Donald Ingwerson, who has been the superintendent of the Jefferson County school district in Louisville, Ky., for the past 12 years, has resigned that post to head the Galef Institute, a school-research firm in California.
Mr. Ingwerson, who has come under fire locally in recent months for a new student-assignment plan implemented as part of a federal court desegregation order, leaves with a long record of innovation in integration and shared decisionmaking with teachers that led to his selection as the National Superintendent of the Year last year. He has the longest tenure of any current urban school chief.
Mr. Ingwerson last year flirted with the idea of leaving the Kentucky school district for a post in the U.S. Education Department, but changed his mind.
The Galef Institute in Santa Monica focuses on young children who are likely to drop out of school. He will begin work there July 1.
A 17-year-old Chicago student has won first place in the 52nd annual Westinghouse Science Talent Search.
Elizabeth Michele Pine, who attends the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora, won for her use of D.N.A. in resolving a scientific controversy over the genetic relationship between two major groups of fungi. She received a $40,000 college scholarship.
The second-place scholarship of $30,000 went to Xanthi M. Merlo of Racine, Wis., who studied a newly discovered protein in blood plasma. She attends Washington Park High School in Racine.
The third-place scholarship of $20,000 was awarded to Lenhard Lee Ng of Chapel Hill, N.C., for a mathematics paper on rounding numbers. He attends Chapel Hill High School.
The other seven winners in order were Constance Lee Chen of La Jolla (Calif.) High School; Ryan David Egeland of Wayzata Senior High School, Plymouth, Minn.; Wei-Hwa Huang of Montgomery Blair High School, Silver Spring, Md.; Mahesh Kalyana Mahanthappa of Fairview High School, Boulder, Colo.; Steve Shaw-Tang Chien of Montgomery Blair High School; Elizabeth Dexter Mann of Montgomery Blair High School; and Zachary Zisha Freyberg of Midwood High School at Brooklyn (N.Y.) College.
They each received scholarships of $15,000 or $10,000.
