The Nugget Newspaper - News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon

A significant time commitment and the burden of maintaining total confidentiality are being placed on the individuals who will join school board members in serving on the Superintendent's Screening Committee.

At their meeting on February 12, the three school board members in attendance, Chairman Mike Gould, Glen Lasken and Jeff Smith, unanimously voted to establish a superintendent screening committee that will consist of all 30 members who submitted an application to participate.

Final appointment is contingent on each individual's pledge to donate the required time and maintain confidentiality. Committee members will be charged with helping the board pick the new superintendent.

According to Betsy Miller-Jones, the Oregon School Boards Association consultant hired to assist with the search, a letter is being mailed to applicants this week explaining the board's expectations of committee members. At the time of this writing, one individual had already withdrawn from the committee.

Miller-Jones has scheduled a mandatory meeting for all committee members on Monday evening, March 5, where she will outline and explain the evaluation process in detail.

"At the end of the public portion of that meeting where I've talked about process, we're going to go into executive session, and they (committee members) can begin reviewing applicants' files," Miller-Jones said.

While reading the files, each committee member will take notes to assist him or her in ranking the top 10 candidates. From Tuesday, March 6, through Friday, March 9, committee members will independently read all remaining files. In addition to normal business hours, time will be set aside during the evenings for committee members to read applications.

"Each person will be expected to read every applicant's file," Miller-Jones said.

Everything members read must be kept confidential, and the paper screening process is to be done individually with no discussion.

"They (committee members) can't talk about it even to each other ... and they can't talk about it afterwards. They will be signing a confidentiality agreement," Miller-Jones said.

Miller-Jones has scheduled a second meeting for either the evening of March 12 or 13 at which time she will present in executive session the composite results of the committee's top 10 rankings.

"It is possible for some of them (committee members) to point out things about the candidates that others didn't see, and we move them around in terms of how we rank them," Miller-Jones explained.

By the end of the meeting, a list of about seven candidates will be compiled to recommend to the board for interviews.

Board members chose to appoint all 30 applicants to the screening committee to get the broadest possible representation.

"There's a certain danger to pick the friends of the district. There's some benefit to be had really to include people who even are your strongest critics and invite those people to get involved in the process and participate," board member Glen Lasken said.

"I think it's a good idea to have about as broad of representation from the community as we can to include anybody who is willing to put in the considerable hours that it takes to go through the applicant files, the discussions, all of the work that goes on," said board member Jeff Smith.

Staff, administrators and residents who have applied to serve on the committee are: Earl Armbruster; Paul Bennett; Leland Bliss; Sue Boettner; Terry Burke; Rob Corrigan; Tom Dumolt; Rae Anne Faulkner; Mark Greaney; Don Hedrick; Marean Jordan; Barbara Kamrath; Donna Layne; Bill Leininger; Peggy Lindley; Bonnie Malone; Scott McAllister; Kathy Miner; Mike Morgan; Rod Morris; Paul Patton; John Sanders; Cheryl Stewart; Mark Stewart; Carey Tosello; Jim Wysong; Mark Yinger; Mark Yoakum; and Kerry Zenich.