SAN BENITO — For weeks, the school board’s majority planned to hire the Texas Association of School Boards to launch a $7,800 national search for the district’s next superintendent.
Now, trustees are shifting course, opening up the job to other search firms.
Meanwhile, board member Ariel Cruz is concerned the board might be running out of time to hire a superintendent by August’s start of the new school year.
As discussions opened last month, she and board member Orlando Lopez said they wanted to contract a professional search firm.
Earlier this week, board members held back plans to hire TASB, agreeing to request proposals from other search firms to help them land the best candidate for the district’s top job.
“In talking to other board members and in our discussions that we’ve had, I know there’s been some concern raised just verbally in reference to are there any other consulting services that could possibly help us with our future superintendent search and, so with that said, I want to propose that we don’t vote at this time on going ahead and approving (TASB) but rather reach out to other consulting services to see what they have to offer and then make that comparison and then finally come to a vote,” board President Ramiro Moreno said during Tuesday’s meeting, adding trustees Oscar Medrano and Mario Silva had proposed hiring TASB for the job.
“I’m not saying that we will not go with TASB,” Moreno said. “There was a couple of board members that mentioned other potential services that we could reach out to.”
Opening options
During discussions, board member Janie Lopez said she wanted to open up the job to other search firms.
“I know that TASB provides a lot of the services for us and I don’t want it to look like it’s a monopoly and we’re just getting everything from TASB and if we have other opportunities to see what other firms are out there in the community that we can utilize, I think that that would be great,” she said. “We need to be very thorough and that’s why I think we should wait and not rush on anything and see which is the best company.”
Questioning timeline
Meanwhile, Cruz questioned whether shifting course would give the board enough time to hire a superintendent to help start the new school year in August.
“Why didn’t we start looking at these different options a month ago?” she asked. “Because of the timeline that we have to get a new superintendent, I would like us to focus to not be wasteful on time, to be thorough enough that when we start the school year we start off fresh and that we have everything in place.”
But Moreno told Cruz the board had no timeline in which to conduct its search for a superintendent.
“We don’t have a timeline,” he said. “At this time, there is not a timeline.”
TASB’s proposal
Last week, Marian Strauss, TASB’s consultant, offered trustees a three- to four-month timeline in which to conduct a $7,800 national search for a superintendent.
During her presentation, she described TASB as the state’s “most experienced” search firm, part of a national network of sister organizations and “the only firm with professional working knowledge of all the superintendents throughout the state and the up-and-coming central office administrators.”
As part of its search, she said, the district’s web page would open up to confidential input from within the district and community to include “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.”
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 past Superintendent Nate Carman was hired, Orlando 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.
