“Everybody's style is a little different. I tend to be a little bit of a neat freak. I like everything in its place and a place for everything,” he said.  

Most of the time superintendents start their new tenures just prior to the start of school years in the fall, but the resignation of Smith’s predecessor, Angie Bryant, announced in early fall, meant his hiring process started at that point and he is taking office as the spring semester starts.

“It's a little different coming in the middle of the year than it is at the beginning of the year. because, as I told the school board, I'm going to blink and it's going to be March, because everything already is in motion so fast, especially the springtime of the year.  It really is kind of build the plane as you're flying it,” he said.

But in Smith’s case, the person building that plane is not exactly an apprentice.  He comes to Prescott with three decades of experience in educational administration, including ten years as the superintendent for White Hall Public Schools, which serves about 3,000 students. (A September report by Bryant had PHS attendance at 867.)  Other towns where he has served in capacities ranging from principal to assistant superintendent include Alma, Paris, Benton and Bryant, Arkansas and Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Among those Smith has been meeting with lately was the Prescott-Nevada County Chamber of Commerce.  At a coffee a day earlier he told them of the first time he showed an interest in a career in education.

“My first paddling in school was in fourth grade,” Smith said. “That was because I was helping one of my friends with his math because he couldn't figure out how to do the math problem. So I was up out of my seat, which I wasn't supposed to be, in a little different time back then, back in the early-to-mid 70s. So the teacher snuck up behind me--I never saw her coming--and swatted me on the behind before I knew what was going on.”

But Smith didn’t start out in college at University of Central Arkansas as an education major.  Having been in a car accident that had broken his leg as a teenager, Smith found himself inspired by his physical therapist and for a time considered that profession.  But a World Literature course changed his mind and set him toward becoming an English major with the teacher of that course being his advisor.  After graduation, he got a job teaching English in Clarendon, taught three years there, then married his wife Marty and moved to Marion.

“She actually worked in insurance at that time in Memphis, and so we moved to Marion, which is where she was from. I drove to Parkin. She drove to Memphis, and I drove twice as far as she did.  But it took her twice as long to get home as it did me most of the time, because she had to go through the traffic.  I did that for that year and had an opportunity then to go to Elaine, Arkansas and got my first administrative job there,” Smith explained.

This was as a junior high principal and federal programs coordinator.  After two years there, he joined the Bearden School District as middle school principal with the understanding he would move up in his third year there to high school principal, but a disagreement between the superintendent and the school board stopped this from happening. So the move was made to Alma, where he was middle school principal in a much larger district.  But soon he would go to another one even larger still.

“I always had a desire to work in a really large school district one time, just to see what it was like. … They had a job open in Kenosha, Wisconsin for an assistant high school principal and a middle school principal. And I applied for both, and got a letter two weeks later saying thanks, but no thanks but no thanks on the assistant principal job. And then about two months later, I got a phone call saying, hey, we'd like for you to come up and interview for the principal job. So we moved in January to Wisconsin.”  Concerning actually moving during a Wisconsin winter,” Smith said, “Don’t ever do that.  Terrible.”

There for 2 and a half years, Smith worked on the doctoral dissertation, finally coming to the statistical chapter.  He realized then, in the days before video communication via the internet, that he could either quit the doctoral program or move back to near University of Arkansas Little Rock, the institution in which he was enrolled.  But Marty wouldn’t let him.  “I won't tell you exactly what she said, but in no uncertain terms, it was, ‘You're not quitting this, because I have been a wife while you were taking classes three nights a week, and you were an administrator.” Fortunately, a chance opened up to be a high school principal in Paris, two hours from Little Rock. This helped him finish and claim his Ed.D. in Educational Leadership and General Administration. 

Next, he followed his superintendent, Richard Abernathy, to Bryant, becoming his assistant superintendent for curriculum instruction there.  Having grown up in Benton and graduated from high school there, he was now working for the in-county rival.  “It was kind of tough at the beginning, because I was sitting on the Bryant side, but I knew the words of the Benton alma mater, not vice versa. So it's a little odd sitting over there that way. But I did that for four years with them, then got the opportunity to be superintendent in White Hall,” Smith said. 

He was at White Hall for ten years, in the process watching his kids graduate, including his youngest son, who excelled at football, do so and then move on to SAU.  He called himself retiring in 2017, when he left White Hall, but said, “I stayed retired about 24 hours, went to work for AEA, which is Arkansas Association Educational Administrators, because Richard Abernathy moved from Bryant to executive director there.”

There, Smith helped organize an initiative to educate beginning administrators. “You get their feet wet, and mentor and all that sort of stuff. [Abernathy] asked me if I would come put the program together for them and run that program,” he explained.

