Some want district to use outside firm
you consider waiting until your next meeting, now that these names have been put out there, to allow for that feedback,” said Jeffrey Bennett, chair of San Diego Unified’s District Advisory Committee, which will have a member on the search committee.
Board Student Trustee Zachary Patterson suggested the board put up a webpage with answers to frequently asked questions, to better clarify the search committee process to the public. He added that the committee is a work in progress.
“It is really important that everyone can feel at the end of this process, or at least most people, that they’re confident,” he said.
The advisory committee will not pick the superintendent; that remains the job of the school board. The committee will choose 10 semi-finalists, and the board will pick three finalists.
San Diego Unified’s superintendent selection process appears to be an outlier, especially among large school districts, in that it is using an advisory committee and not a professional firm to help conduct its search, experts said.
It’s advisable to use search firms because they know which good candidates are out there, said Dan Domenech, executive director of the national School Superintendents Association.
Domenech does not recommend just waiting for applications to come in, because the board will miss strong potential candidates who are not currently looking to change their jobs or who don’t happen to apply.
“That’s not the kind of position you want to sit back and get applications for,” Domenech said. “You basically want a head-hunter.”
Some parents, union leaders and board members recently said they want to use a local advisory committee instead of a firm because they did not want to outsource one of the board’s main responsibilities, hiring a superintendent, to an external group that is not accountable to local voters.
San Diego Unified Board President Richard Barrera said last month that the board wouldn’t need a search firm because he believes the district won’t have any problems getting enough candidates to apply, considering the district’s standing nationwide and the news of Marten’s nomination.
He also said a search conducted by an outside firm would be less transparent than one conducted by a board-appointed committee.
Search firms have a lot of experience backgrounding candidates, including factchecking resumes and vetting candidates’ social media history. Firms help school boards avoid unwanted surprises, such as learning a candidate lied on their resume, which has happened before, Domenech said.
Several community groups, including Parents for Quality Education, ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties, NAACP San Diego, and the African-American Association of Educators, recently urged the San Diego Unified board to use a search firm. Some said they do not trust the board to conduct the search in a way that is transparent and representative of all communities.
Board OKs interim superintendent contract
On Tuesday the board also approved an interim superintendent contract for Lamont Jackson, the area superintendent who will take over for Marten once she is confirmed by the U.S. Senate. The contract provides a $270,000 annual salary.
Jackson will serve as interim superintendent for the rest of 2021. Several principals have suggested that Jackson should become the permanent superintendent, given his decades of experience as a teacher, principal and central office administrator in San Diego Unified.
His contract says that if he is not picked as the permanent superintendent, Jackson will “resume the position” of the district’s chief operations officer starting Jan. 2, 2022. That’s because, before Marten was nominated, the San Diego Unified board had already approved a plan to make Jackson the chief operations officer at the start of the coming school year, Barrera said.