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At the Jan. 25 superintendent search meeting.
Someone with teaching and administrative experience. A strong fiscal leader and capable grant writer. Someone who supports teaching the “whole child.” A collaborative leader who is responsive to data.
Those are a few of the ideal qualities for the next superintendent for the New Haven Public Schools (NHPS), as raised by members of the Board of Education during a recent search-process meeting about who should replace the soon-to-retire NHPS Supt. Iline Tracey.
That meeting took place on Jan. 25. The Board of Education met online via Zoom with the search firm McPherson and Jacobson, which the school board has hired to help with the superintendent search.
Board members took turns reading from their list of desired qualities for the person that will replace Tracey, who plans to retire at the end of the school year and who has led the public school district — first as interim superintendent, then as permanent — since November 2019. Her three-year term expires at the end of the current school year in June.
Last week’s meeting was hosted by current and former superintendents from across the country, including University City Supt. Sharonica Hardin-Bartley, retired New Jersey Supt. Karen D’Avino, and McPherson and Jacobson search consultant Judy Sclair-Stein, who previously worked as an interim superintendent in Missouri.
During the first hour of the three-hour meeting, local school board members brainstormed ideas for the criteria of the next ideal superintendent. Click here to watch the meeting and keep up to date with the superintendent search process.
Asked on Monday about the immediate next step in the search process from the district’s perspective, NHPS spokesperson Justin Harmon wrote: “The next step is for the search firm to post the position statement. We will then create stakeholder groups to get advice from members of the community, including teachers and parents.”
"New Haven Isn't A Training Wheels District"
Ed board-brainstormed qualities for a new superintendent.
For the first half of the meeting, board members discussed their personal list of criteria for the next superintendent. The group then organized and condensed the long list of more than two dozen suggested qualities and characteristics to include in the district’s job listing.
“Your most important job as a board is selecting your superintendent because if you select the right person to lead your district, he or she will select the right people to work on behalf of kids,” Sclair-Stein said.
Before diving into creating the board’s requirements list for the next superintendent’s qualities, Sclair-Stein walked the board through the search process.
She said McPherson and Jocobson will host stakeholder meetings and focus groups with educators, parents, business leaders, administrators, and students, which the board will not be a part of.
The search firm will also create an anonymous survey to collect public feedback to later present a report to the board to consider during the candidate screening process.
“During stakeholder meetings we have four questions: What are the good things about your community? What are the good things about your 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?” Sclair-Stein said.
Board members then shared qualities they’d like to see in the next superintendent.
Ideas included a leader who is willing to accept and adopt new ideas, is a good listener who takes action based on the district’s demographics, is bilingual, has previously demonstrated effective work in a diverse school district, can assess and restructure the district if necessary to improve student achievement and development, can restore transparency with the board and public, and is an effective communicator of the district’s needs, accomplishments, and vision.
After listing off ideas from all board members, the group identified its common themes that were seen amongst the nearly 40 suggestions.
The team identified five major themes that captured the board’s desires. Those were leadership, collaboration, ethics, content expertise, and a commitment to New Haven.
“I really believe that schools are at a flex point and the old structures may not be as effective and we have more and more at risk students. We have more students that struggle with issues of certain regulation and I don’t think we’re up to speed on that,” said Board of Ed Secretary Edward Joyner. “And so we’re going to have to have some that can work more collaboratively to restructure schools so we can deal with the realities that teachers face in a classroom everyday.”
As the discussion continued board members also identified which qualities were “wants” versus “needs.” Mayor Justin Elicker suggested that having eight to 10 years of cabinet experience shouldn’t be a requirement.
“Certainly having a bilingual finalist would be a plus, but I would not want us to limit our possible responses,” Board member Darnell Goldson said.
Others said that the criteria list should be a comprehensive one to demonstrate that “New Haven isn’t a training wheels district.”
"Does The Community Trust The District?"
While discussing criteria having to do with ethics, Hardin-Bartley asked the Board, “Does the community trust the district?”
“There was a past experience with a superintendent that came and did a lot of dishonest things,” Board member Abie Benitez responded. “And so it created this cloud over the leadership and I think we just need to help people see that we are indeed a district that cares for everyone of our stakeholders.”
Joyner added that the “elephant in the room” is nepotism that resulted in “misappropriating funds to people without informing the Board, that has happened.”
“I think providing people who are not qualified to receive district funding, not evaluating programs that we fund to determine whether or not they’re doing what they say they do, and that’s a problem in almost every large school district, and in a lot of small school districts as well,” he said. “So managing the money in a way that’s transparent and having procurement policies and things like that are critically important.”
“That’s really a challenge and we need to clean that up,” Joyner concluded.
Hardin-Bartley highlighted the board’s consistent repeated need of a leader that takes into account stakeholders’ voices. “I heard stakeholders up to 25 times in different ways,” she said.
The criteria statement the board worked on during the meeting was later drafted up two days later by the search firm. Once the board comes to a consensus on the statement, it can take next steps toward posting the job position.
On Friday Sclair-Stein emailed a drafted Criteria Statement to the Board, based on the ideas shared at the meeting. Revisions were requested from the board by Jan. 30. Click here to view to the criteria statement draft.
In an email sent Friday evening by Elicker to the group, the mayor wrote: “Overall I think this reflects well what we discussed. My one concern is with the way bullet point two is written that may narrow our potential applicants too early in the process. I’d suggest language that is more flexible around experience – “Has experience working in a diverse, multi-cultural, multi-lingual school district.” (and not include “serving a majority…”) While it would be nice if someone had experience working in a district exactly like ours, I worry it will significantly limit our options. After we get applications in, we can still evaluate the wealth of their experiences to make a final decision. Also, is it being bilingual that is highly desired or being a Spanish speaker? If the board highly desires a Spanish speaker (and I can see the value in that given the high percentage of Spanish speaking students and families) why can we not say that directly rather than say “bilingual”?”
Goldson agreed with Elicker’s suggestions to eliminate the phrase “serving a majority.”
Goldson also wrote: “On the point of “multilingual” as opposed to “Spanish”, I personally do not see the advantage in having a Spanish speaking vs any other language speaking Superintendent. The fact is that the “majority” of the district is non-Spanish speaking. So I would fall on the side of not limiting ourselves to “Spanish” or “bilingual”. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I support not even including the “Spanish” or “bilingual” requirement.”
Sclair-Stein also shared next steps with the Board in the email. She stated that “we are in the process of starting to put Stakeholder groups together. To that end, we would like to ask each of you to suggest up to 3 names of individuals who you think should be invited to serve on the Business/Community Leaders Stakeholder Team.” She asked for those names to be sent over by 9 a.m. Monday. She said the stakeholder teams will have only 10 to 12 people on them.
President Yesenia Riveria requested the Board to not include Alders on the Education Committee in their suggestions because “we will be sure they are represented on the stakeholder group,” she said in a Friday email.
Spanish language fluency should be an absolute requirement.