After two years, grant funding ran out and Benton Public Schools, he discovered, had need for him. So he took the position there as Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources and Support Services.  “I dealt with everything that nobody else wanted to deal with. I had transportation, custodial, maintenance, busses, all the non academic part of running the school district,” Smith said.  He retired again this June, but again found this didn’t take.

“I'm not really built for retirement,” Smith said. “I still have that desire and drive to make a difference for kids. So this job was open, and I applied for it and interviewed. They asked me to come, and I told them I would do that, as long as health and family all held out.”

About family, Smith is the husband of Marty, a receptionist for Benton Public Schools and a proud dad of three, including a teacher/coach son in his ninth year at White Hall, a teacher/athletic director daughter in Benton and a roofing site supervisor son in Oklahoma City.  There’s also the grandson Thomas, of whom Smith said, “He'll be four on March the 10th. And if we could have had him first, we'd have skipped the three kids and just went straight to him. Most grandparents say that, and it's true.”

This brought up the question of how Smith sees kids doing as of 2026 in the broad sense.  What are their lives like and what are their needs from their educational institutions?

“Covid really had a dramatic impact on not just kids, but families and everything else. And so lot of mental health issues have come out and coping and knowing how to get back into being around other people.  Because for two years, especially the younger kids, they missed out on a lot of things we would have had as kids growing up, and those kids are just now starting into the school system.

“You're finding behaviors that are a little more severe than they were in the past.  You’re finding part of the problem too, [is] social media. All of that plays into it, especially for the older kids and bullying and harassment, and those kinds of things are difficult to deal with, and a lot of times those end up spilling over into the school because this is where they’re actually together,” Smith said, adding that he believes directives from state government to limit screen time in classrooms are to the good.

“[The legislation was meant] to try to get kids back to social emotional balance, so to speak, where they know how to deal with people, talk to people, and interact and learn without having a screen in front of them. And it’s so important. It's extremely important.”

Smith also addressed the impact of AI on education, especially the temptation it offers to students who wish to take the shortcut of having a platform like ChatGPT write papers to order that can be turned in when assignments are due.

As Smith explained, “What we’ve got to do with AI is make sure that the kids have those skills to be able to use it and use it effectively, but not in place of their own mind. They've got to be able to exercise their own brain and get their own thoughts into that.  That part is the part I think that educators are most worried about.  Are we doing that?”

Another issue pertains to the households in which children and teens live.  Parents are more often today struggling with food and shelter insecurity, and their time is so stretched working for survival they’re not able to be as involved in their children’s education.  Forced proximity during the COVID years, Smith said, also affected a trend of change in the dynamic between some parents and their youngsters. 

“Parents used to be very, very strict or straightforward. At least mine were, and you don't see that as much now,” Smith said. “It's a little more want to be friend rather than being parent.  Being parents is a tough thing to do, and you want to be friendly, but not friends with them. That line gets blurred a little more than it used.  I think after Covid, it got blurred even more.”

Concerning the way school administrations have been managing in the wake of the Arkansas LEARNS Act, which increased the pay of beginning teachers to $50,000 while increasing the pay of experienced ones more modestly than the increase in salary extended to beginners, Smith said, “Don’t get me wrong. Every teacher, I think, ought to start at least at 50--truth be known-- for what they deal with, and what they do, because there's a lot of hours that they don't receive compensation. The problem with the way it was done, in my estimation, was we did it at the expense of experienced teachers and more educated folks. And I know they will tell you that there's no correlation between more education, more experience, and student results, I tend to take issue with that.”

Where in past years, Smith said, the gap between salaries at wealthier districts and those with smaller property tax bases was narrowing, he said that since the LEARNS Act’s passage, this gap has begun to widen again.  But in a district like Prescott’s there are still a couple advantages to offer prospective teachers and staffers that can offset the higher salaries in more developed places. “It's not the fast-paced, hectic lifestyle that you get in those areas. So you have that as an incentive. I think you will find, and probably have found, even here, districts looked at the four- day week as an incentive to attract teachers and educators to come and still get the same amount of time in,” Smith said.  Prescott’s four-day school week is one Smith said he will have to adjust to.

In describing his communications style with staff, Smith said “I’m a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of person.  I try to be open and visit with whoever wants to visit.  You can tell I like to talk, especially about education, because I'm very passionate about that, and always have been, but I think you have to get to know people, and that's why I spent the first couple of days spending time having people come in to try to get to know them.”

In terms of the relationship he hopes to build with the school board and the people living in his district, Smith added, “you try to find out what the community norms are, what people expect, and then you try to meet those expectations as best you can and do that.”

Smith’s first regular school board meeting will be this coming Thursday, January 15th at 7:00 p.m. in the board meeting room at the Prescott Junior High Campus.