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The last time Springfield School District 186 chose a
new superintendent, the process was cloaked in secrecy. The top three
candidates, skimmed from a pool of 19 applicants, were interviewed in a
ballroom at the Crowne Plaza by a panel of people who had been sworn to
silence. A few days later, when the school board announced the new
superintendent, the unsuccessful finalists disappeared without a trace. “I couldn’t tell you who the other two
were to save my soul, and I don’t remember where they were from,” says Beryl
Feldman, who earned a seat on the secret panel by being president of the
classroom assistants’ union. Cinda Klickna, who served on the panel as a
representative of the teachers’ union, likewise can’t name the
runners-up. “I remember one guy, we all just felt that he
was not going to fit into Springfield,” she says. “He walked in
wearing all this gold jewelry, and he just seemed flashy instead of
serious.”
Feldman recalls that one would-be superintendent had
severe communication problems. “One guy was barely articulate,”
she says, “but I couldn’t tell you if he was the bling guy or
not.”
Given those options, choosing Diane Rutledge —
who had already spent three decades working in District 186 and was making
the next logical step up from her post as deputy superintendent — was
practically a no-brainer. “It seemed like a general consensus that she
was the strongest candidate,” says Sheila Stocks-Smith, who
represented Springfield Parents for Public Schools on the committee. Although no one disagreed with the result, the hiring
process itself left an unpleasant aftertaste. The State Journal-Register editorial
writers devoted their prime Sunday space to criticism of a selection scheme
so clandestine that even the number of participants on the interview panel
could not be revealed. “The board asks taxpayers to pay the
superintendent $150,000 a year. It ought to welcome the public in helping
to hire such an important person,” the SJ-R opined. Four years later, in 2006, Rutledge announced that
she planned to retire. Her contract will expire at the end of June, and the
hunt for her successor is well under way. This time, the process is bound to be different. For
starters, there’s no heir apparent within the district, so the school
board faces the task of recruiting a superintendent from outside
Springfield. To help lure worthy candidates, the board has spent $20,000
(plus expenses) to hire a full-service consulting firm and voted to offer
the new superintendent a salary up to $220,000 per year. But so far, despite the fact that the financial
stakes are higher and the candidates will almost surely be less familiar,
there’s no assurance that this superintendent search will shake off
the veil of secrecy that marked Rutledge’s hiring. Even board
president Cheryl Wise — running for reelection against opponents who
raise the openness of the superintendent selection as a campaign issue
— plans to keep the process private unless a majority of board
members vote to pry it open. “I don’t think an election is nearly as
important as hiring the superintendent, so I want that done right,”
Wise says. “If I lose the election because of it, then I do. I can
accept that.”
Springfield school-board meetings aren’t known
for fireworks. These twice-monthly affairs tend to be tedious, long on
niceties and short on meat, a cross between bureaucracy and a tea party.
There’s a lot of smiling and nodding and not much dissension. Tonight, March 22, the board will hold a special
meeting that will determine how the superintendent search will proceed. The task of choosing a new school superintendent is,
by far, the most exciting item on this officially nonpartisan,
all-volunteer governmental body’s agenda. For most board members,
this duty represents a once-in-a-tenure opportunity to make a decision that
has a meaningful and lasting impact on the community. To Wise, the
importance of the choice suggests it should be made in private. Other board
members use the same reason to argue for more public participation. “The superintendent touches lives in a very
personal, intimate way. It’s through your children or through your
job if you’re a teacher,” says board member Erin Conley.
“I think it’s really important that we make sure, as elected
officials, that this process is as open as we can get it. You hear too much
cynicism about closed-door hires. . . . I think we need to make sure that
our community feels vested in our choice.”
So far, however, the sunshine some board members say
they want is hidden behind a cloud of their own making. Ray and Associates
Inc. — the Iowa-based consulting firm the board hired to handle the
superintendent search — is exercising significant control over the
process. For example, last week, after the application
deadline had passed, Wise asked Ray how many candidates the nationwide
search had produced. The consultants wouldn’t give her even a
ballpark number, instead promising to present the information to the entire
board tonight. All Wise knows is that the search yielded “plenty of
interest,” by Ray’s standards. “In a way, it’s better for me to be just
like everybody else and to not know and not have to deceive others,”
Wise says. “That’s the deal. I’m fine with
that.”
Ray representatives didn’t return phone calls
seeking explanation of their methods. However, there are hints that the
consulting firm doesn’t necessarily encourage amateur involvement.
When board member Melinda LaBarre expressed a desire to do “site
visits” of finalists’ home districts (not uncommon in such
searches), “Ray and Associates were not real excited about it,”
she says. When Wise asked about revealing the names of finalists in any
way, Ray had a warning. “Gary Ray said sometimes that will kill the
deal,” she says.
