School Board Notes 2.5.07

By Nicole Achs Freeling
GreatSchools.net Correspondent

Superintendent Search Begins

The board, meeting as a Committee of the Whole, took its first steps toward finding a new superintendent, working with search firm Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates to make several important decisions about the process.

The biggest issue was whether to conduct a confidential or open search. The latter would allow community input in the final decision, but, search executives say, would discourage many qualified candidates from seeking the post who wouldn't want it known that they might leave their current positions.

In the last search for a superintendent, the names of some of the candidates were leaked by members of the Community Advisory Council, according to Commissioner Jill Wynns. "Your district does have some history where confidentiality was not maintained and, quite candidly that's going to hurt you," said Bill Attea, partner in Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates.

Attea told the board that the most qualified candidates usually request confidentiality. Those least concerned with it, he said, tend to be currently unemployed, from another field, or are serving in a lower-level capacity.

"We've never had any sitting superintendents who have gone public with their candidacy" before a job offer was made, Attea said. "We have had several situations where there was a leak and the candidates withdrew their applications."

The committee decided to hold a confidential search with the possibility of making the process open to public input in the final stages, subject to the candidates being willing to have their names revealed. The committee also decided to solicit a large amount of input on the front end. Over the next two months, the search firm will hold stakeholder focus groups and a number of public meetings to gather public opinion on what San Francisco residents want from their schools and their new superintendent. One proposed forum was an upcoming parents conference, sponsored by local community-based organizations, to be held on March 5.

The board will convene a Citizens Advisory Council of at least 20 members including youth, parents, advocacy group representatives, union leaders and other stakeholders. The CAC will be charged with taking the report generated from the public engagement process and using it to develop a list of criteria the search firm will use in finding candidates. "These will be our marching orders, the criteria we're going to measure every candidate against," Attea said.

The firm will then publicize the search and begin recruiting. It will ultimately come up with a short list of 12 to 15 candidates, and then narrow that down to about five for the board to interview. The board is looking to search for, decide on, and make an offer to a candidate by the end of May. Interim Superintendent Gwen Chan's contract expires in June.

Wynns, the only board member to have already presided over a superintendent search, shared a problem encountered during the last search, when the board did not review the applicants' resumes until the finalist candidates were presented. Several of the people recommended as finalists, she said, "were unacceptable to us because they would have been unacceptable to the community." The board asked to review all the applications of serious candidates, not just those on the search firm's short list.

Comments

[Wanyee Francis-Babitsky]

I am the Chair of San Francisco Unified School District Community Advisory Committe for Special Education (CAC for Sp Ed). It is extremely important for SFUSD to have a superintendent who is familiar with issues concerning students with disabilities and who promotes inclusion programs (that is including disabled students in the general education classroom). Therefore, the participation of CAC for Sp Ed in the interviewing processing for our future superintendent is necessary.

[Caroline Grannan]

All the charter proposals before the SFUSD BOE this year came with $450,000 startup cash from the state (which hands money out indiscriminately to anyone who wants to start a charter). The CES charter also had a mega-chunk of Bill Gates money. CES has been involved with schools but does not appear to have ever run one on its own before.