Principal hopefuls getting ready

Session with interview teams set for April 7 once field narrows

Lorain City Schools scholars and parents will get a chance to discuss the school buildings with candidates vying to become turnaround principals.

After the application process and interviews, candidates who have made it to the next step in the process will visit Lorain High School for a six-hour session with interview teams April 7, according to plans published March 26.

The information included an explanatory letter from Chief Schools Officer LaKimbre Brown.

CEO David Hardy Jr. explained the process in the March 21 meeting of the Lorain Academic

Distress Commission.

Lorain Schools had more than 73 applicants for turnaround principals, including 17 internal candidates, according to Hardy’s data presented to the Lorain Academic Distress Commission.

The school district administration interviewed the top 40 candidates. The applicants had seven to 12 years of experience and 33 percent were people of color, Hardy said.

Hardy has not disclosed who among the existing Lorain school building principals are applicants for the turnaround principals.

The principal selection process aims to assess six areas: instruction; talent; personal leadership; family and community; operations;

and school culture.

On April 7, interview teams will include a building union representative, a teacher, parent leader, a parent, a support staff member, a community member and a student, identified as the student council president, for the middle schools and high school, according to plans.

“School leaders share a tremendous responsibility to engage with a variety of stakeholders,” Brown wrote in her cover letter explaining the selection.

“As part of this process, candidates were invited to participate in a day long interview process,” she said. “This day was filled with performance tasks aligned to the various functions that turnaround principals will be expected to execute each day.”

Candidates also had individual interviews with central office leaders,

Brown said.

The applicants who made it past those rounds will be in the group of candidates who will meet the school communities during the April 7 event, she said.

In the Lorain Academic Distress Commission meeting, Hardy displayed slides that were tables to show “State Performance Snapshot by School” for the school years of 2016-17, 2015-16 and 2014-15.

The tables included grade levels shown in red boxes to indicate where at least 50 percent of the students were not performing at grade level expectations.

“So, if you notice, there’s a lot of red,” Hardy told Lorain Academic Distress Commission members. “I think about that pretty heavily, because if we’re going to make that change instructionally, we have to make sure that our buildings are led with those leaders who are able to change those reds to greens and to elevate the performance of our young people.

“What makes that so hard is because there’s a lot of hard-working school leaders that do this or work in this every single day, and the results just don’t match the effort. So, I understand that.

“But know this is part of my decision-making process around who the school leaders will be next year.”

Hardy set a May 10 target date to inform the schools about anticipated changes and adjustments for the 2018-19 school year.