What Does the HPISD Community Want From the Next Leader?

Max McGee and Jim Largent of the search firm Hazard, Young, Attea, and Associates (HYA) provided a look into the qualities the community’s looking for in the district’s next leader during a Dec. 13 school board meeting. 

The input was gathered during in-person and virtual forums and focus groups, a digital survey, interviews with stakeholders, including trustees on the board, and direct contact by phone or email from members of the community. McGee said HYA will have a final leadership profile report around the first week of January. 

Among the priorities identified as most important by survey participants were maximizing opportunities for increasing staff pay to help retain and attract well-qualified teachers and improving academic performance.

Parent, student, resident, and alumni respondents each identified ensuring college and career readiness and recruiting and retaining effective personnel as extremely important.

A preliminary summary of the top five desired characteristics of HPISD’s next leader includes someone who “leads from the front,” “emphasizes fundamentals and a solid, rigorous basic traditional educational mindset focused on academics, mastery of the fundamentals, and direct, explicit instruction with textbooks and a consistent curriculum,” and is able to “make tough decisions in the best interest of students” with a “passion for teaching and learning.”

For the full preliminary leadership profile report presented, click here.

McGee and Largent also outlined their role in the search process.

“The most important part of this process from our perspective is to listen and learn,” McGee said. “The second phase is to screen applicants, recruit applicants, track down references, interview them, do all kinds of background checks.”

“We facilitate discussions that the board has during deliberations, we will provide sample interview questions based on what we have learned from the community, we will provide rubrics, but what we don’t do is what we do not make any recommendations,” he continued. “We will present a slate of candidates that we think fit the profile well.”

Some HPISD parents and residents aren’t sold on the search firm, though. 

“As an extremely passionate and concerned parent and 20-year resident of Highland Park, University Park, I’d like to plead to you all and most importantly to this board tonight to please … terminate this contract with HYA immediately,” Tyler Beeson, who challenged Jae Ellis for the place 4 seat this spring, said. “We will you all to … listen and engage with this community much better than you have in the past for what we expect to be an extremely critical new hire of our next superintendent — one who comes from a traditional or classical background.”

Board vice president Maryjane Bonfield reiterated that HYA was only hired to help conduct the hiring process for the next superintendent. The board reviews each candidate and has the final say on who’s ultimately chosen for the job.

“We have hired Hazard Young to conduct a process only. I hear the concerns about the influence of a third party that’s not from our community on the candidate pool that we’re going to be looking at,” Bonfield said. “One of the reasons that we hired Hazard Young was because they have this process that allowed us to have that type of presentation that I think really accurately represented what our community wants.”

Bonfield added that she’s submitted names and invited the community to submit names to broaden the candidate pool. 

Trustees plan to begin reviewing candidate applications in February-March and name a lone superintendent finalist by April.

In other news:

• The board approved new course proposals for 2023-2024 including statistics “sports analytics,” Modern Media in the high school’s Moody Advanced Professional Studies (MAPS) program.