Mervin Daugherty
Even before Mervin Daugherty officially began his tenure as superintendent of Chesterfield County Public Schools in November, he estimates that he had gone to five or six high school football games. “I love going to school events,” he says. In December, a month into his role, he was in the stands at Hampton University when the Manchester High School Lancers capped a perfect season with a 49-7 thumping of Woodbridge’s Freedom High School to earn the Class 6 state title.
“It was unbelievably impressive to see the fan support,” Daugherty recalls of the experience. “They had packed the stands.”
He was appointed to his role as superintendent by the Chesterfield County School Board in August 2018, after a three-month search. He came to Chesterfield from Delaware’s Red Clay Consolidated School District, where he had served as superintendent since 2009.
Daugherty, who has worked in some of the largest school districts in Delaware and Virginia, was born and raised in Cumberland, Maryland, in the foothills of the Appalachians. His mother, a telephone operator, raised Daugherty and his two siblings as a single parent until she remarried when he was 11. “I grew up with all my family all around me,” he says. “I never realized I was a student living in poverty until later in life.”
Daugherty recalls being only an average student growing up. “I didn’t take school seriously,” he says. He was a strong athlete, however, and while he was a student at Allegany High School in Cumberland, he was mentored by his football coach and physical education teacher, the late Ed Shupe. “[Ed helped] me get into college, not really to play football, but to get me a direction, get me looking at what the future was about,” Daugherty says. He went on to play football at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Maryland.
At Frostburg, Daugherty found a passion for history and political science. He credits Shupe for shaping his career choice. “[Ed] helping me out really affected me going into education, realizing that one person can change the life of another person,” he says. In 1977, after graduation, he took a job teaching social studies at Queen Anne’s County High School on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Daugherty taught in Maryland for 16 years, coaching basketball for all of those years, and football for 14 of them. In the late 1990s, Daugherty had an opportunity to cross over into an administrative role, helping to run Rennard Annex, a program for 150 ninth-graders who were struggling academically.
“That experience was probably the best I could have had in my first administrative opportunity,” Daugherty says. “The focus was, every day is going to be a new adventure — which it always is in education.”
Daugherty attends James River High School's boys' basketball Senior Night against George Wythe High School.
Daugherty helped bring in new programming to the school for students who were acting out or falling behind. “It was really a form of PDS [professional development studies] and other supportive programs we have now,” he recalls. “We just didn’t have the names for them then.” He also refined his administrative philosophy during his two years at the school. “[I told folks], you take care of the classroom and I’ll take care of the school climate.”
Perhaps because of his own experience as a less-than-stellar student, and the support he received from Shupe, Daugherty always tries to look beyond a student’s classroom performance. “Most of the time, students who are having difficulty in the classroom and are starting to act up are students who have fallen behind,” he explains. “They don’t want to be embarrassed.”
In 2000, Daugherty and his family moved to Delaware, where he became an administrator at John Dickinson High School in Red Clay Consolidated School District, the state’s largest school district. (Red Clay is one of four school districts within New Castle County; it includes the northwestern sections of Wilmington, Delaware’s largest city.) The next year, he took over as principal of H.B. du Pont Middle School, also in Red Clay.
He earned a doctorate in leadership in education from Wilmington University in 2007 and became assistant superintendent for Red Clay that same year. Two years later, he was appointed superintendent, a position he held until coming to Chesterfield County.
While Daugherty was at the middle school, one of his students was a young man named Tyler Armstrong Keister. He had struggled with substance abuse and moved to a sober living house in Colorado for support with opiate use disorder. In 2012, Tyler died of an accidental overdose.
Tyler’s father, Don Keister, was a fellow teacher and administrator in Red Clay. He had launched a nonprofit, Attack Addiction, after his son’s death, and sought help from Daugherty in launching a high school to serve and support teens recovering from substance use disorder.
At the urging of Daugherty, the Red Clay School Board offered space in a school building, as well as computers and curriculum for the program.
