AURORA | John Barry has offered a common piece of advice to the many students who have reported to his office over the past seven years.
Whether they had landed in the superintendent’s office for recognition or for discipline, Barry repeated a similar basic message about success. It was wisdom culled from a past career in the military, from another lifetime as a top pilot, a two-star Air Force general and an advisor to some of the country’s most powerful officials. All of that came to bear in his role in Aurora Public Schools, and it showed up in the advice he gave to students.
“Some students come into my office for not good reasons, because I’m expelling them or something,” Barry said. “But when they do come up, no matter what the category, I tell them that the measure of wealth isn’t necessarily money. It’s the ability to have choices in life.”
Barry spoke from his office in the APS administration building off Chambers Road near the Community College of Aurora. As usual, the room was precisely organized and arranged, from the framed illustrations on the wall to the neat arrangement of Barry’s desk at the back of the room. It was hard to tell from the setup that Barry will be leaving the office — as well as his post as APS superintendent — in less than a month.
As he prepares for the end of a seven-year tenure at the head of Colorado’s sixth-largest school district, Barry will have plenty of the choices he spoke about to so many students.
“I’m going to flunk retirement, I know that,” he said. “I have some choices. I just have to figure out which ones I’m going to take.”
Whatever his next step, Barry will leave a strong stamp on the APS district, one that will persist after Rico Munn takes over as the new superintendent in July. He’s quick to give plenty of credit to the APS Board of Education and district administrators (“Superintendents get far too much credit,” he said), but Barry’s time in APS saw the introduction of many innovations. From the growth of concurrent enrollment programs in the district that have connected thousands of high school students with college credit to the refinement of the specialized pathways initiative, Barry can tick off several points of pride.
“He’s elevated the visibility, he’s helped increase the reputation and he deserves credit for helping the larger community understand and see that APS really is a good school district,” Aurora Mayor Steve Hogan said. Last year, Hogan and Barry formally announced the creation of a pathways program through the city that connected high school students with work opportunities in dozens of municipal departments. “That public side is important for the district, it’s important for the city, it’s important for the state.”
But Barry is not apt to talk about any legacy.
“Legacies shouldn’t be something you worry about. You should always do the best you can,” Barry said. “In the military, I had the honor and privilege to help defend people. … Our focus has been on helping to defend the right of every child to learn.”
Barry was a nontraditional candidate when the APS board selected him for the post in 2006. A graduate of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Barry came to APS as a retired two-star general and a former wing commander. As a pilot, he logged more than 3,000 flight hours in F-4s and F-16s and flew more than 270 hours of combat time over Iraq. Before retiring from the Air Force in 2004, he’d served as the military assistant to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and led the investigation into the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
All of that professional experience came to bear in Barry’s approach as superintendent. Along with the board of education, he worked on strategic plans to boost student achievement, shrink the achievement gap and reduce truancy. He mounted an annual door knocking campaign to encourage truant students to come back to school. He launched an aviation school for APS students. He drew from his military past in refining a district-wide Incident Response Team, a system that played a big part in the days following the tragic shooting at an Aurora movie theater a few blocks from Gateway High School last summer.
But Barry also can list the improvements that still need to be made, whether it’s in achievement, truancy or graduation rates.
“We cut the dropout rate in half, which is pretty good,” Barry said. “It used to be 2,000, and now it’s about 800 kids walking out the door every year; that’s way too many. That’s what I lose sleep over.”
He won’t be able to solve those problems in his last weeks as superintendent, but Barry hopes that Munn will have plenty of choices when it comes to solving them in the future.
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at 720-449-9707 or agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com