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At Monday's online Board of Education meeting.
Thirty-one applicants from across the country have thrown their hats in the ring to be the next superintendent of the New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) district.
That’s the latest in the public school district’s search for a replacement for Iline Tracey, who plans to retire at the end of the current school year in June.
The Board of Education and the McPherson and Jacobson search firm spent the month of February collecting applications for the superintendent job posting, which closed on Feb. 23. They also dedicated a week to collecting community feedback that will be considered by the search committee, which is made up of the school board’s seven voting members.
NHPS spokesperson Justin Harmon told the Independent on Tuesday that a total of 31 people applied for the superintendent position while the job posting was up. He added that the search firm reported it “has never seen so much interest in a search. Candidates have applied from all over the country, and it is a very diverse pool.”
Asked for a list of names of the 31 people who have applied for the superintendent job, Harmon said that the “candidate names are confidential at this stage.”
McPherson and Jacobson lead search consultant Judy Sclair-Stein attended Monday’s full Board of Education meeting, which was held online via Zoom, to give the school board members an executive summary on what was heard during the superintendent-search public meetings.
Sclair-Stein gave a 15-minute summary during Monday’s meeting, reviewing some of the many community responses the search firm received during its stakeholder meetings, focus groups, and anonymous online survey, which collected input from almost 200 community members. (Click here to read an Independent story about some of the community feedback.)
A total of 187 people participated in the stakeholder and focus group meetings, which took place two weeks ago.
A more detailed report is being put together this week, Sclair-Stein said, that will be provided to the school before candidate interviews begin mid-March.
“The staff at Mac and Jac is in the process right now of putting all of that together and the board will get that report probably in about a week,” she said. “We wanted to get back to you so that you have an idea of what we learned from your stakeholders when we met with them.”
Sclair-Stein’s report highlighted responses from public stakeholders to the search firm’s four key questions asked throughout the search process. Those questions were: “What are the good things about your community? What are the good things about your school district? What qualities and characteristics are you looking for in your next superintendent? And what issues should your new superintendent beware of as he or she comes into the district?”
Many of the community responses the search firm collected coincided with the the school board’s ideal qualities for the next superintendent.
In response to the good things about New Haven, Sclair-Stein reported frequent responses like diversity, great neighborhoods, many higher-learning institutions, has the best pizza, has caring communities, lots of public programming, very unified, and celebrates its many multicultural communities.
Sclair-Stein said repeated input about the great things about NHPS were: talented, dedicated, and hardworking educators, many community partnerships, represents many world languages, the kids are amazing, schools expose students to real life experiences, has many invested parents, and there are many school choices for kids.
Before highlighting some key issues the community expressed a need for the new superintendent to know about, Sclair-Stein told the board, “When you hear some of the things I’m going to share with you and when you get your report and start reading it, some things may sting a little bit, but that’s okay. We can only get better if we know what things we have to work on.”
The issues highlighted by the community were: there’s a teacher and staff shortage, politics play a significant role in decision making, lots of nepotism in hiring practices, pay increases have been inequitable, a lack of safety and discipline, there are many facility problems, there are difficulties meeting IEP terms, lack of communication, inequitable state funding, and inequities across buildings.
The skills, qualities, and characteristics desired by the community for the next school leader as reported by Sclair-Stein include someone who is visible, a collaborator, has a voice at the state level, is patient, a good listener, experienced, bold and fearless and will push back against long-standing systems, problem solver, believes in transparency, and is honest and approachable.
“As we go through the process and continue on when interviews begin, my greatest hope is that the feedback from stakeholder teams will be very congruent with the board’s perception of candidates,” Sclair-Stein said.
Board of Education member Darnell Goldson asked if the full stakeholder report will be shared publicly. Sclair-Stein said the process so far calls for the report to be distributed to the board first in the coming weeks then shared publicly on the district’s site after the board reviews it.
Goldson also requested that the names of the people that participated in the stakeholder and focus group meetings be shared because the community “has the right to know who those people are speaking for them.”
At the Board’s Feb. 13 meeting Mayor Justin Elicker agreed that the names of stakeholders who contributed input at the focus groups should be made public.
What's Next?
According to the NHPS district’s site, the next steps in the search process will see the search firm present to the school board a narrowed-down list of seven to nine candidates. That presentation will take place in a closed, private session scheduled for March 14. After that, during the week of March 27, stakeholders and the school board will interview finalists with a goal of announcing the next superintendent by April.
Student, staff, and parent stakeholders who will participate in the interviewing process will be selected by the school board, school unions, school leaders, and the Office of Youth, Family, and Community Outreach, Harmon told the Independent.
“There is no plan to have a public meeting of the finalists,” Harmon added, “however, they will be interviewed by groups of stakeholders representative of the community.”
Reached for comment Tuesday afternoon about how the search process is going so far, Goldson said he would have liked to have seen more stakeholder input. He described the arranging of the stakeholder meetings as “rushed” because they were announced less than three days before they were set to happen which “didn’t make it easy for folks to go” and had no hybrid options.
“We’ve been doing online meetings all this time, then all of a sudden people had to go to a building somewhere in the middle of winter,” Goldson said about the recent three in-person stakeholder meetings.
Asked what he’s heard from the community about the process, Goldson said he’s heard some community members say the decision is “already a done deal” and that others no longer are speaking up because they feel there’s a lack of transparency.
“I’m going to follow the stakeholders and if they suggest they haven’t had enough input, I’m going to support their positions,” he said. “I think a lot of people have given up because they see it’s a 6 to 1 mix and they think, what’s the use?”