After firing a 34 year veteran of our District, the School Board hired a new Superintendent without any search and without any current resume on file. The story of this school district is quite amazing. I’ve tried to chronicle it at colliercountyblog.blogspot.com with backup documentation at my personal site.

I am also curious by nature and upon checking the credentials of our new Superintendent became quite concerned. He had never taught in a public classroom. In 4 short years he went from a middle school guidance counselor to Superintendent. He even had numerous negative articles about him in NY Times and other National publications.

For the past year we have been embroiled in lawsuits, controversy, protests and facing the possible loss of our district accreditation due to the School Boards actions.

The more I dug into the events the more I came to realize this is a National issue. Some recruitment firms are actively marketing “non-traditional” Superintendent candidates. I have since been writing to State officials asking them to support legislation mandating minimum continuing education requirements for School Board members as well as minimum requirements for Superintendents.

I almost started crying to see a journalist who actually cared and is willing to go the extra mile to serve the public. Thank you.

Washington State has more than 300 exemptions for executive session. They go from reasonable to ridiculous. The board also does not have to record, in any fashion, any part of the executive session. They do not have to give notice that they are going into executive session, so if it’s outside of a school board meeting, I’ll never know.

The board in that Wired Journalists post ended up selecting a superintendent in less than a month. It turned out to be the woman I thought it would be, she was assistant superintendent after all. But they said at the meeting that there were “two very qualified candidates” that they interviewed for the post. WTF? I thought if they interviewed anyone it would be public?

This goes back to the post I made that education reporters need more training (you made one also IIRC).

Once we found out the finalists, I think my editors were prepared to send me, within a reasonable distance, to the community the candidate belonged to. But it’s hard to do that when we have no idea who they are.

I was managing editor/”editor-elect” of my college paper when they named a new president — in the middle of exam week! With less than 24 hours notice a “finalist” would be introduced! (Only one finalist, btw.)

The then editor and I were actually at breakfast with our ethics prof when we got the news a new president would be named. (It had been announced ONLY in a faculty e-mail that a finalist would be introduced.) We had finished production for the semester and our next issue wasn’t out for nearly a month. But damned if we’d be scooped on that!

So, with about a dozen staffers still left on campus, we all pretty much abandoned our exams and got to work on cracking who he/she would be. Once we were confident enough with our name, we broke it online and then we put a photog and reporter on a plane to Louisiana (from Ohio) to find out who the heck the guy was. We put out an extra edition the day he was announced and a second extra the day following with more perspective and reaction. Every other paper in the region was quoting our paper on the name.

Seriously, it was amazing journalism. In fact, I’m excited just thinking about how much fun it was. But still… not cool. I lost my 4.0 that semester. But, it was worth it. ;)

San Jose State University just got a new president (I was the online editor for the paper there at the time) so I can relate to your frustrations. The only public meeting to get input from the community was during winter break, so no students were around to participate and the paper was not being published. Then they waited to announce their decision on the day before finals started, after the paper had finished publishing for the semester and when students were too busy to pay attention anyway. (Some of us on the paper gave up our study time to do a special issue.) Luckily, they did announce the three finalists a few weeks before the semester ended, so we at least were able to do some research on them and talk to them when they visited the campus.

I agree that public institutions need to be more open, especially when they are spending students’ fees and tax money.