Consultants to aid in a search for a new superintendent laid out for the Little Rock School Board on Thursday a process that calls for individual board member interviews next week, a March 5 applicant deadline and a selection of a school district chief before May 1.
The search will include a public forum in mid-February, a widely distributed survey and the use of multiple focus groups -- including district employees and students -- to discern what the Little Rock district is seeking in a chief executive, Debra Hill, managing director of BWP & Associates, told the board members at a two-hour session on the Zoom meeting platform.
Other components of the search will be the posting of the job on BWP's website and advertising with various education-related organizations, as well as personal recruiting at national conferences. A leadership profile, compiled from the results of the different kinds of outreach in the district, will be presented to the School Board for approval and ultimately be used to match applicants to the job.
The Little Rock School Board late last week selected BWP & Associates, an executive search firm based in Libertyville, Ill., to facilitate the board's search for a replacement for Superintendent Mike Poore. Poore, 60, announced in December that he will retire at the end of this scho0l year.
"This is a place where I would want to work," Hill, a retired Illinois superintendent, told the board about her research into the 21,000-student capital city system. "I think there is such potential here in spite of historical kinds of perspectives.
"This is going to be a fantastic search," she continued, adding that the BWP team "is ready to move you forward and blast you into the universe in terms of selecting an outstanding leader."
She said the calendar for conducting the search calls for the approximately six best candidates for the job to be presented to the School Board by March 17, in anticipation of board interviews of those candidates to be held after the district's annual spring break.
Hill and her BWP associates told the School Board members that Arkansas' Freedom of Information Act that does not exempt any job applications from public disclosure will have a chilling effect on the pool of candidates for the job -- even on the possible six or so finalists for the position.
Sheila Harrison-Williams of BWP and currently executive director of the Arizona School Boards Association, told the board that when presentation of candidates is made publicly "it actually hurts you."
"We look at applications but our job is to go out and find that perfect superintendent for you. Nine times out of 10 he or she is in a district and he or she is very happy and not looking for a job," Harrison-Williams said. "We are trying to coax them out, but it is very difficult" because those people do not want to jeopardize their current jobs.
"You want a super-star that is zooming in their current district and ... they generally don't want to do anything that is going to damage that very positive upward trend with their district and their board," said BWP consultant Darrell Floyd, who is superintendent in Enid, Okla.
Percy Mack, another of the BWP consultants, said "super star superintendents" won't take the chance, but deputy and assistant superintendents will gamble on applying and that their current communities will understand that they are looking for advancement.
Poore, who participated in the Thursday meeting, suggested that the consultants limit the presentation of finalists to two or three as a way to limit publicity surrounding the applicants.
The Freedom of Information Act and related court decisions and attorney general opinions do not exempt any applications for taxpayer-supported jobs from public disclosure -- even if the applications are collected by a private firm.
Eric Walker, staff attorney for the Little Rock district, said earlier this week that the district will comply with state law regarding the public disclosure of information in a search for a new superintendent.
Many of the steps in the search envisioned by BWP will be done online or on the telephone, including the consultants' interviews of board members and of the focus groups. The community forum will also be done using an online platform, Hill said.
The survey will be conducted through the commonly used Survey Monkey.
The board interviews, focus groups and the survey will center on four questions: What are the strengths of the district, what are the challenges, what are the characteristics preferred in the next superintendent and what else do the respondents want to share with the consultant.
Hill proposed that while most of the search will be done using electronic meeting formats, the School Board interviews of final candidates for the job should be done in person.
The BWP plan carries a base price of $40,000 plus advertising, travel and community survey costs.