The consultants did solicit public input, albeit
within a prefab framework. On Nov. 6, Ray and Associates scheduled a full
day of meetings at the Prairie Capital Convention Center, assigning brief
sessions to a variety of invited stakeholder groups and reserving two and a
half hours for the general public. Participants were presented with a
survey — a list of about 30 traits that would be desirable in any
education administrator — and asked to choose 10 of the traits to
describe the ideal superintendent for Springfield. Each board member also
completed the survey. Wise says this exercise yielded 89 surveys —
not a huge number in a district of 15,000 students. But LaBarre says the
consultant told her the low turnout was a good sign: “They said that
the fact there were not hundreds of people there to give input meant that
the public as a whole was satisfied. In cities where the public isn’t
satisfied, they’re there by the hundreds.”
Of course, the fact that there was less than a
week’s notice of these sessions may also have influenced the turnout.
“I think you need a lot of time, almost like a
save-the-date kind of thing,” LaBarre says. “They [Ray and
Associates] know that we have that criticism.”
The Ray team used the 89 forms to compose a profile
of the person they hoped to recruit. This profile was published in a
brochure suitable for distribution at conventions and was posted —
along with more than a dozen other announcements from school districts
seeking superintendents — on their Web site,
Rayandassociatesonline.com. The candidate described by the profile sounds like a
super superintendent: someone who “will inspire trust, has high
levels of self-confidence and optimism, and models high standards of
integrity and personal performance”; someone who can “build
consensus and commitment among individuals and community groups with
emphasis on family engagement” and who is “able to develop and
communicate a vision of quality education for the future to the board,
staff and community.”
But those three traits also appear on at least five
other superintendent profiles on Ray’s Web site (Lorain, Ohio;
Crete-Monee, in Illinois; Issaquah, Washington; Beaufort County, South
Carolina; and Community Unit School District 303, in St. Charles, Ill.). In
fact, nothing on the Springfield profile is unique. Each profile was
apparently formed from the same menu; different school systems simply made
different choices. Some of the items seem obvious — after all, who
wouldn’t want a superintendent to have “successful experience
in the selection and implementation of educational priorities consistent
with the interests and needs of students, staff, board and
community”? (That item is listed on Springfield’s profile, as
well as the profiles of desired superintendents for Lorain, Issaquah, and
St. Charles). LaBarre, who says she hadn’t looked at
Ray’s Web site, wonders about the usefulness of such statements.
“I think it’s a good list,” LaBarre says, “but I
would be curious as to who that would eliminate, because it’s so
broad.”
The fact that the superintendent search overlaps a
school-board election has added fuel to the debate about openness. When
board candidates realized that the current school board plans to choose the
new superintendent before the April 17 election — a revelation
announced last month in the SJ-R — several of them pounced on the topic as a
campaign issue. Bill Looby, the AFL-CIO political director and an
active PTA dad, running unopposed to fill the seat being vacated by Pat
Grady, issued a press release calling that plan “troubling.”
“What’s the rush? I don’t want to
implicate anyone, but it could be construed as being political if
you’re trying to get it done before an election,” Looby says. Current board members say the candidates just
haven’t been tuned in — that they couldn’t imagine
leaving such an important task in the hands of rookies.
“That’s been our assumption all the way
along, that we would hire a new superintendent in the first part of
April,” says outgoing board veteran Rick Heironimus. Board president Wise particularly wants to have
Heironimus’ input because Heironimus has been on the board almost 20 years. “I prefer to
have the more experienced members make the decision,” she says. But she’s not so sure about including the
public in the process. Wise, a certified public accountant who works for
GIS Solutions Inc., believes that personnel matters should be confidential.
“You have to remember, I come from the private
sector, not the public sector. What I’m accustomed to is privacy when
you decide to change jobs,” she says. “It will be interesting
to see what the board decides in terms of how we’re going to do
this.”
Back in 2002, about the same time at which the secret
committee was meeting behind closed doors to select District 186’s
current superintendent, the Champaign Community Unit School District 4 was
also in the process of choosing its next superintendent. In Champaign,
however, the process worked differently. From the beginning, the school board planned to
include public input. That requirement was made clear at the earliest
stage, when the board interviewed recruiting firms. Champaign liked Ray and
Associates’ reputation for having a nationwide reach and hired the
firm on the basis of its agreement to cooperate with an open process. “We really felt that the superintendent would
not be accepted if it seemed like a smoke-filled-backroom process. We would
not have chosen a search firm that was not amenable to this,” says
Margie Skirvin, the current president of the school board in Champaign.
