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Board member Che Dawson questions who’s been left out.
New Haven wants a “strong and energetic” leader to take over as the next school superintendent — someone who can 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.
So consultants assisting in the superintendent search — which has drawn 45 applicants and may now stretch into 2018 — heard from focus groups, in-person interviews and an online survey.
At a presentation to the Board of Education at L.W. Beecher School on Monday night, the consultants from Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates (HYA) proposed developing those findings into a rubric that will guide the firm as it narrows a pool of 45 applicants to the top contenders.
Even as the HYA consultants talked up trust and transparency, they acknowledged that the search process itself hadn’t always lived up to those values.
During the two days in mid-June that the HYA team members were in New Haven, they met with 41 people face to face: 20 community members (with no clergy represented), five administrators, seven teachers, five support staff and four parents. The sessions didn’t include a single student.
Still, the agency said it felt comfortable moving ahead, because 1,022 survey responses largely confirmed what they’d heard from the few in-person interviews.
HYA is collecting $24,500 in compensation for conducting the search, plus up to $13,785 to cover ancillary costs like “advertising, background checks, travel costs and other expenses.”
Search consultantMcCormick reports Monday night.
The low turnout looks like a repeat of the 2013 “listening: sessions. Parents said that that year’s search process felt rushed and that Garth Harries’s promotion felt inevitable. Only this time around, the process has been marked not by speed, but delays.
Superintendent Harries departed abruptly last October amid calls for his resignation from a divided school board and community. Reggie Mayo, his predecessor who’d led the school system for 21 years, temporarily stepped back into his old role — an interim position that was scheduled to end by June. But the Board of Education dragged its feet in hiring a search firm, and after it flubbed getting the word out in advance of HYA’s focus groups, the Board of Education extended its deadline again.
The consultants now aim to have a new superintendent take over by 2018.
To make sure that happens, one of the firm’s lead consultants, Randall Collins, proposed picking up the pace with an accelerated schedule. He said he hoped to have five or six top picks by Sept. 11. From there, the board could conduct two days of interviews on Sept. 14 – 15. The firm would vet the finalist’s background for 10 days, while negotiations get underway. If a contract is signed by mid-October, that will give the new superintendent enough time — usually 90 days’ notice — to transition into the role by the start of next calendar year.
Collins emphasized that the board needs to expedite the process to remain competitive. Already, four applicants have dropped out to take jobs in places like Boston and El Paso. (One candidate withdrew after growing skittish about the state budget.)
HYA’s Randall Collins talks timeline.
The board’s next step will be setting the criteria by which HYA’s consultants can begin winnowing the field, “matching the candidate credentials against these requirements,” explained Edward McCormick, the firm’s other lead.
At Monday’s meeting, he shared the responses that came up consistently.
“We asked three questions of individuals: What were the strengths of New Haven? What were the challenges of New Haven? And what were the desired characteristics of the next superintendent?” McCormick said. “As you can imagine, with those three questions, we got a lot of input,” he added, earning a laugh from Mayo.
In assessing strengths, stakeholders highlighted the caring and committed educators, strong magnet school and early childhood programs, the Elm City’s cultural diversity, and valuable community partnerships like New Haven Promise.
Conversely, when it came to weaknesses, stakeholders took issue with the inequity between individual schools (that’s highlighted annually by competitive school choice placements), the absence of a clear strategic plan and guidance on how to carry it out, the need for more accountability and stability at the administrative level, the lack of diversity across the staff, and a perception that the Board of Education is “at war.”
“There was not an overwhelming sense that anyone was doing something wrong, but that you could do something better,” McCormick observed. His conclusion, after evaluating all the feedback? “You needed to work together in a much more cohesive manner,” he said
To meet the district’s challenges, the consultants wrote, “The new superintendent can best establish a basis for success by being visible, active and accessible in the community. The position requires the superintendent to value input from staff and community as well as utilizing collaborative practices. A combination of outstanding knowledge and management skills (instruction, governance, finance), self-confidence and humility will serve the superintendent well. Also there is a strong expectation that the superintendent will be a visionary with a proven track record of successfully implementing programs that improve student learning.”
On the online survey, the top five desired characteristics were fostering a “climate of mutual trust and respect” among the staff, recruiting and retaining “effective personnel,” establishing “high expectations” for students and teachers, understanding “the needs of a diverse student population,” and implementing the “emerging best practices” in educational research.
(The district withheld 46 pages of the online survey’s full comments from release on Monday; the Independent has contacted the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission asking whether that was legal under the state’s open meetings law.)
Summarizing all that information, HYA compiled four main points into a job description. New Haven seeks “a knowledgeable and innovative instructional leader,” “a systems thinker and proactive manager,” and “an effective communicator and committed consensus-builder” with “leadership experiences and accomplishments.”
Short three members, due to Mayor Toni Harp and Darnell Goldson’s absences and Jamell Cotto’s pending confirmation by the alders, the board held off on formally approving HYA’s leadership profile.
HYA’s proposed “leadership profile” that will be used to distinguish the top candidate.