The incoming superintendent of Alexandria City Public Schools has his work cut out for him.
Before starting work with ACPS on Feb. 1, 2027, Jharrett Bryantt will wrap up more than four years as superintendent for the Anchorage School District in Alaska by preparing a budget for his successor. In Alexandria, Bryantt will have had less than three weeks on the job before the Alexandria City School Board votes on the ACPS fiscal year 2028 combined funds budget, which will have been drawn up by Interim Superintendent Grace Taylor and ACPS staff.
“Right now my focus is on a strong transition for Anchorage School District,” Bryantt told ALXnow. “I will certainly be in communication with Dr. Taylor and the ACPS team to ensure that I have a strong entry upon February. So we’re going to be walking and chewing gum at the same time.”
The School Board appointed Taylor, the school system’s chief of staff since 2023, as acting superintendent in August after former Superintendent Melanie Kay-Wyatt took an unexpected leave of absence and moved up her resignation date.
Bryantt’s hiring was announced last week after a national search. His four-year contract will run until June 30, 2030, with an annual salary of $310,000.
A native of San Antonio, Texas, Bryantt said he grew up in humble beginnings and was fortunate to get accepted into the number-one college of his choice, Yale University. It was at Yale, he says, that he took a class called “The American Education Crisis” and was inspired to become an educator.
Bryantt would go on to earn a degree in psychology from Yale University and later earned master’s and doctoral degrees in education leadership and policy from The University of Texas at Austin. After graduating from Yale, he taught high school geometry for two years and then spent nine years in leadership roles with the Houston Independent School District.
In 2019, while he was an assistant superintendent with Houston ISD, Bryantt was named in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 – Education list for his work in securing millions in grant funding. Bryantt was also Houston ISD’s executive officer in its Office of Talent from 2021 to 2022, after which he was hired as superintendent in Anchorage.
“This isn’t my first rodeo being a new superintendent in a new community,” Bryantt said. “That was probably one of the most challenging things that I had to undertake, moving from Texas to Alaska.”
He added, “I literally moved to Alaska with just a couple suitcases and a burning desire to be the right person for that moment in time and to move our system forward, but I knew that there was a lot I had to understand about our culture, about who we are, about what it means to be Alaskan, and I knew how to ask a lot of questions before prescribing specific fixes. That’s a mindset that I want to bring to Alexandria.”
Bryantt’s tenure in Anchorage was marked by major budget cuts, layoffs of hundreds of employees and closures of six schools. The school system manages 90 schools with more than 40,000 students.
“I signed up for that,” Bryantt said. “I knew that we had financial challenges, and, in Alaska we have a lot of schools that are declining in enrollment because we’re such a remote location. As birth rates decline, we realize that we have to reimagine what our facilities’ footprints look like. As you can imagine, I had to make a lot of challenging decisions in partnership with my community over the past four and a half years, and I would do it all again.”
Despite those cuts, Bryantt said he’s learned how to make hard choices and touted an increase in graduation rates and the number of kids achieving catch-up growth in reading.
“One thing you might not realize is that the Anchorage school system is pretty large, but the Anchorage community is not that much larger than the Alexandria community,” Bryantt said. “I really wanted that in my next chapter to come to a place where our communities are pretty tight knit and people know each other.”
Looking Ahead to Joining ACPS
Bryantt said he will be visiting Alexandria next month, as Taylor is scheduled to deliver her proposed FY 2028-37 Capital Improvement Program budget to the School Board on Nov. 5.
“I really do have to meet a lot of people,” he said. “I need to get to understand all of our school board members very well, and of course, everyday families and parents and teachers and principals.”
Bryantt said he wants to work “deeply” on accelerating academic progress by digging into the school system’s data, and talking with educators and parents. He also said that he will be led by the ACPS 2030 Strategic Plan.
“I need to understand what are our teachers seeing every day in our schools,” he said. “There’s so many things that I just want to understand about the character and heart of our schools as we start to figure out what the next step looks like.”
After City Council approval of next year’s city budget, the School Board is scheduled to adopt its Final FY 2028 Combined Funds and FY 2028-37 Capital Improvement Program budgets on Thursday, June 17. That will give Bryantt more than four months on the job to familiarize himself with the school system’s workings before its financial wheels are set in motion.
Under its current budget, ACPS cut 56 staff positions, made program cuts and increased a number of fees, including a jump in employee health care premiums. The school system has not yet finalized its first collective bargaining agreement.
Bryantt touted his experience working with labor unions in Alaska to craft collective bargaining agreements, and said that he prioritizes open communication and being proactive.
“I look forward to forming strong relationships with all of our labor unions and to have strong collective bargaining processes moving forward,” Bryantt said.
Bryantt also said that all students need to feel welcome in ACPS.
“That’s the bottom line, and one of the reasons why I’m coming to ACPS is that we serve very diverse populations of students,” he said. “Whether they are from a different country, whether they are trans, whether they love sports, whether they are a shy student, there are so many types of families that we serve, and my commitment is that no matter who you are, no matter what identity you have, you’re welcome in our school. I want you to feel safe, and I want you to feel welcome.”
