Charlotte County Schools superintendent announces retirement

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CHARLOTTE COUNTY, Fla.- The Charlotte County School system is in a period of transition.

Tuesday night, the district’s superintendent announced his plans to retire. Next year, three board positions will be up for election, leaving the district with some big changes ahead.

“We had family down and grand kids down. I was going to work and my wife and grand kids were going to the beach. Evenings I had obligations and they were home and I had to ask myself the question, ‘why am I doing that?'” said Dr. Douglas Whittaker.

With the pull of family and retirement in reach, Superintendent Whittaker formally told the school board that he would be retiring earlier than expected.

The announcement comes on the heels of poor marks for both the school system and its superintendent. The district fell from 16th place to 39th last year in state FCAT rankings and the school board collectively gave Dr. Whittaker a 5.48 out of 10 on his annual evaluation.

“The new superintendent is going to have a lot of different kinds of issues to deal with,” said Lee Swift, the longest serving current Charlotte County School Board member.

But Swift says Dr. Whittaker isn’t to blame.

“We were losing students which caused us to lose revenue, we had a tremendous drop in property values which caused us to lose revenue, we were dealing with all those budgetary issues and there were significant problems with the quality and reliability with state testing,” said Swift.

Leaving a big job for the next superintendent to tackle.

An interim superintendent will not be named. Whittaker plans to stay while the board searches for his replacement.

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