Hiring Schools Chief Puts Many Districts to the Test

Laguna Beach, once considered a dream location for top school officials because of its wealth, strong parent involvement and fabulous seaside setting, has gone through two superintendents in 18 months.

Today, as the school board sits down to review the resumes of 41 applicants, it finds itself in an unenviable but increasingly common position for California schools: struggling to find a qualified chief.

You think computer programmers are hard to find these days? Try recruiting a schools superintendent.

An estimated 15 to 20 school boards in Southern California are looking for superintendents. A decade ago, each of these openings would have drawn more than 50 applicants; now the typical number is 30, according to the California School Boards Assn. Yet the demand is greater than ever, with districts cycling through their top officials faster. Five years ago, superintendents stayed in their jobs an average of four years; now the average is 2 1/2.

More educators with top credentials have been drawn into the lucrative businesses of educational materials and testing; and with school boards becoming increasingly politicized over such issues as phonics and bilingual education, superintendents in comfortable spots are less likely to leave for what could be a volatile situation.

Consider this: The Inglewood school board fired Supt. McKinley Nash a year ago. Three months later, a local election ousted his opponents, and the new board rehired him.

But Nash, like many other superintendents, says he’s out of the business after this stint. “There’s too many other jobs you can do and make more money and the responsibility is not as great,” he said.

The trend is nationwide, but California, with its low per-pupil spending, has particular problems attracting superintendents from other states. In fact, schools in other states seek California administrators, figuring that if they have succeeded with their paltry budgets, they have been proven by fire.

The difficulty in hiring superintendents has led a hefty portion of districts to seek the help of executive search firms--many of which are run by former schools superintendents.

“The turnover is unbelievable,” said Tom Giugni, the executive director of the Assn. of California School Administrators. “The job is becoming impossible to do and boards are becoming more and more demanding.”

In February alone, at least three Southern California superintendents were stripped of their posts. Laguna Beach fired Supt. Reed S. Montgomery after seven months on the job. The district’s previous chief retired under fire over a $2-million financial blunder. Sol Levine, the superintendent of the Beverly Hills Unified School District, was forced to announce his retirement after he lost the support of the school board there. And Simi Valley school board members fired Dan Flynn, their schools chief of three months.

In January, the Centinela Valley Union High School District in Hawthorne fired its superintendent as well. All the districts are now in the midst of searching for new chiefs.

But just as school boards evaluate potential superintendents, the candidates give a critical eye to school boards. And that’s where some districts such as Laguna Beach and Simi Valley may be in trouble, Giugni said. High turnover rates for superintendents may be a warning sign of internal strife or other unsavory situations.

Faced with such obstacles, the four districts hired an executive search firm for as much as $25,000 to do the recruiting. Centinela has retained a search firm co-owned by Bill Anton, the former superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Ten years ago, the use of such firms for finding educators was virtually unheard of; now, the state School Board Assn., which provides recruitment services, estimates about half the districts seek professional help. During all of 1997, the association was hired for 22 superintendent searches; during the first three months of this year, it completed 18 searches.

Right now, the association is trying to help the Simi Valley Unified School District, not only by searching for candidates but also by trying to resolve the bickering and dissension on the board that have caused the district to go through five superintendents since 1990.

Flynn’s problems with the board started at the beginning, when only three of the board’s five members voted to appoint him, instead of following the traditional search process. His slim majority evaporated within 90 days as the political winds continued shifting.

“It’s extremely important that a board be willing to work together and compromise on what a board wants in a superintendent,” said Janice DiFatta, the school board president and one of those opposed to Flynn.

Educators first began noticing a trend of politically divided school boards during the 1980s, as would-be politicos began using the seats as a springboard to higher office, said Wilson Riles, who was the state’s schools superintendent from 1971 to 1983. In addition, he said, the 1978 passage of tax-cutting measure Proposition 13 gutted the ability of local governments to levy property taxes and stripped boards of much of their ability to set educational agendas and programs. School boards then became a forum for one-issue candidates, said Riles--who now heads an executive search firm in Sacramento.

Before Proposition 13, “you just didn’t have people running as a stepping stone or to protect some interest in the schools or in the community,” he said.

Some of the board turmoil stems from a more demanding public, said Ron Brown, a former assistant superintendent in the Huntington Beach City School District who eight years ago refused a promotion to superintendent in order to take a job at the Assn. of California School Administrators.

Before, “you would ask the community for suggestions, and school administration and the board would listen and then they would ultimately decide,” Brown said. “Now, you’re having members of the public helping board members make those decisions.”

And the job continues to get tougher as superintendents are under more public pressure to improve schools with dwindling resources.

“People aren’t sure what they want the schools to do,” Nash, of Inglewood, said. “You have an underfunded organization that is a human service organization. The funding and commitment is not aligned with the expectations.”

Perversely, California schools’ financial troubles make the state’s superintendents even more attractive to districts elsewhere in the nation, said Giugni, a former Long Beach schools superintendent. The reasoning goes that anyone who could lead a district through such tight money straits can cope with pretty much anything.

“I know of national headhunters calling California looking for superintendents who would be willing to move elsewhere,” he said.

In addition, although superintendents generally earn $98,106 to $121,172, according to statistics from the National School Boards Assn., in Arlington, Va., many educators find they can make more money with less harassment editing textbooks or opening their own educational consulting firms.

Despite the hurdles, some school districts, particularly small ones in rural areas, don’t hire search firms because of economic reasons. Others say that’s a mistake. “If the relationship is not working out, it may end up costing them more in the long run,” Peterson, of the California School Board Assn., said.

In Laguna Beach, Montgomery, the former superintendent, intends to sue the school board for an estimated $300,000 because he said his Feb. 4 dismissal was unfair. The board fired him after a prolonged absence for medical reasons that are still unknown and because of job performance issues. Montgomery was recruited by an executive search firm that volunteered its services for free but that had never recruited a superintendent before.

This time around, the school district is paying nearly $17,000 to Leadership Associates, a San Marcos-based search firm, to help find a new schools chief, and, hopefully, a long-term match.

Board members also hope that using a recruiter will restore the district’s sullied image.

Said Steven Rabago, a member of the Laguna school board: “We know we have a selling job here.”