How do you take over a school district from a guy who was there for 30 years?
Well, according to Michael Burke, the newly appointed Rye Neck schools superintendent, you do more listening than talking.
“I think a key mistake you can make when you come to a new district is to start making a lot of changes right away,” Burke, 51, told The Record from his office in Mamaroneck. “My job is to learn with them, and to grow with them.”
The former Bergen County, N.J., superintendent was selected to take over for Eric Lutinski back in April. Lutinski, who became the Rye Neck superintendent in 2021, is leaving the district after three decades working in some capacity in the Rye Neck school system.
Burke, who lives in Harrington Park, N.J., said the best part of the job so far has been meeting with his new staff, as well as parent groups and student clubs, to learn as much as possible about the community.
“Thirty years in a district … tells you all you need to know about the type of district that it is,” he said about his predecessor.
Burke, who holds a bachelor’s and a master’s in secondary education/mathematics from Boston College, got his start in 1997 in the Cresskill Public School system in New Jersey as a seventh-grade math and Advanced Placement Calculus teacher.
After two years he moved to the Northern Valley Regional High School District in Old Tappan, N.J., where he taught AP statistics and was the head varsity basketball coach and the head boys track coach.
But Burke loved the small school feel of Cresskill, which boasts about 1,700 total students, and found his way back in 2004. He spent the next 18 years there — including the last nine as superintendent.
His time at Cresskill came with its share of challenges, Burke admitted, the most difficult being the flood damage the joint middle/high school sustained from Hurricane Ida back in August 2021.
“The entire school was filled with water up to my knee,” Burke recalled. “You run the gamut of emotions.”
The worst part, he said, was the timing — kids were just about to return to school after the COVID-19 pandemic.
An old Korean church in the area ended up volunteering its building to host the 1,000 displaced middle and high school students, and district officials were able to get the kids in on a rotating basis until the school was back up to code.
For his handling of the disaster, Burke was named the Bergen County schools superintendent of the year in 2022, which he attributed to the people around him.
“It really was not about me at all,” he said. ““It really was a Cresskill community award.”
Burke said his experiences during Ida have prepared him to handle curveballs that could be thrown his way at Rye Neck — a school district split between Rye and Mamaroneck, two communities notoriously prone to flooding.
“Knock on wood, hopefully everything will be okay, but if something were to pop up, I feel like my experience, fortunately or unfortunately, would be able to give us some guidance,” he said.
Another challenge he faced while in the Garden State was a controversy over racial sensitivity training, after a district staff member posted racial comments on a private Facebook page. The Cresskill community decided to form a diversity, equity, and inclusion committee after the incident, Burke said.
The district ended up contracting with Kelisa Wing, an education consultant and former chief DEI officer with the U.S. Department of Defense. But Wing also came under fire in 2022 for a few social media posts of her own, where she vented about some clients — including calling people “Karens” — the Daily Voice reported.
Burke said Wing’s posts weren’t directed at people within Cresskill, but they ultimately decided to end their relationship with her anyway.
Even though the district’s DEI program was on the outer edge of that controversy, Burke reiterated that it was “actually a great experience” to learn more about diversity in education.
“All of the children should see themselves in the curriculum, and this was a great opportunity for us to do an internal look,” he said. “It actually ended up being a real positive for us.”
Burke doesn’t have plans to implement DEI programing in Rye Neck, he told The Record, but noted that he’d be open to it if the community identifies DEI as a district need.
Meanwhile, his philosophy, Burke said, is that schools are in the business of motivating children.
“Why do students come to school? Why do students want to get up in the morning?” he said. “They want to be in a supportive environment. They want to be where they’re loved.
“They want to be where people believe in them.”
While Burke is New Jersey through and through, he said he has had a soft spot for Westchester ever since he and his wife met in White Plains on a blind date. The pair later lived in New Rochelle for four years.
When he left Cresskill in 2023, Burke thought he might be on the path to retirement from public education. He explored the private sector — freelancing, working at Montclair State University as a mentor, and even exploring opportunities in sports data analytics.
But, he said, he always wanted to come back to Westchester. And if Burke was going to start fresh in education, he wanted it to be here.
“That time I took for me and for my family was incredible and rejuvenated me, and so I’m looking for a long-sustaining career here in Rye Neck,” Burke said.
While he’s excited to be back working in Westchester, he isn’t going to make the physical move across the border from where he and his wife live with their 15-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son. But, he was quick to mention, it’s just a short 30-minute commute, depending on traffic.
Burke said he already had started working on an entry plan to present to the Board of Education. He’s also assisting with a new district-wide strategic plan to promote problem solving, create connections, and transform professional learning — the first part of which should be ready by December.
He officially took over as head of Rye Neck schools on July 1.
