Field whittled to 2 to head residential high school.

Educators from Arkansas and Kentucky are finalists to be director of the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts in Hot Springs, a state-funded residential school for the state’s gifted high school juniors and seniors.

Corey Alderdice, an assistant director of The Gatton Academy for Mathematics and Science in Bowling Green, Ky., and Marcella Dalla Rosa, dean of students for the Pulaski County Special School District, will meet with faculty, staff and community members and students on separate dates this month.

Dalla Rosa will be on campus Tuesday. She will make a public presentation about her vision for the school at 3:30 p.m. at the First Presbyterian Church on Whittington Avenue.

Alderdice will visit the campus April 30. He will similarly make a public presentation about his plans for the school at 3:30 p.m. that day at the First Presbyterian Church.

The candidates were selected from a pool of applicants by an advisory search committee headed by University of Arkansas System President Donald Bobbitt.

After the finalists’ visits, Bobbitt will recommend a candidate to the University of Arkansas board of trustees, which will make the final hiring decision.

The new director will replace Janet Hugo, who will retire June 30 from the 203-student school that also provides distance-education classes for some 3,500 students statewide in kindergarten through 12th grades.

Alderdice has been an assistant director at The Gatton Academy, responsible for the school’s admissions and public relations, since 2007. Before that he was the school’s planning coordinator and assisted with recruitment and curriculum development as the academy was being established.

Additionally, Alderdice for nine years has been owner and publisher of SpeechGeek and Speechgeek Market, which provides literature and coaching resources for high school speech and debate programs.

He is a former director of residence life and a former residential counselor at Western Kentucky University’s Center for Gifted Studies. He also was an adjunct instructor at that university, as well as a camp instructor at the university’s Summer Forensic Institute.

Alderdice is seeking a doctoral degree in postsecondary education leadership through Western Kentucky University. He has a master’s degree in English literature and a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and religious studies, both from Western Kentucky University.

Before rejoining the Pulaski County Special district to be student dean in 2009, Dalla Rosa held leadership positions — including superintendent for four years and curriculum director/middle school principal — at the Arkansas School for the Deaf. The School for the Deaf in Little Rock is a state-funded residential school.

From 1987-97, Dalla Rosa was facilitator for the hearing impaired in the Pulaski County Special district. During that time, she also worked as a staff development instructor and a teacher for home-bound students in the district.

Dalla Rosa began her career as a teacher for the hearing impaired in the Muldrow, Okla., public schools.

Dalla Rosa holds an ED.D. in educational administration from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, a master’s in school counseling from the University of Central Arkansas and a Bachelor of Science degree in deaf education from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, which she received in 1981.

The advisory search committee had identified a third finalist, Matthew Frederickson, director of curriculum and fine arts coordinator in the Rockwood, Mo., School District for the director job, but he withdrew his name from consideration late last week.