The School Board has been extremely busy over the last few weeks. We have been busy trying to do the two things that a school board really gets involved in – hiring a superintendent and working on a referendum (for buildings in this case). We’re trying to add on to our Elementary building and our High School, and it appears the state has concerns about the amount of green space (none basically) that we have at our high school facility. We had a phone call with the one guy from the state Department of Education who seems to control these things, and then he came to visit last week. It sounds like he’s going to submit a report saying we shouldn’t build on the high school site, but it’s ultimately up to us to do whatever we need to do. So we’ll have to jump through some hoops, and I guess that’s what you do when you’re on the board. After the phone meeting with the state guy, our current superintendent gave out my cell number to the regional paper, and I did an interview about the meeting that ended up making the news. There’s still much more work to be done on the building front – we have to get past the state approval process, decide on what we want to do, build up some task forces to get feedback and take it to the community, and ultimately sell the community on the project. I’m hopeful we can be done by December, but there appear to be lots of hurdles to scale quickly for us to make that date.
Our superintendent of three years has decided to move on to a much bigger district in the state after interviewing at two large districts. That opened up the opportunity for us to hire a new guy (or gal). The previous superintendent was hired just before I arrived on the board, so this was my first time through this process, but about the 5th search the board has gone through in the past 10 years. We didn’t hire outside consultants, and seemed no worse for the option because we received 14 quality applications. When the applications arrived, we went into the school office and read over the applications on a late Friday afternoon and had to mark down which ones we wanted to have interviewed. We decided to interview the 4 candidates who had received the most check marks by the principals and board members. The four interviewees were all principals who had 7-12 years of experience and were looking to move up. We interviewed two candidates on June 2 and two more on June 3. We asked 30 questions of each candidate and expected them to finish their answers within an hour.
After the four interviews were completed on Tuesday night, we spent over 2 1/2 hours discussing the candidates. The discussion quickly turned to two candidates. The other two were solid candidates that we think can be superintendents, but they weren’t as good. It was quickly apparent that two liked one candidate and I liked the other with the other 4 board members feeling they were both good. It appeared we were split 3 1/2 to 3 1/2 after all this discussion, so a principal recommended we have the two candidates back for a presentation of some sort. We all thought it was a good idea to give the candidates one more opportunity to appear and hopefully remove any doubt about the candidates. For my preferred candidate, I was hoping to see some attention to detail and willingness to listen and seek advice – because he had been very confident and used lots of themes in his initial interview. He actually succeeded well on both fronts and gave his 30 minute presentation in exactly 30 minutes while holding the audience and proving he had both the communication skills and attention to detail we were seeking.
This time we discussed the candidates for another two hours – we first listened to the staff’s thoughts then went around and gave our reactions. We ended up taking a secret straw poll to determine where everyone stood. After that we had a majority and decided to make it at 7-0 vote in favor of the selected candidate. Publicly, we’ll say we all agreed on one candidate, but it’s insulting people intelligence to say there was no real debate when it took us 5 hours and a second presentation to decide. However, we were all comfortable with both candidates to the point that we would’ve supported either in a 7-0 vote depending on who had the majority.
The decision to have them back, even though it took away another night from my family, was a good decision for the board. It’s really hard to make a school-defining decision after seeing someone talk once for 1 hour. Taking the time to call some references and getting another chance to listen for certain perceived weaknesses from the candidates helped me feel very confident about the selection. Time will tell, of course, but I came out of that meeting energized by the feeling of having been part of a good decision.
As I mentioned above, the regional paper had my cell phone, so after the meeting on Tuesday, they called me both Wednesday and Thursday to try to get information on who was selected. The board chair hadn’t been returning calls because he was trying to work out a deal with the selected candidate before alerting the media and contacting the other candidate. My phone died on Wednesday, so I missed the call, but they did reach me on Thursday. Not knowing what was going on to the point, I gave the paper the information about who was selected, because it happened in an open meeting (that the paper could’ve attended, but didn’t). I didn’t give away any information about the proposed salary even though that was technically public information too. In retrospect I probably should’ve waited because the board chair hadn’t worked out a deal yet and the other candidate hadn’t been contacted yet. Anyway, it was finalized on Friday, so then the official announcement could come out. I was called again, but I didn’t know anything when I was called and had learned since I’m not making the deal, it’s better that I stay out of it. I should’ve thought of that earlier, but I guess I learned my lesson.
In all, I feel very good about the candidate we’ve selected, and I’ve learned a lot about the process of hiring by committee. We’ll see how it goes, but I don’t have much doubt he’ll do a good job.
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