“Merv is always one who wants to reach out and help those who need help,” Keister says.
Daugherty also put in an appearance on a radio show with Keister to promote the idea of the school and attended a press conference for the school at Legislative Hall in Dover.
“He was in the trenches, doing the work,” Keister recalls. “He would not put me off. He was running one of the largest school districts in the state, and when we were doing the work, he was there. He was sincere about the project and trying to get it done.”(Keister and Attack Addiction are still working to complete funding for the school.)
Daugherty chats with a student at L.C. Bird High School's SAT Academy, an after-school program that helps students prepare for SATs and SOLs or catch up on classes needed to graduate.
In the Classroom and Out in the Community
Red Clay may be the largest school district in Delaware, but it’s peanuts compared with Chesterfield. Daugherty currently oversees 61,000 students in Chesterfield, while Red Clay has about 16,000 schoolchildren. It’s an experience that he says is a little bit the same, and a little bit different.
“You’re dealing with similar issues,” he explains. “How do you make sure students are academically ready? How do you reduce the dropout rate? ... How do you help the staff continue to have the tools and the professional development and the resources to do their job every day?”
“[We should] never use the size of a district as an excuse,” he continues. For Daugherty, that means making sure communication is running as smoothly as possible to ensure that everyone — from teachers to parents to community leaders — is on the same page. “Sometimes the larger you get, the less transparency you have,” he says. “We’re really trying to communicate more, and be more transparent.” Since beginning in his position, he’s started a program that brings central office staff into schools twice a month and has begun a newsletter that goes out to families on Fridays.
And, of course, a bigger district means more activities and programming to keep Daugherty’s calendar full. “Basketball games, wrestling matches, plays, performances, musicals — I spend most of my time [there],” he says. “That’s my life.”
It’s who he is.
“One of the words used often to describe [Daugherty] is ‘authentic,’ ” says Chesterfield County School Board member Dianne Smith. Like Daugherty, Smith, who represents the Clover Hill district, has worked as both a teacher and a school administrator. She was on the board when it began its search for a new superintendent last summer, but has recently announced that she will not seek another term on the board.
Smith, along with School Board members Rob Thompson, Carrie Coyner and John Erbach, announced in January that she won’t be seeking reelection. She says that regardless of the changes to the board, “the [Chesterfield] community as a whole stands to benefit from the innovative ideas [Daugherty] will continue to bring to our community.”
Daugherty says that those who encouraged him to go for the Chesterfield position were “on point.” Of the turnover on the School Board, he says, members “have faced tough decisions from time to time, [but] have always done so with one thing in mind: what’s best for the students.”
“From my perspective, that should be the lens used by any public servant,” he adds.
Smith notes that a few months into his tenure, Daugherty has already visited each school in the county and has met with staff, parents, and community leaders.
For Daugherty, these events are about more than just something to do. “You get to see the greatness of our young people. … If you only deal with the daily routine of things, you only keep one side of the view,” he explains. “You want to see all the sides of what kids do.”
He is now coming up on 42 years working in education, and for a kid who didn’t take school seriously, it’s an unexpected life’s work. Perhaps that’s the reason why nearly five decades after high school, Daugherty still recalls Ed Shupe’s name the way some people recall a favorite athlete or movie star. Shupe’s lesson is one he takes with him everywhere he goes. “We have an ability to change the lives of young men and women who may not see hope or see a future ahead of them,” Daugherty says. “When you can open their eyes up and help them see that there really is more than where they are right now, that’s exciting.”
That hands-on approach keeps Daugherty busy, in his professional as well as personal life. His weekend and evening calendar is filled with school programs to attend—school sports games, performances and shows. “With 63 schools and a lot of after-school activities, there isn’t much time for hobbies,” he jokes.
He says he is lucky that his wife, Kim, with whom he shares two children and three grandchildren, appreciates his work. “She understands me,” he says in reference to all the time he spends at school programs.
