Business administrator Jonathan Yates (left to right), Superintendent Dr. Justin Smith, curriculum director Danielle Magulick, personnel director Michael Mongon and special services director Dr. Jennifer Bland outside the district’s administration building.
Evesham school Superintendent Dr. Justin Smith will retire in September after six years in the role.
With parents who met as teachers at the same boarding school and a brother who also became an educator, embarking on his first teaching job 30 years ago was something for which Smith seemed destined. His pursuit of an education career has taken him from his local roots in Maple Shade and Cherry Hill, to undergraduate school at Williams College in Massachusetts, to the University of Oregon for graduate school.
Smith’s first education job was instructing German at the college, then to the country itself for a teaching assistant program. He settled his family in Marlton and worked at Cherokee High School. Smith’s own children were Evesham and Cherokee students.Â
“All of my experiences that I’ve accrued are part of who I am and how I think today,” he said in an interview with The Sun after he was named Evesham superintendent in 2020. “And I’m grateful for every one of those stops along the way. If I were to write a book, I’d call it something like, ‘Everything I Need to Know About Being an Administrator, I Learned as a Teacher.'”
Smith was named Cherry Hill’s assistant superintendent in 2018 and Evesham superintendent two years later. Since then, he’s worked on community initiatives and managed the district response to reopening after COVID. He has also strategized with the district’s board of education and navigated eight years of continual state-aid reductions.
New Jersey’s S2 Act – implemented in 2018 – re-aligned aid based on current student needs and local property values. The result for Evesham has been a cumulative reduction of more than $40 million since its 2018-’19 budget.
Smith has guided the extension of 2024’s tuition-free, full-day preschool to 25 classrooms over five years, with the goal of offering the program to all 3- and 4-year-olds by the 2028-’29 school year.
“I will be retiring Sept. 1 this year,” Smith announced in an email to district staff earlier this month. “Other endeavors await me after. For the sake of all current and future Evesham students, I am deeply grateful to our township community and local taxpayers – as well as our board – for its decisive action last year in providing our district with an additional local tax levy that has improved our financial footing.
“It is painful to imagine where we would be now without those resources,” he added. “It is painful to know where we are now even with them. The impact on people of our budget challenges gets more difficult to bear each year.”
