EVERETT — The public remained largely left in the dark when the Everett School Board named a new school chief at a special meeting Thursday night, critics say.
The board disappointed those who wanted more of a voice in selecting a new superintendent especially after the previous administrator left following a death threat and revelations that the district secretly spied on a teacher’s classroom.
“As a citizen, I am outraged that this public body chose to exclude the public,” said Ed Glazer who lives in Everett and works as a district middle school teacher. “I think the beginning process for the selection was good but I think the ending process just stunk, to use the vernacular.
“This school board, this elected body, remained completely isolated and segregated once their so-called community input was done.”
School board president Sue Cooper said the board was simply trying to get the best fit for the job when it decided against picking finalists or introducing candidates to the public.
The board unanimously voted to hire Port Angeles Superintendent Gary Cohn, who accepted the post. A contract still must be negotiated. The position was advertised for $190,000 to $210,000.
“We realize that this is not necessarily the so-called traditional search and there are other ways to do a search,” Cooper said. “That would mean that we would not be able to provide confidentiality and there would be some key candidates who would not feel they could go through that process.”
School board members Karen Madsen, Ed Peterson, Kristin Dutton and Carol Andrews did not return phone calls Friday.
Union leaders said they didn’t know a new superintendent was going to be hired Thursday. The union and the district fought last year after the district placed a secret surveillance camera in a classroom while investigating a teacher.
That battle, between clashing personalities and district policy, cost taxpayers nearly $200,000 in lawyer fees.
“For this district, quite frankly, transparency should be their No. 1 objective,” said Kim Mead, president of the 1,200-member Everett Education Association. “The goal should be to be inclusive, transparent and progressive after the last year we have been through.”
Cohn was one of 20 candidates, including 11 from out of state. Cohn, 53, said he always tries to build trust in the array of leadership positions he has held.
He understands there was turmoil between union leaders and Everett administrators, but is confident he can work effectively with all groups in Everett, which has 18,500 students.
“In my view, that is in the past,” he said. “I’m definitely looking to the future.”
After former Superintendent Carol Whitehead retired in September, the board decided against hiring an outside consultant to assist in finding a new school chief. Cooper said the board believed they could attract a wider selection of good candidates if applications were kept confidential and there would not be a formal list of finalists being announced.
The school board went to great lengths to gather comments early in the process about what issues were important to district staff, and residents, in selecting a new superintendent, she said.
“We do believe in transparency,” Cooper said. “We also believe that in order to identify our next superintendent we needed to follow the process we did.”
It’s “pretty unusual” to conduct a search the way Everett did without deciding on a list of finalists, said Toby Nixon, president of the Washington Coalition for Open Government.
“It is not necessarily a violation of the (state) Open Meetings Act, but it seems strange they could narrow the choices to the point where they could make a final decision without making any intermediate decisions to narrow the field,” he said.
School boards have wide discretion in how they choose to hire superintendents. There are pros and cons to each approach said John Dekker, assistant executive director of the Washington Association of School Administrators.
In Everett’s case, the advantage is the wider pool. The drawback is that parents, teachers and others who live in the district feel they weren’t involved as they would like to be, he said.
A disadvantage of too much public interaction is that the elected school board members might end up following the wants of a vocal “narrow section of the community, perhaps a special interest, instead of an interest in the district as a whole.”
Bill Reed is a school district watchdog who has closely monitored the district’s efforts to boost academic achievement among minority students. He believes the school board was within its bounds conducting the search the way it did.
“I would have liked the process to be more transparent,” he said. “I would also say the board had a process it believed in and executed the process it believed in.”
“They got a tremendous amount of input from the community,” he said. “We elect them to make good judgments on our behalf.”
Glazer, the middle school teacher, was not swayed by the board’s arguments for confidentiality.
“Do they care more about the candidate’s concerns than they do the community’s concerns?” Glazer said. “I feel this school board has a massive credibility problem with this community and especially with communities of color.”
Cooper, the school board president, said the search ended up with someone passionate about education with a record of building effective teams.
“I believe it was the best way to get an effective leader for our district,” she said. “We feel the process worked exceedingly well.”
