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The search for Pleasanton Unified School District’s new superintendent has officially begun after the Board of Trustees approved a contract with a search firm that will begin gathering input from the community in the next couple of months.
Board President Mary Jo Carreon had asked district staff to include the contract in the June 27 board meeting so that the community knows how the district will be looking into gathering feedback from stakeholders on what kind of superintendent they want for the future.
“I really think it’s important that we gather public information and we engage our public,” she said. “I want to hear from all members of the community.”
Last month’s board meeting was former PUSD Superintendent David Haglund’s last one before leaving the district so that he could spend more time with his family in Southern California — his final day at PUSD was June 30.
Haglund was originally set to stay on into August but when he learned the board wasn’t planning on following the district’s succession plan of hiring deputy superintendent Ed Diolazo to take his place, Haglund opted to exit earlier. Carreon previously told the Weekly, the board didn’t want to just appoint Diolazo because hiring a superintendent is an important decision that requires community engagement, which is why the board instead hired former Menlo Park City School District superintendent Maurice Ghysels as interim superintendent.
The public engagement process for the permanent superintendent recruitment will be led by Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates, an executive search firm based in Illinois that actually helped the district during the hiring process for Haglund seven years ago.
Jim Negri, a search associate with the firm who was a part of the search process for Haglund, told the board that the first step in any superintendent search is engagement, which entails gathering input from all of PUSD’s stakeholders.
Negri said the engagement phase would consist of conducting a community survey, hosting town hall meetings and talking with focus groups, board members and other individuals who would be impacted by a new superintendent. He said some of the focus groups could include middle school and high school students, staff and other local community members such as folks in city government.
He said all of that data would be used to create a leadership profile, which basically outlines the desired characteristics of what the community wants in the future superintendent.
Negri said the search firm would conduct all of that input gathering during the last half of August and the beginning of September before bringing a full leadership profile report back to the board for final approval on Oct. 10.
Now that the board approved the contract with the search firm for the engagement phase, which is estimated to cost the district no more than $14,000, a subcommittee made up of Carreon and Board Vice President Justin Brown will work with the search firm to address any issues leading up to the engagement efforts.
“The committee is to help us with the planning questions but all the decisions come back to the full board,” Negri said.
Trustee Kelly Mokashi said one issue she was worried about was that with there being three seats up for election this November — and with Trustee Steve Maher confirming he will not be seeking another term — it could affect the search firm’s plans to interview board members.
However, Negri said they have had a similar issue with another district and that what they could do is interview each candidate for the trustee seats separately in order to get that feedback. In order for that to happen, the subcommittee made up of Carreon and Brown would have to bring that up with the firm and then bring it to the board for final approval before the engagement process begins.
He said the engagement phase timeline is fairly quick and should be finished before the election.
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Talk to teachers, Kids Club people, teachers, CNS, custodians, SpEd staff, tech department folks, teachers, school district retirees, and people who work on school campuses to get authentic input. If you only talk to hand-picked committee members, the superintendent wish list information will be skewed.