regan said, Yanni stands out as among her "finest students." English class "came easily to him," but he still created study guides, flash cards, and audiotapes to help other students. As yearbook editor, he spent summers planning layouts, and created editorial plans for the year ahead, Regan said.

His studiousness has persisted. He came to our interview well prepared, and seemed to remember questions emailed in advance, bringing up ones we hadn't asked yet.

Yanni was a good student, but not a good test taker. "I didn't do super well on the SAT," he said, "sitting in a room doing multiple choice questions for four hours."

At first, he hoped to follow in Regan's footsteps and teach English. But after teaching The Canterbury Tales seven times per day as a student teacher to kids who struggled to grasp the text, he switched gears. Hoping to catch students further upstream to improve their reading comprehension at a younger age, Yanni graduated from Pitt Johnstown with a degree in elementary education.

Yanni said he believes in letting individuals define success for themselves, and making district decisions based on those bottom-up priorities.

He's "not big on acroynms," including DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) — he prefers the term "belonging." The district does not currently have a DEI director, but the new budget has allocated money for one. DEI programming has been controversial for some parents, who believe it doesn't address the needs of all students, or is unnecessary. Yanni made headlines in 2020 for eliminating tracking in Upper Dublin that Black parents had for years said funneled their children into classes that didn't prepare them for college.

"It's very easy sometimes for people to say, DEI doesn't apply to certain groups of people," Yanni said. "But when we frame it and we think about it as belonging," it's clear that it does mean everyone — whether it's "wrapping our arms around a certain community" after a racist incident, or "looking at kids that don't have access to, say, extracurriculars or something because of a certain circumstance."

Though Yanni is a local superintendent about town, he didn't want to tell us about his family, or hobbies, or the podcasts he listens to. He didn't want to tell us what his college job at the mall was like, or name favorite Doylestown spots — "independent, off-the-beaten-path places" was the closest we could get (though he's also excited about the new Wawa). But maybe he's still getting to know us, too.

He does know his neighbors — and now that he's superintendent, some of their kids are already asking him for early tip-offs about snow days.

Despite the well-publicized tensions, Yanni likes it here.

"Of all the places that I've lived, I find it's a largely welcoming, friendly place," he said. "There's still this hometown feel, but it's bigger."

Reporter Jess Rohan can be reached at [email protected]

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Steven Yanni takes on Central Bucks district as new superintendent