Back from Washington with a New Tool Kit.

Last fall as he sat around a conference table at U.S. Department of Education headquarters in Washington, D.C., helping to plan for Goals 2000: Educate America Act, Wes Smith listened restlessly as speaker after speaker paid homage to state-level school reforms.

"I was shaking my head and saying, 'That's not where reform started. Schools and school districts are where it began.' The people around the table ... looked at me funny (and replied), 'Well, that's what the states tell us.'"

Smith regularly found himself providing reality checks to his colleagues in the massive federal education bureaucracy during his year as "superintendent in residence." Officially, he carried the title of senior associate in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement.

Smith was handpicked for the job while in his fifth year as superintendent in Newberg, Ore., where he demonstrated a distinct taste for policy advocacy on the state and national levels. He had worked with Oregon's legislature to revamp its school funding formula and was responsible for drafting what became a state law linking teen-age drug and alcohol use to driving privileges. This landed him a spot on the President's National Commission for Drug-Free Schools.

During his stint in the federal advisory post, which he left in July, Smith urged the education department to find better ways to digest research on best practices for superintendents, much as the National Institutes of Health now does on treatment alternatives for medical practitioners. He also designed a practitioners panel for OERI, consisting of superintendents, principals, teachers, and parents, to discuss ongoing or proposed reform initiatives.

One thing he quickly discovered was how slowly things move in Washington. "You get frustrated about the pace, yet there's protection in that pace. The federal bureaucracy is not going to ... go off in wildly different directions constantly."

Though he had a three-year appointment at the education department and had resigned from his district superintendency, Smith opted to leave after just one year when his board of education in Newberg, about to commence a search for a permanent successor, eagerly extended a new four-year contract to get him back. (Smith was Newberg's fifth superintendent in seven years.)

While the rapid return raised a few eyebrows in the community and on the Newberg Graphic's editorial page, it did not surprise others.

"He's a hands-on person," says Claudia Stewart, communications coordinator for the 4,500-student New-berg district. "He wanted to be doing it rather than talking about it."

Adds Bill O'Connor, a school board member: "He wanted to be where he could make things happen. He left in the middle of some tremendously exciting things."

One of the most attractive assignments will be the chance to manage the district's $36 million renovation and building program that he helped to initiate with passage of a bond issue. He will also engineer a fundamental remodeling of the district's middle school and high school as part of Oregon's "Education for the 21st Century" reform program.

In addition, over the coming months, he expects to lead the community in defining "what it wants to do for its own children and what its graduates should be like in six years and in 15 years and develop that vision as clearly as it can."

Smith says he profited professionally and personally from his Washington experience and will bring new skills to his old job. On a material level, he now knows how best to tap into federal grant opportunities and cooperative agreements. He knows where to turn for technical assistance and how to quickly find research and data.

O'Connor says he and his fellow board members expect Smith to use his new tools to put Newberg "on the cutting edge" of Goals 2000 and standards-based reform.

Smith, meanwhile, tries not to second-guess his decision to cut short his time away from the trenches as he helps the U.S. Education Department identify a successor. He admits he always will remember his first workday in the nation's capital. "It ended with dinner at home and then a reception at the Air and Space Museum, where I found myself eating cheese and drinking wine under the Spirit of St. Louis. That night at home (in Oregon), my old school board was meeting."

Nearing the end of his year, Smith says his wife asked him, "'Are you going to say you're stupid about leaving a job with less stress, shorter hours, and more variety to go back being a superintendent?' I guess I did."