The Superintendent: Anne Arundel County’s Mark Bedell

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It’s a role with a hero/scapegoat dynamic and Anne Arundel County’s Mark Bedell is intent on setting a positive example for all

Ninth-graders rarely put down their phones. Especially not for a Monday morning assembly, where the superintendent might just drone on. 

But as he strides onstage at North County High School, Mark Bedell makes clear this won’t be the usual lecture. Snapshots light the screen behind him. With each one, Bedell delves deeper into his past, drawing in even the most distracted of 650 students, their texting forgotten. 

Here are the 12 homes he lived in, growing up with the turmoil of his mom’s addiction and bouncing between relatives in Rochester, New York. Next, he points out a corner store, where he cashed his teen paychecks to buy his family food. A final photo shows a reunion with four of his seven siblings. By then, they’d endured the heartbreak of a brother killed in a drive-by, a sister found murdered in the woods, and the youngest in jail. Only Bedell made it past eighth grade.

“Whatever circumstances you’re going through outside of school, whatever might be a crutch for why you can’t try your best, all I’m saying is: ‘If I can make it, you can make it, right?’” Bedell urges the freshman class in early fall. “You all can achieve.” 

Now 49 and sharp in slim suits, Bedell commands respect with a national reputation, a doctoral degree—and more impressive to high schoolers—a closet of Air Jordans he once couldn’t afford. 

After a 26-year career in public schools, our new superintendent excels in many roles: data guru, budget planner, community liaison. But he’s best as a motivational speaker, declaring “school was my only savior,” his life a testament to his faith in education. 

Eighteen months ago, Bedell took charge of a school system that’s rapidly growing yet grappling with disparities and often overshadowed by its higher-achieving neighbors. Bedell had distinguished himself by turning around Kansas City, Missouri’s school system, leading big cities like Philadelphia to court him. Instead, he opted for the $305,000-a-year suburban job here. 

His mission is twofold: to rejuvenate the weakest of 130 schools but also to rouse the complacent.

With 83,000 students, Anne Arundel’s district is Maryland’s fourth largest, and like the flourishing county, increasingly diverse. Students of color now make up half the enrollment. Despite a healthy $1.68 billion budget and surrounding affluence, the schools hover just above state average. Middle schools underperform, notably in math. Beyond a few stellar high schools, most lag in the competitive Baltimore-Washington suburbs that prize advanced classes and college acceptances. Only five seniors were National Merit Scholar semifinalists last year, compared to 61 in Howard County, and 162 in top-ranked Montgomery County.

“Sometimes good gets in the way of great,” says Bedell. “People don’t think there’s a lot we need to do to improve until you start pinpointing data and showing them where we really are.”

Students Foremost

Another day and Bedell is showing more slides, this time to the school board. One celebrates back-to-school progress—fully staffed bus routes and half as many teacher vacancies. The other details multimillion-dollar plans to ease overcrowding with three new schools.

It’s a quietly mundane meeting, unlike last summer, when hundreds of parents and students clashed over gay pride displays in schools. Bedell argued schools should not ban such unofficial flags, saying he wanted to ensure an equal “sense of belonging” for all students. The board ultimately voted 4-3 to defeat the proposal.

Still, Bedell recognized it was a delicate moment at a time when superintendents can go from celebrated to scorned amid the country’s angry debates over teaching race and gender. Bedell, the first Black man to lead the county schools, is among a mere two percent of Black schools chiefs nationwide. Several have faced backlash, including a Queen Anne’s superintendent, who resigned in 2021 after a social media outcry over her Black Lives Matter support.

“There’s a lot of pressure from a very loud minority of folks trying to impose their own values on our county,” says Kristen DeBoy Caminiti, 42, a Crofton mother of four, who opposed the flag ban. She fears parental rights activists might target library books or curriculum content here, as they have elsewhere, fretting “it’s going to be a challenge.” 

Bedell is more sanguine. He speaks his mind but takes pride in his ability to collaborate with different groups, including the conservative powerhouse Moms for Liberty. And he firmly believes that improving student performance will override everything else.

School board outgoing president Joanna Bache Tobin agrees. Online learning frustrated parents during the pandemic, she says, “but we’re in school again, and people want to see their kids’ outcomes. The most important thing right now is to be clear on your compass. For him, it’s our students.”

After introducing himself to parents and civic leaders, Bedell endeared himself to teachers by securing an eight percent raise in salaries he called “embarrassing,” lifting them from near the state’s bottom to fourth. He greets crossing guards and thanks cafeteria workers. Recently, he was named “superintendent of the year” by the National Alliance of Black School Educators.

Now, he has to make tougher decisions: redistricting the northern end of the county, instituting state reforms, and transitioning to new reading methods. Nearly half of third- and fifth-graders don’t read proficiently at grade level, though scores ticked up last year. The district is also trying to end the isolation of special education students and expand preschool programs.

Above all, Bedell wants to address academic inequalities among Black, Latino and low-income students. Many are less likely to enroll in college-track classes…and at risk of quitting school. 

Discipline rates also differ starkly by race, with disproportionate suspensions of Black youth. If that weren’t enough, schools are dealing with TikTok-triggered fights and a teen mental health crisis. Parents want help; at this meeting, “Moms Demand Action” advocates cite alarming youth suicides to ask that schools hand out pamphlets promoting safe gun storage. 

A grandmother has the final word. Through the patchy connection of an online call, Lillie Ellis implores the board to do more for Black students by creating a charter elementary school.

“By the time they reach middle school,” she says, “we’ve lost them.”

