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Sunol Glen School’s recruitment for a new superintendent and principal is officially underway after the school board unanimously voted to have a Southern California-based firm begin the search process.
Thanks to the Alameda County Office of Education, Sunol Glen Unified School District will not have to pay any of the $13,000 for the firm to find qualified candidates to replace longtime and beloved leader Molleen Barnes.
While the decision was made to move forward with the search, several community members at the March 12 meeting begged Barnes to postpone her retirement and serve in an interim position during the search — a process that many also said shouldn’t be rushed.
“I don’t think that we should rush into hiring anybody particularly quickly,” former Sunol board member Vic Cloutier told the board. “I think it’s in the interest of the community to have Molly as interim because she has a spectacular amount of knowledge, she can help guide us through this process and we can make the right choice because we don’t want to rush into somebody who isn’t going to have the duration of longevity.”
Barnes first announced in January that she will be retiring at the end of this academic year, after having served the one-school district for 16 years. She previously told the Weekly that she had made the decision to leave in order to take care of her mental health.
After her announcement, the county office of education offered to pay for a search firm at the school board’s February meeting. On March 12, the board was left with the decision to choose between two firms.
The three trustees chose Leadership Associates, an employment firm based in Glendora — located in Los Angeles County — that caters to school districts throughout the state.
“We do about close to 70% of the searches here in California,” said Donald Evans, one of the partners at the firm who will be working on the search. “We’ve done about over 650 searches and of course all of those in the state of California. We listen, we personalize, we customize and we cater to the districts that we work with.”
Evans said Leadership Associates focuses on the students as being the most important assets when it comes to choosing a new superintendent.
“I love doing searches because you get to find out a lot about the community, as well as the person that they want to be at the helm of the district,” Evans said.
Evans has experience of being a superintendent in Alameda County for 10 years in Berkeley and Hayward, which was one of the reasons the board liked his presentation and firm.
The other firm, which the board also really liked, was Nebraska-based McPherson and Jacobson LLC. All of the members said that while they could have gone either way, Leadership Associates was the better fit.
Evans said that the search process will start and end with the the Sunol community as the firm will begin with reaching out to the residents, distributing online surveys for a few days and asking the students questions about what they would like to see out of a superintendent.
“Our students are really why we’re here, and we like to include them in the process because they are important,” Evans said.
Employees and staff are also questioned in order to build a profile of who the firm thinks would be a good candidate for the district before they start blasting out newsletters that go to aspiring administrators and superintendents.
The firm then vets candidates before moving on to the board interviews and the selection process, which are both set by the school board.
The timeline for the process is projected to be two to three months, depending on varying factors. That length of time would have been the same with either firm the board chose to go with.
A number of residents expressed concerns during the meeting about the estimated duration of the process for various reasons.
One reason, according to former school board trustee Guin Van Dyke, was that it takes much longer to choose the appropriate person. One example she gave was Barnes herself, who Van Dyke actually helped hire alongside the rest of the school board in 2007.
“We had one year … to find the perfect, caring person for Sunol,” Van Dyke said. “A credential teacher, as well as qualified to be principal and superintendent, who cared about her school and not using the position as a stepping stone. I think it’s safe to say we found that person 17 years ago.”
“I want to reiterate to the board that this is your most important job and you need to take the time to carefully find that perfect candidate out there,” she added.
The timeline also didn’t sit well with others who said it was not appropriate due to the fact that the community will soon have a recall vote for trustees Ryan Jergensen and Linda Hurley.
Kelly Goldsmith, a Sunol Glen parent who lives in Fremont and is on the pro-recall campaign committee, said that she wanted both of the top two firms to address how they’d plan on bringing on a candidate into a workplace that she believes led Barnes to retire in the first place.
“I see nothing addressed by the firms to speak specifically to how they will navigate the extremely unique and difficult position they will be in recruiting candidates to a position that has been vacated earlier than would have otherwise been desired by the beloved administrator … due to overwhelming and unhealthy levels of stress as a result of the politicization of the school board and the resultant drama that it brings,” Goldsmith said.
“Superintendent Barnes is retiring early due to poor working conditions,” she added. “Any candidate considering this role is not only stepping into an especially challenging environment, but they also will not know who they will be reporting to if they accept the position given that two thirds of the board is currently under recall.”
However, one of the representatives from McPherson and Jacobson LLC said that changes in school board leadership during these hiring processes are a lot more common than most might think and that things like that shouldn’t scare off potential superintendent candidates — and if they do get scared off then that means they probably wouldn’t be a good fit for the job.
Trustee Peter “Ted” Romo at the end said that he agreed with most of what people were saying about taking the time to search for Barnes’ replacement in light of the upcoming recall election.
“If we choose to select a search firm tonight, the process must be slow,” Romo said. “It must be thoughtful, it must take into account all of the various people out there who have stakes in this process and it should not be decided on the recall election timeframe.”
He also said that Barnes is obviously loved in the community — regardless of what he called the board’s “shenanigans” — and having her stay for a bit longer, even if she didn’t decide that night, was what everyone wanted to see.
“The public here loves you, the students love you, the teachers love you, the staff loves you and so it would be an honor to have you stay on, if that’s possible,” Romo said. “Obviously, it’s an emotional issue; it’s one that you don’t take lightly and it’s also one, given the vitriol and abuse that you’ve suffered … that you need to think about.”
Hurley said that if the board waits until fall to hire Barnes’ successor, it would be harder to find someone.
The representative from McPherson and Jacobson LLC confirmed that running a search in the fall would make it more difficult to find someone to start in the middle of the school year as opposed to the beginning.
Hurley also defended herself in her comments, saying that it was Barnes’ own decision to leave and that she did not pressure Barnes to retire, which was met with laughter from the room after some people made statements saying that it was Hurley and Jergensen’s fault that Barnes is retiring.
“You can laugh,” Hurley said. “You’re basing your opinions on a bunch of spun lies. I have not been welcomed down here … I don’t understand this harassment.”
Jergensen chimed in and said that the best time to look for a replacement is at the end of the school year and that ultimately, the community will need to come together to find this new leader for the sake of the students.
“I call on my fellow board members and the community as a whole to come together to truly try to be united for Sunol,” Jergensen said. “To truly try to work together for the school and not continue to divide.”