A couple of weeks ago I attended the funeral of Dick Willever, one-time superintendent of schools for the WW-P School District. He passed away at the age of 86 on October 19. I feel that it would be appropriate for today’s community to hear something about him and what he accomplished for our schools during his 16-year tenure here from 1975 to 1991. His accomplishments were many and very impressive.
In 1975 the school district was just six years old, having been created in 1969 through the combining of the independent districts in West Windsor and Plainsboro townships. The first district superintendent, John Hadden, had accomplished his major task of supervising the district during the building of what is now High School South and had indicated his desire to move on. As school board president at the time, it fell to me to organize and supervise the process of finding a replacement.
We had realized that big changes were coming when we were told by Princeton that our high school students would not be accepted there after 1974, and we had been faced with major school decisions. Finding a new superintendent was simply one more, but a very important one. It was obvious that the process would profit from extensive community input. And this meant real input, not just passing on comments about desires to school board members.
Some in the community were very outspoken on the subject. As a result, we on the board worked out a process in which the “final” candidates for the job would take part in a public interview process that involved both the board and an independent community group at the same time. This was considered very unusual, since it was the board that had to make the final decision on a person to hire, but it made the community happy because of its opportunity to be heard and to have a hand in making the final choice.
Because of this process we ended up with only two serious candidates for the job, Dick Willever and one other. The fact that the other candidate had a doctoral degree impressed some people, but there was no question when it was finished that Willever — with “only” a master’s degree — was the best candidate. He was hired and began work immediately for the lasting benefit of our school system.
At his funeral in Pennington I saw and talked with most of the still-living members of the school board of that time, people who in most cases I had not seen for many years, but who still remembered Dick Willever with great respect and affection. There were probably more than 300 in attendance at the service, including former teachers, administrators, and other employees of the district.
As a former board member, when I hear about apparent unhappiness in the community about some school activities or policies, I think about how Dick Willever would have handled such things.
One of the most impressive things about his way was that very few “major” educational decisions had to be made by the board. When he heard of some unhappiness in the community over an educational policy or process, he usually handled it himself to everyone’s satisfaction — teachers, parents, and students alike. He was very good at explaining the reasons for his decisions. Because of his skill at this, it was very rare for a school board meeting to be confronted with unexpected controversy. And we had our share of skeptics in town, even then.
Those were the days when public education in New Jersey was supposed to be “thorough and efficient,” or T and E. That was the catchphrase on everyone’s lips. When some in the community expressed their concern that we were not recognizing the importance of T and E, Dick Willever quickly pointed out that what we had been doing all along was, in fact, T and E, and that parents should stop getting concerned about it. The kids were doing just fine. Most parents understood, and it was no longer an issue.
Thanks to Willever’s skill at handling personnel issues, very few “controversies” came to the school board. This included instances of unhappiness over a couple of school principals, who, we were told by some parents, were not very “nice” to the children and their parents.
The most serious case I remember involved an elementary school teacher who was denied tenure after working here three years. Her main claim was that she deserved tenure because she had a PhD. But according to her principal she wasn’t a very good teacher in the classroom because she gave most of her attention to the best students and let the others founder. At least that was what the principal told us about her performance when she knew she was under his observation.
When she demanded a hearing before the school board, she came with a special attorney to help her. As we started the hearing, I told her and her attorney that we were there simply to consider the facts of the case as presented by her supervisor, the school administration, and the teacher herself. That brought forth a lecture from her attorney on the fairness of the process, something that was in reality standard procedure.
After the hearing they left, and it was up to Dick Willever to handle her case. As expected, she was denied tenure — to the benefit of the district. Curiously, we later learned that she was hired by Princeton. We guessed they were more impressed by the PhD than we were.
At the time he joined the district, the central school system office was on the second floor of a building in Princeton Junction on Washington Road. We needed more space, and school board meetings had to be held in a classroom at the high school. But when the new West Windsor municipal building went up in 1977, Dick Willever proposed that space for the school district offices be included in the design. Thus the entire first level (downstairs) was devoted to the central office, and the school board had a meeting room of its own with plenty of room for public attendance.
All this fits in with the atmosphere of a developing school system and its leadership under Dick Willever. When I left the board in 1980, I was confident that his success would continue. There is no doubt that it did, and the “Richard H. Willever Campus” in Plainsboro is a lasting tribute to that success and the benefits he left with the school district. Another part of that tribute was the large turnout at his funeral.
