SUPERINTENDENT SEARCH: 14 MONTHS AND COUNTING

Hamilton County inched toward getting a new schools superintendent Thursday when the board pared down its candidate list from eight to five.

Or maybe — now at 14 months and counting — we inched toward making Interim Superintendent Kirk Kelly the “new” permanent superintendent.

Although Kelly tied at five votes with another candidate, Jack Elsey, and then won a “runoff” vote round with five votes again, that didn’t mean that Kelly came in as the fifth and last pick on the pared list.

The school board has nine members, and in both rounds of voting, Kelly got five votes.

Five is the magic number. Some weeks from now, when all the winnowing is finally done, five votes will still be all it takes to name the superintendent of our extremely embattled school system.

What’s more, in the first round, each board member named their five preferred candidates in alphabetical order, so although Kelly’s name was last five times, that didn’t denote his place in the board members’ preferences. It only denoted the fact that there were no other candidates on the list beginning with a letter following K.

In the runoff round, board members were told they had only one vote: either for Kelly or Elsey.

So far, our very embattled interim superintendent has stayed in the running, and this is worrisome.

Kelly is a good man, but with decades of seniority in our system, many as the former head of testing and accountability, he is a pillar of the problematic status quo, not the change agent this system needs to help teachers and students rise above falling scores, lack of fiscal accountability and student safety lapses.

The board plans to conduct final interviews in early June and will host several public forums with Kelly and other finalists Bryan Johnson, Arthur Wayne Johnson, Stuart Greenberg and Timothy Gadson III. The board plans to name a superintendent on June 15.

Bryan Johnson was the only candidate listed by all nine board members in the first round of voting Thursday. He is the chief academic officer for Clarksville-Montgomery County School System in Tennessee. Before being named to that position, he served as the director of high schools for the district.

Gadson, Greenberg and Wayne Johnson were named on the narrowed lists by eight of the board members.

All have educational experience qualifications except Wayne Johnson, who is the founder and chairman of First Performance Corp. Before that, the Georgian was the CEO of Reunion Financial Services Corp. and a managing partner at Global Education Partners. He says he has a passion for education and earned his doctorate in education leadership last year. In an online interview recently he told board members he’s been successful in his career and isn’t looking for a contract, but rather a job where he can improve the lives of others, and he hopes that is by working in public education.

“The most important challenge right now is to bring stability to the system,” he said.

If picked for the job, Wayne Johnson said his business experience would be an asset. And he emphasized the need for the district to address the long list of deferred maintenance and to analyze the entire budget. He also said he’s good at finding talent, and his first priority would be surrounding himself with people who have strengths complementing his own.

That may set up an interesting choice for this board, since county leaders who hold the school system’s purse strings have signaled that they are not likely to allocate more operating money to schools — which would require a tax increase — until they feel more secure about the school system’s money management and business practices.

Yet the board is educator heavy and has often split its votes along educator/non-educator lines.

Gadson is superintendent designee and executive director of curriculum and schools for Robbinsdale Area Schools in Minnesota. From 2014 to 2016, he worked as the associate superintendent for Atlanta Public Schools.

Greenberg is chief academic officer for Leon County Public Schools in Florida. Before that, he was the executive director for Reading and Early Learning for the Florida Department of Education. He was one of the six finalists in Knox County’s recent superintendent search.

Parents: Stay tuned.