Superintendent Search Firm Sticks By Picks

A headhunting firm Wednesday morning defended its recommendation of six candidates for New Haven schools superintendent morning — or tried to, when Board of Education members weren’t interrupting the consultants to pass blame onto the company and each other for disrupting the search process.

Rather than interviewing semifinalists for the role that’s been vacant since last October, board members, stakeholder reps and consultants talked over each other in an acrimonious meeting. The two leads from executive search firm Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates (HYA) (which is getting a $24,500 commission and up to $13,785 in reimbursements) tried to explain their decision-making process, while board members sniped at each other with disparaging comments and accusations of illegality.

A parent leader in the room called the back-and-forth ​“crazy,” ​“ridiculous” and a ​“big mess”; a union representative said they were ​“wasting time.”

That’s not how this meeting — at a district facilities outpost on Ferry Street — was intended to go.

The board’s leadership, President Ed Joyner and Vice-President Carlos Torre, had hoped that a sit-down with HYA would be a chance to regroup. They said they wanted their fellow board members — who are evenly split on whether to revise the search firm’s picks, because no internal candidates advanced to the second round — to hear HYA’s reasoning and then come to some consensus on how to resume interviews.

Instead, Darnell Goldson, Joyner and Torre’s primary antagonist, was the only other board member to show. (He initially didn’t receive the email invitation, due to an typo by Torre, Torre said.) After the trio butted heads for an hour, Goldson left before hearing the firm’s private assessment of each candidate’s qualifications.

As he walked out, he said the gathering was illegal, because the four representatives — Nijija-Ife Waters for parents, Dave Cicarella for teachers, Claudine Wilkins-Chambers for paraprofessionals and Cheryl Brown for administrators — had been added to the search committee by a vote of four at the last meeting, less than the contested quorum bar of five that the old bylaws required

“I believe you’re doing this backwards,” Goldson said.

The meeting ended without an apparent resolution, postponing the impasse until Monday’s regular board meeting.

Already, the delay has caused one of HYA’s six favorites to drop out of the running, no longer interested in the job, according to officials.

The one upshot of the meeting was that HYA members had a chance to explain themselves, in broad strokes to the public and in specific detail, name by name, after the press was asked to leave.

“We stand by our recommendations,” Randy Collins, HYA’s lead consultant, said, ​“We don’t know everything about everyone; you may. We’ll put them in. The search committee and the board has that right. They have to work with the superintendent; they have to live with him.” (“Or her,” Brown added, prompting Collins to note that four of the six semifinalists are women.)

Of the 45 candidates who submitted applications, the firm took 22 seriously. Three withdrew their applications; the rest were deemed unqualified for the job. ​“For example, a principal who’s got 180 kids in school is not qualified to go from there to here,” Collins explained. ​“They would be eaten up in a heartbeat. They don’t have the experience.”

Each of those 22 candidates — one of whom was an internal applicant — was given a preliminary interview by phone, by Skype or in person.

The pool was evaluated against a leadership profile that HYA assembled from feedback in focus groups that had only 41 participants and an online survey that got over 1,000 responses. (Even though there’s some dispute whether the firm got enough in-person input, Ed McCormick, HYA’s other lead consultant, said the themes were consistent. ​“If we had doubled the input, it wouldn’t have changed,” he said.) Those criteria, presented to the board on Aug. 28, asked for a superintendent who could connect with the struggles of urban youth, build trust with parents, communicate with the wider community and articulate a vision for the district’s future.

The firm prioritized experience over credentials, McCormick explained. ​“Who had more accomplishments in community engagement, in bringing a diverse group together, in operating in a large urban environment?” he asked, as some sample questions. ​“We focused on the specific jobs they’ve done, not the positions they’ve served in.”

Based on that rubric, nine were interviewed in greater depth, and from there, the consultants narrowed it down to six semifinalists, Collins said. ​“None of the six we presented as the best candidates were from New Haven. That doesn’t mean you can’t add them in. If you want to do that, go ahead. It’s not our superintendent; it’s yours. If you think there’s someone better qualified to lead New Haven, then go for it.”

Collins added that the firm had tried to recruit local candidates they felt would be strong contenders, but they were unsuccessful in getting the prospects to apply. He also ruled out some superintendents from small districts in Connecticut’s suburbs he felt would be in over their head in a large, urban district.

“This has been up and down for a number of reasons, good reasons,” Colins argued, citing an illness in one of their consultants’ families, Daisy Gonzalez’s untimely death and the district staff’s failure to schedule focus groups until the school year’s end. ​“But this meeting should be about coming together, the board too. We want the best candidate to lead the schools. That’s the motivation that we should all have, and that I assume we all have. It’s really time to stop the internal bickering.”

He concluded, ​“We just need to move forward in a united way and make a decision.”