Mark Lineburg

Superintendent
Halifax County, VA

Having worked in school systems across Virginia, Mark Lineburg has found a real home in the impoverished former tobacco country along the state’s North Carolina border. It’s that forgotten kind of place, off the main lines of transportation, and one of the last victims of the decline in both the Virginia soil quality - a 300 year problem - and the combination of a drop in American  cigarette smoking and a rise in tobacco imports from lower-cost nations. It has also seen it’s secondary industry, the fabric mills that moved south from New England to escape unions, move on, to Asia.

In some ways Mark represents a future that seems possible for rural areas across the country. While Halifax County is deeply committed to raising the skills of their own students as one path to economic revival, another is to build on the success of their children by adding in families who can either commute to Duke Medical Center and other Durham, North Carolina employers just 51 miles away, or who can work remotely with companies around the world, bringing opportunity home.

Our conversations with Mark began at a conference in San Francisco, where, gathered with other Virginia school leaders, we listened to his passion for what most might see as a thankless job, rebuilding education on a geographic and economic fringe.

A Teacher

“My gift is teaching and I still teach today because I enjoy teaching and enjoy the relationship with students and that has taken me all the way to this journey to Halifax County,” Mark says, “that is the most needy place I've ever been.”

“We are the underdog,” he adds, but we have “the best children on earth.” He thinks he is incredibly lucky to have found himself to this place after a long career. “This is 29 years in public education, [and] I think about the journey that I've been through. I'll start with how I got started,” he begins again, “both my parents were teachers. My dad was a football coach, a legendary football coach, my mother was a teacher and … for me as a teacher there were two things [she] did all the time, and that was read and write. We shared every book you could ever share.”

High School Doesn’t Work Well Anymore

Despite, Mark says, “being in high school forever, is that high school doesn't work well anymore.” He challenges teaching content in isolation, “this department over here, that department over there.” He admits that we don’t model collaboration and we don’t demonstrate connections. He talks of combining advisories and content areas, of helping students find their way to career paths and to lifelong mental health, of making the curriculum meaningful, and of making sure that apprenticeships and internships are the norm.

Within that challenge of the future of high school is the future of the Halifax County High School, the building, currently a chopped up, inaccessible, 1970s structure that is, in parts, already falling down. 

“If you ask me why we don't fix the existing high school facility,” he says, I will say that we’ll never move past where we are because we will have too many obstacles to get over, and that will drain for us forever. Drain us of money, drain us of energy.”

Sharing Power, Including Kids

What makes the work that Mark does so unique as a superintendent is his willingness to share power with staff and students. This is exemplified in the story of teenagers who joined forces with Mark, his Board, and other key leaders in the community to lead an effort to gain legislative support for action by Virginia’s General Assembly to allow Halifax County to redirect local sales tax to capital improvements funding for a new high school. As Mark tells it, students not only went to the Assembly to testify but also called every single legislator to tell them why they should support a bill on behalf of the Halifax community. When adults contacted legislators as well, they were often told, “oh, we already have heard from a student in your high school.” 

These calls were organized by students who had seen the inequities present in their high school when visiting other schools for competitions and other events. That kind of citizen action by teens doesn’t happen by chance. Mark believes in the power of student voice. He values opportunities that support students to develop life competencies beyond passing state tests. He sees his work as a mission not a job and that matters in a community. And, he wants students in Halifax to be able to access pathways to success in life often reserved for those who come from a demographic in which education beyond high school is a given and careers that provide financial viability are a must. Mark believes in the learners of Halifax County and in their potential to define the future of the community rather than being defined by it. He sees this when he talks about hiring former students into Halifax Schools and the opportunities that building out the local business community can bring to them. He sees the schools as part of the community.

For Kids and Teachers

Mark understands “management by walking around,” as Hewlett-Packard executives called it. He is everywhere in the schools, and in the community, always listening, and always teaching.

His vision is one of making the school system an integral, a leading, part of the community’s rebirth. He wants high school to seamlessly carry kids into adulthood, whether that means college or work, in Halifax or beyond the county’s borders. And he wants every learner, pre-K through “whenever,” to be a real part of the community, understanding the problems created by Halifax’s complicated history while dreaming a future that works for all.

And everywhere he goes he constantly encourages, constantly thanks everyone who is doing this hard work of transformation, and the hard work of giving Halifax’s learners a path to the opportunities that will serve them well whatever they choose to do, whatever they choose to be. At the end of just about every day Mark sits down and writes handwritten notes of thanks and appreciation to at least one person he interacted with. “a handwritten note in blue ink,” he says, “not an email, not printed, something more personal.”

Beyond the Limitations

Mark as a leader sees beyond the horizon of what others view as the limitations of rural communities. Instead, he looks to change up education so young people will have choices after high school, one of which is to discover that the community where they grew up is a place where they can thrive along with their families into the future. He sees the students that he serves as a superintendent as an asset to the community and the economy. That’s why he’s invested in making sure they don’t feel they have to run away from their hometown or to see their hometown in the words of Bruce Springsteen, one of Mark’s favorite musicians: 

“He's singing about my school,” Mark says, while refusing to let this happen to Halifax or it’s central community, South Boston.

“Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores

Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more

They're closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks

Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back

To your hometown.”  (Bruce Springsteen, 1984, Columbia Records)