The Wheels on the Bus...

The process of consolidating two small school districts is not an easy thing.  My dearest hope is that it will be like sausage when we are all done -- no one will want to see the process but an amazing result will come out of it.

The recent moves to find a superintendent for the district went poorly:  Instead of an open search, the board opted to privilege internal candidates.  This pitted the two supers of the old districts against each other and against a well-qualified and extremely well-supported HR director from one of the districts.  The school board put all three through a public interviewing process only to retreat to the position that they felt they needed to the two current supers because, by their contracts, we have to pay them anyway. Perhaps to mitigate the unrest keeping them would cause (there is great displeasure with one super in particular), the board intends to contract with the intermediate school district for a superintendent who then will hire the two current supers as associate supers...

I could say many things about this, but I'm going to restrict myself to three conculsions:

1) The unified school board screwed up in the process of making this decision but I don't think it was because they are evil.  In some ways they were set up to fail by the WISD (Washtenaw Intermediate School District) board who chose the school board for the new unified district.  The WISD put three members of the old school boards on this new board.  These people all had good working relationships with their superintendents and probably felt some loyalty toward them.  They certainly relied heavily on these two supers and firing someone on whom you have counted must suck.  FWIW, both superintendents did work hard for this consolidation.  Never once did they moan in public about it being the end of their jobs, though talk all along has been that there would be only one super for the new district...

2) The board should make a sincere and public apology to the three internal candidates.  They need to say that they went about this all wrong.  That they made a mistake in opening a search at all.  They should beg the HR candidate to stay and then accept it with grace (and guilt) when she does not.  The board should support our two current supers (as much as their individual record as administrators merits) in their search for the next job, because we all need to be clear that they are serving out their contracts and nothing more.  The bold, fresh leadership we were promised with this merger will have to come from WISD's Scott Menzel for now (I actually think he'll have some in him) but must come in a full and thorough OPEN search in 2014 or 2015.  And for what it is worth, I favor 2015, when we have an elected school board to run the search and make the choice.

3) There is lesson to be learned here and I hope the board and administration(s) show that they learned it with their actions.  I want to see a clear, detailed, and transparent plan for what decisions will be made when (and how) over the next six months, at least.  The plan the board voted on last night should have been proposed with the proposal to vote on consolidation back in August or in the moments following the November vote.  What has to be decided now?  What can wait?  How can we position ourselves to do the big things.  In other words, what do we need to do to take care of business for now but not tie us down so that we can't make the substantial changes we want once we have them planned out.  I suspect this will be particularly important to plan as we hire teachers for the coming year.  If we think the superintendent decision was painful, I can hardly imagine how hard the teacher decisions will be.

More on that soon...