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Date: 12/26/2023
AMHERST — With an eye on a July 2024 installation for a new, permanent superintendent, the Joint Union 26 and Amherst-Pelham Regional School Committees are furthering that pursuit by seating a 20-member search group whose role will be to recommend candidate finalists to the joint committees.
The new superintendent will succeed Michael Morris, who resigned in August in a mutual agreement with the joint committee during the Title IX investigation into allegations of harassment and mistreatment of LGBTQIA+ students at the middle school.
School District Finance Manager Douglas Slaughter has been serving as interim superintendent since Morris’ departure.
Joint Committee Member Jennifer Shiao is also on the Subcommittee for a New Superintendent, a group tasked with conducting research and offering recommendations to the joint committee, which will ultimately select the next superintendent.
“My plan and my hope and my goal is to have an open and transparent search process for the superintendent position,” she said.
Shiao said when seated, the newly formed search committee will be made up of a diverse group of people from all backgrounds and identities, including race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender and socio-economic background.
“[The search committee will be] made up of community members, school staff, high school students and people from all walks of life,” she said.
Acknowledging that a 20- member committee is on the large side, Shiao said the joint committees wanted to, “err on the side of the side of inclusivity and diversity.”
The primary function of the search committee will be to look at all inquiries for the position, meaning anyone completing an application will be reviewed by the search committee.
“Their job will be to go through the applications, choose a number of applicants to interview, to do like an initial, virtual screening interview and then among those interviews, select a number of finalists,” Shiao said.
Those finalists will then be forwarded to the joint committees, who by state law, have the ultimate decision-making power over hiring. The finalists will then participate in interviews, public forums and site visits as the selection process continues.
Nebraska based McPherson & Jacobson, an executive search firm who were engaged by the joint committees at the beginning of December, will be tasked with conducting the nation-wide search for candidates to apply for the position.
“Their job is to do the outreach to get, to find qualified candidates,” Shiao said. “The search firm is not going to prescreen any candidates.”
Shiao said the search firm with be working with the search committee as many committee members, herself included, have not been involved in a superintendent search before.
“The search firm is going to like, walk the search committee through the process of viewing all those applications, coming up with interview questions,” she said.
The firm will not have any power to prescreen or eliminate any candidates.
Shiao said the search committee, once seated will be self-governing and will decide as a group how they choose to operate.
“My goal is to have the search committee run in as democratic a way as possible,” she said.
Community members interested in serving on the search committee are invited fill out the interest form, available on the Superintendent Search page of the ARPS website, located here: https://arps.org/suptsearch/.