School district mum on candidates

It’s a “very rich and robust pool of candidates,” Eugene School District Director of Human Resources Celia Feres-Johnson said.

But who exactly is among the candidates to replace George Russell as the financially struggling district’s superintendent is not yet known.

Not publicly, anyway.

The district will not even say how many have applied for the job that currently pays $144,161 annually.

Candidates have been promised confidentiality, said Virginia Thompson, co-chairwoman of a 20-person search committee and a former Eugene School Board member who led the search committee when Russell was hired in 1998. The search panel includes school board members, district staff members, parents, students, Lane Community College President Mary Spilde, University of Oregon Vice President of Institutional Equity and Diversity Charles Martinez, and local business leaders.

“The search committee did an excellent job,” Thompson said of this go-round. “Out of the pool, we’ll have an excellent candidate.”

Applications were accepted from the end of October through Jan. 4, and the search committee has narrowed the pool to a list of semifinalists that has been forwarded to the Iowa-based search firm Ray & Associates, Feres-Johnson said.

However, the school board has the option of looking at any and all applicants, even those who did not make the search committee’s cut, Feres-Johnson said.

The board will interview the semifinalists and any other applicants it wishes later this month, and the finalists will be announced at an upcoming board meeting. Finalists also will have an opportunity to meet the community, Feres-Johnson said. The goal is to announce the new superintendent at the board’s March 16 meeting, she said.

One candidate who applied early, South Lane School District Superintendent Krista Parent, said Friday that she has withdrawn her name.

“It was a tough thing,” Parent said. “I talked with my board about it and my heart is here,” she said of the Cottage Grove-based district. Parent, 49, was named National Superintendent of the Year in 2007 by the American Association of School Administrators.

Colt Gill, the popular 44-year-old superintendent of Eugene’s Bethel School District, said he never applied for the Eugene School District position. Another popular local school superintendent, the Springfield district’s Nancy Golden, also said last fall that she was not interested in the Eugene schools job.

Carl Hermanns, the Eugene district’s assistant superintendent, said in December that he chose not to apply, and is, like the 66-year-old Russell, planning to leave the district at the end of the school year.

And that leaves … who knows?

There are likely candidates already working for the school district. But Thompson said the committee has conducted a broad national search perhaps unlike any ever before in the district’s 120-year history.

The national search in 1998 was something of a farce, Thompson said, because although he initially did not want the job, Russell, then the district’s human resources director, was deemed a strong candidate who had been recommended by his predecessor, Margaret Nichols, who died of cancer in June 1998. Russell was named acting superintendent just a couple of weeks before Nichols’ death, then announced his candidacy in December 1998 and was named superintendent in January 1999.

Whoever is hired to replace Russell will inherit one of the state’s largest school districts, with more than 16,000 students, albeit one with declining enrollment. It’s also a district whose board just last week voted to close four elementary schools in the fall and soon lay off as many as 84 teachers and 62 administrators and classified staff members in an effort to close an estimated $24 million budget shortfall.

Last fall, the search committee said it wanted someone who has excellent listening skills, experience dealing with unions, a knack for fiscal management and the expertise needed to respond to the challenges of a diverse student body.