SAN BENITO — The school board’s majority is planning to hire a state-wide nonprofit agency to launch a national search for the district’s next superintendent.
Earlier this week, the Texas Association of School Boards offered to conduct the search for $7,800.
While board President Ramiro Moreno said he’s planning to propose the board hire TASB to conduct the search, board members Orlando Lopez and Ariel Cruz have said they want to contract a professional search firm which would charge a “comparable” fee.
During a meeting, Marian Strauss, a consultant with TASB, told board members average search timelines run three to four months.
“Our price is very competitive,” she said during Tuesday’s meeting of the district’s administrative committee. “We’re going to advertise both state and nationally. All of our sister organizations throughout the United States pick up our searches at no additional cost.”
While Strauss described TASB as “the most experienced” search firm in the state, she said the agency’s “the only firm with professional working knowledge of all the superintendents throughout the state and the up-and-coming central office administrators.”
“We do more searches than any other search firm,” she said during a video conference. “We’re very proud of our record. We have a high retention rate percentage-wise for superintendents that stay on the job for three to five years and a high percentage of those that stay after five years. We have a guarantee, and that is, if your superintendent leaves for any reason within the first two years other than a family emergency, we will come back and do the search again at no fee.”
Community input
Strauss said TASB’s search would include confidential input from within the district and community.
“We’re going to engage your community,” she said. “We have a web-based survey that we will put on your district’s web page and allow your constituents to respond, so it is for the community, the staff, your administrators and even students can respond. After we close the survey, you will receive a report that will give you all of the responses that were sent through the survey to us, so you will see verbatim what people are saying, and we’re going to ask them what’s going well in the district, what their concerns are about the district and then what it is that they would like to see in their next superintendent.”
Digging into candidates’ backgrounds
The agency’s searches are aimed at digging into the candidates’ backgrounds, Strauss said.
“The board is in charge of our searches,” she said. “We’re going to check all the references that are there but we’re also going to dig deeper than that and make sure that you have the best information about the candidate.”
Strauss said searches include interviews with the candidate’s family.
“We have two rounds of interviews,” she said. “The first round is just with the spouse. The second round, if you choose, can be just with the candidate or you can bring the spouse in and actually have a dinner ahead of time and meet the family of the candidate that you’re talking to.”
Bridging the transition
After school boards hire superintendents, TASB helps districts map out their first 12 months, Strauss said.
“We also have added to our search a transition session, so within the first 90 to 120 days of your new superintendent being on the job, we will send someone (who) will come out and actually talk about the things that are really important to talk about at the beginning — what you expect from them in the first 90 days, what you expect in the first six months from them, what you will be evaluating them on after the first year,” she said.
Background
In 2017, the previous school board hired a professional search firm at a fee “comparable” with TASB’s offer of $7,800, producing a pool of 50 applicants from which Nate Carman was hired, Lopez said during an earlier interview.
Last month, Carman resigned to take the superintendent’s job with the Socorro school district near El Paso, with nearly 50,000 students.
Meanwhile, the board’s majority hired Teresa Servellon, a former longtime San Benito administrator and principal who previously served as the South San Antonio school district’s chief academic officer, to serve as interim superintendent.