Bedell looks up from a pile of documents, his expression somber. It almost happened to him.

If He Can Do It…

Until second grade, Bedell was eager to go to school. His home could be chaotic, with a struggling single mom, and a new sibling every year or so. Meanwhile, Rochester itself was in a downturn, the once-thriving manufacturing city in western New York losing jobs and population with the decline of employers like Eastman Kodak and Xerox.

One day, an annoyed teacher snapped at Bedell. “Dumb” and “ugly,” she called him, adding dismissively that he would “never amount to anything.” Bedell can still recite every harsh word. 

He retreated to the couch. Eventually, Bedell missed so much school that a child services worker intervened, sending him and a brother to live with an aunt. It was the first of many moves: as the oldest of eight, he would be repeatedly separated from his brothers and sisters scattered in foster care. Back with his mom in high school, Bedell tried to cope with her worsening alcoholism, drug use, and an abusive partner. Some nights as a teen, he went hungry, or had to sleep in a car.

Basketball became his refuge. When poor grades threatened to bench him, a homeroom teacher pulled the distraught 15-year-old aside, telling him: “You’re academically talented, and I don’t think you even know it.” Somewhat hesitantly, Bedell confided his troubles at home. Their frank talk was cathartic: with the teacher’s encouragement, Bedell would reclaim his place on the team, make the honor roll, and set his sights on college. “I never looked back,” Bedell recalls.

Bedell went on to graduate in 1997 as a basketball star from Nashville’s Fisk University, where he set a Division III scoring record—and met his future wife, Robyn, an attorney with whom he has three children. His NBA dreams out of reach, Bedell signed up as a substitute teacher, remembering his homeroom mentor’s advice that he could help students facing similar hardships.

“Sometimes, all you need is someone who listens,” says Eric Lin, a 17-year-old at Severna Park High, who is the school board’s student representative. Students are inspired by Bedell, he adds: “You see he overcame so many huge challenges, so what’s to say I can’t?”

After teaching in Nashville and Houston, where his wife went to law school, Bedell went into administration. In 2010, he revived Houston’s oldest high school as principal, then led Apollo20, a pioneering math tutoring program. From 2012 to 2016, he worked as a Baltimore County assistant superintendent, improving graduation rates by over 4 percent. Meanwhile, he wrote his dissertation on dropout prevention and lived with his family in Anne Arundel County. 

By the time he became Kansas City’s superintendent in 2016, Bedell had developed a mix of strategies. Among them: free PSAT testing, expanding access to advanced classes, and tacking on school time for tutoring. He scrutinizes school data to target those with the lowest test scores and highest rates of truancy. By experimenting and cheerleading, he restored the 14,000-student district to accreditation in 2022, for the first time in a decade, gaining national attention.  

Bedell has brought the same methods here, while looking for ways to reverse pandemic learning loss. One solution—cutting 60-minute free periods in half—prompted some student howling (even his youngest daughter, an eighth-grader at an Annapolis middle school, weighed in.) 

Overall, the county boasts an 89 percent graduation rate, comfortably above Kansas City’s initial 68 percent, but 18th of Maryland’s 24 school districts. Bedell is determined to push it higher.

Amid all the initiatives, Bedell is best known for his straight talk at schools and community forums, sharing the struggles of his youth with a candor that resonates, especially with teens. He describes the college call that his brother had been shot, his mom’s 2002 overdose, and his sister’s later murder, to emphasize the dangers of dropping out of school.

“When you don’t have adults who understand what you’re going through, this generally becomes the outcome,” he says. “So, we have to be more proactive.”

A Calling

His days might be filled with routine paperwork, check presentations and meetings. But on a fall night in Annapolis, Bedell is greeted like a celebrity at the Wiley H. Bates Legacy Center. Every seat is taken, and people jostle for a view. Some are old enough to have graduated from Bates, once the county’s only high school for Black students. Others are two to three generations younger and have first-graders playing soccer behind the renovated building.

“I take my craft seriously,” Bedell says to the crowd at the Caucus of African American Leaders meeting. He ticks off plans to improve SAT scores, revamp lackluster middle schools, and expand access to Advanced Placement Classes. He says to cheers: “I wrote a 146-page dissertation. I never took an AP class. I never got invited.”

People here are fans, having handed out books at giveaways or played pickup basketball with Bedell. But they have longed for more dramatic change for over 30 years, having seen too many of their kids fall behind and graduate undereducated for college or jobs. 

Many here also are unnerved by the surging teen violence in Annapolis. Four days before the meeting, an 18-year-old was gunned down in the Bywater neighborhood, following the shooting of a 16-year-old earlier in the summer. On the second day of school, several students started a fight at Annapolis High. The instigators “showed it blow-by-blow on Instagram,” notes a disgusted Baron Bell, a 55-year-old consultant who graduated from the school.

For a brief moment, Bedell is silent. He can be tough on disruptive students, only to be questioned about discipline disparities. He can try to limit phone use in schools, but parents will worry about reaching their kids in an emergency. 

“No matter what, I’m getting beat up,” he exclaims in exasperation.

Then, Mark Bedell returns to his calling. He poses for a photo with a football and basketball standout at Glen Burnie High, who is running a camp for low-income kids. He urges people to volunteer for #BePresent, a youth mentorship campaign he launched, saying they can transform a kid’s life like his homeroom teacher did for him. Bell is already active, impressed that “he means what he’s saying. It’s an actual program, not just a statement.”

“We’re going to relentlessly accelerate our efforts,” Bedell promises, “so every single child can reach their full potential.”