“Ray and Associates wasn’t responsible for our school district;
the board was. If the board is convinced that openness is important, the
board makes the parameters. You can’t really let the search firm
decide for you. When they go home, the community is who you have to deal
with.”
After the Champaign superintendent candidates were
screened by Ray and the school board, finalists spent a day meeting with a
wide range of community groups. Then the entire community got a chance to
meet the finalists at a public forum, where they were questioned by
representatives of stakeholder groups and by audience members. The board ultimately hired Arthur R. Culver, who has
instituted a similarly open process for choosing principals in Champaign
schools. Brian Minsker, president of Champaign’s Council of Parent
Teacher Associations, has become a fan of this open system. “We get
even more public input now,” he says. The process of hiring principals in Champaign begins
with formulating a profile, crafted not from a menu of options but from
scratch. First, administrators meet with the campus staff and faculty to
discuss the characteristics they want in a new principal, then they hold a
similar meeting with parents and the community. Skirvin says the process is
difficult but informative. “Since you’re not putting words in
people’s mouths, you really get more of a sense of what’s
important to them,” she says. The resulting list of criteria is used to screen
applicants who respond to a national ad, and district administrators
interview the best candidates. The top two or three are then presented to
the school community in a public meeting, where each finalist gives a
15-minute presentation and takes questions from the audience. Audience
members fill out evaluation forms, which the school board considers in its
final hiring decision. Skirvin attends these forums and says that she is
amazed at how the process works. “I have seen one person at one school be kind
of the underdog and then go to another school the same evening and be the
chosen one. It’s a fit issue,” she says. “At one school
[a finalist] is chopped liver, and at another you can feel the audience
being drawn to this person. I think it’s a healthy process, and
people love it. I think it’s gotten good results.”
Minsker is also a fan of the forums. “The advantage we’ve found here is that
the community and the staff all feel like they have a voice in the
process,” he says. “You get the community to buy in on
who’s being hired.”
The school board has cemented public input into its
agenda, beginning each meeting by hearing from the teachers’ union,
the support staff’s union, and the PTAs and ending each meeting with
an invitation for any interested person to address the board. “It’s not an insular little group
rubber-stamping things,” Minsker says. “They’ve embraced
public input because they’ve learned that you absolutely have to have
the support of the community to get things to work.”
The question of whether Springfield should pursue an
open superintendent search or replay last go-round’s secret mission
is one that members of that 2002 selection panel — whose number
couldn’t even be revealed to the media — don’t mind
answering. After all, who better to ask about a closed-door process than
the people who were invited behind the veil? Sheila Stocks-Smith, now the mayor’s education
liaison, didn’t like it then and says she abided by the terms only
because that was the only way to be allowed on the committee. “At the
time, I questioned that in front of everyone,” she says. “I
think you need what we did but something else as well — an
opportunity for the public to meet the candidates in some
fashion.”
Beryl Feldman, still working in District 186 as an
assistant in a kindergarten classroom — and who took her vow of
silence so seriously that she never even told her own husband about the
final interviews — has a few misgivings about adding the hoi polloi to the mix but is open to the
idea of a public forum featuring finalists. “When you get too much input from just anybody,
I think it confuses the matter a little bit,” she says. “I
think I would kind of do what they did in Champaign, where, once the
finalists are chosen, have an open session.”
Dave Shipley, who sat on the 2002 superintendent
selection committee as then-president of the union representing District
186’s food-service and maintenance workers, didn’t even
exercise his right to quiz the finalists. “I don’t believe
people that much when I interview them anyway. They will tell you what you
want to hear because they want the job,” he says. “I’m
sorry, but I was president [of Local 15] for 27 years, and it bred cynicism
in me.”
Shipley, now retired, is equally skeptical about the
search for Rutledge’s successor, whether finalists appear at a public
forum or not. “When it comes time to make the decision, the
board is going to do it. By law, they have to,” he says. “No
matter what kind of input they have, the board’s going to do the
hiring.”
So even if the board votes to have an open process .
. . “It still wouldn’t be,” Shipley
says. Another committee member, Elbert Betts, approaches
the question more seriously. Betts was on the 2002 committee as a
representative of the NAACP, but he also had several decades of experience
as an educator, retiring as principal of Southeast High School. He
participated in Ray and Associates’ survey last November and hopes to
meet the 2007 finalists in a Champaign-style public forum. “I don’t think anything was wrong with
the way we did it. I think it was OK,” Betts says. “You have to
say, ‘We’re not going to do what we did last time —
let’s do something better this time.’ ”
District 186 holds a special meeting with Ray and
Associates at 6 p.m. today, March 22, in the board room of the
administrative center, 1900 W. Monroe St.
Contact Dusty Rhodes at drhodes@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Mar 15-21, 2007.
