D65 Superintendent to be Named Tomorrow
No planned changes to residency requirement. Also, we're doing the security $$$ thing again
According to the March 18 District 65 Board Meeting Agenda, looks like the new Superintendent is to be named tomorrow night.
8. Approval of Superintendent Employment Contract for the 2024-2025 through 2026-2027 School Years
I’ve already FOIA’ed a copy of the contract.
Again, like in 2020, this process was conducted entirely in closed session, with very little input from the community, besides a survey with the worst statistics I’ve ever seen.1 The Board will argue that this process is required in order to protect the confidentiality of the applicants, however I strongly believe the transparency needs supersede that. Even in DeKalb County, when they hired Dr. Horton, the process was the following;
Interview N Candidates in private.
Identify a front runner in private.
Introduce the front runner to the community and collect feedback. I think he went through 2-3 “town hall” style meetings with the community.
Vote on the candidate in public.
Also notable in tomorrow’s meeting - a budget amendment to increase the funding in January 2024 by $48,171 for security overtime. I don’t know the back story on this but the District has a recent history of cost overruns for personal security, including $50,000/month for round-the-clock security for Dr. Horton in 2022. It’s somewhat disheartening to see the District paying overtime in this fashion again as they decide which schools to close.2
Also in the agenda is a large set of changes to the Board Policies. Most of the changes are pretty boilerplate stuff to account for changes in state and federal legislation, but there are a few things that stand out.
The biggest is the addition of language permitting the District to retain substitute teachers for up to 90 days or more in “Emergency Situations.” This policy seems intended for the case when it’s the middle of May and a teacher has some long-term illness and the end of the year is near.
Either way, this policy change is in conflict with the Teachers Union (DEC) contract, which contains the language below.
Substitute educators shall not be used to permanently replace a full-time educator in a regularly scheduled teaching position. Any teaching position that opens within the first sixty (60) school days due to resignation, termination or the administration decision to create a new position shall be posted and filled with an equivalent time educator.
Notably missing from the Board Policy changes tomorrow and the agenda are anything to do with the Superintendent residency requirement, which is section 3:40 of the Board Policy, which still states;
The Superintendent must be of good character and of unquestionable morals and integrity. The Superintendent shall have the experience and the skills necessary to work effectively with the Board, District employees, students, and the community. The Superintendent must have and maintain a Professional Educator License with a superintendent endorsement issued by the Illinois State Educator Preparation and Licensure Board. The Superintendent must reside within the District.
So if the candidate does not live in Evanston, they will either have to relocate or there will be an unscheduled change to the agenda.3 We will see.
The Board Meeting is Monday night at 7pm. I will be there and make a public comment about a few things pertaining to Dr. Horton’s ~$10,000 fee waiver, which I do not believe the Board has the authority to do.4
I’ve asked the Board President to comment on this twice and received no reply.
The survey is amusing in its own right, most notably that the things the Board wants in a candidate are starkly different from what the teachers, community, and parents want. My complaint with the statistics is that their summation essentially weights all the responses the same. So the 7 Board members get the same weight in the totals as the parents, community, teachers, and so on. The survey gives me vibes of “tell me what I want to hear”
More to come on "overtime” - stay tuned.
It’s possible the contract may contain relocation terms.
I will argue that this fee waiver amounts to essentially theft from the taxpayers, the children, and the District as a whole. In exchange, they did their very rich friend a favor.
It’s difficult to not interpret another completely closed process as outright contempt for Evanston families.
My observation is that districts who use school board associations for superintendent searches (Evanston used ISBE, DeKalb used GSBA) are more likely to do the secretive interviews/final solo candidate. Districts who use private search firms are more likely to have more public processes. Ann Arbor, MI, which reminds me of Evanston in some ways, is interviewing for a new superintendent, led by a private firm, and had public interviews with the top 7 candidates this weekend. It was all experienced folks who interviewed- they know the drill.
My other observation is that the state board associations produce lower quantities of candidates and it may be correlated with recommendations to keep information about the pool private.
We had another district in Georgia, Chatham-Savannah- who has a lot of challenges and they had a ton more candidates than DeKalb, the 29th largest school district in the country. They used a private firm. Private firms have more resources and a larger geographical reach, but the whole process is more complex and nuanced. I do think it is fair to say you get what you pay for.
Again, just my observations.