Let’s talk about the Danville School Superintendent Search…

Let’s do an overview of what’s happened, what’s going to happen, and what’s not going to happen.

Let’s do a “Let’s Talk” Big Board…

• The Danville School Board made an excellent decision in hiring BWP & Associates as their search firm. They’re a national search firm that has plenty of Virginia experience.
• BWP & Associates will start the process with a round of “What does the community want?”. They’ll be talking to business leaders, school system employees and the citizens in a series of meetings.
• All candidates will complete their application packets through the search firm’s website. The school board won’t handle any part of that.
• The company will go through the candidates and recommend a slate of potentials to the school board, then the interview round begins.
• The interview round is where school board members will actually get to see who’s applied and qualified to the search firm’s standards.
• The school board will cut the field down to 2 or 3 finalists and will do a second interview round.
• The school board wisely chose to keep confidentiality throughout the entire process. That means that once the interview round starts, the next announcement will be “Here’s your new superintendent”.
• Here’s why that is the best way to do it… A) The school board was elected to make the tough decisions and this is the toughest one that they’ll ever make. B) There are plenty of people and groups that have their own agenda. They’d go on their own path and undermine the decision-making process of the elected school board. C) Candidates are more than likely be working at their own school systems and need the privacy to avoid conflict at their existing job.
• Whoever is selected for the job will have 3 months to establish legal residency in Danville. Thank you, Steven Gould for bringing that up.
• Whoever gets the job can start as early as January 1st, but it’s likely that they’ll start on July 1st because they’ll have to give notice on their own school contract.
• The cost of the search firm will be paid by the Future of the Piedmont Foundation.

There you go. That’s the blueprint for how this will work. It’s going to be a Speed Round due to the timeclock that’s ticking, but they can get it done.