Group interviews planned for RCSD superintendent search

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Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates will conduct group interviews with stakeholder organizations this week as part of its search for a new Rochester City School District superintendent.

These interviews, along with an online community survey, will guide HYA in creating a Leadership Profile Report categorizing candidates into tiers based on their best fits. The current plan is for the profile to be presented to the board in late November.

The focus groups that will be included in the interviews involve a variety of groups, including students, parents, staff, nonprofits, religious establishments, governmental leadership, and others.

Notable organizations include Teen Empowerment, the Student Leadership Council, the Parent Leadership Advisory Council, the Black Agenda Group, the Center for Youth, the Children’s Agenda, Rise Up Rochester, Pastor’s Roundtable, and the offices of the mayor and county executive. A student and parent group will also be open to any individual who falls within that category.

The motion to pass these groups was nearly unanimous, with many school board members satisfied with the list and ready to adhere to the established timetable. Commissioner Jacqueline Griffin voted against the motion, voicing her concerns prior to the vote that other members, including Vice President Beatriz LeBron, were not prepared in past meetings and that Griffin herself saw changes to the group list.

“I need to review what is on this because there are a lot of things that have been changed and added and I am not familiar with what is going on at this point,” Griffin said. “I don’t think it is fair to me and others who are not here to just remove things without having a full discussion about them.” 

Commissioner James Patterson was the only absence for this meeting and did not record a vote on the matter.

LeBron denied being unprepared for the group interview discussion and implied Griffin was not prepared for the topic.

“For my part, I think there are commissioners who thought they understood the assignment and thought they were prepared for an assignment that they misunderstood,” LeBron said. “I’m prepared to support what was emailed to us, like Commissioner Santiago said, over 48 hours ago.”

This division around the focus group question is similar to other factors in the search process that are still uncertain. HYA notes show that the question of confidentiality is still split between board members, with commissioners Amy Maloy and Camille Simmons supporting full confidentiality throughout the three interview rounds, Patterson supporting it until the final round, President Cynthia Elliott supporting it with community representatives included in executive sessions, and Griffin advocating for an open forum with community representatives in the first round.

The question of reimbursement, which HYA says is often a part of the search process when it comes to travel or hotel expenses, similarly is divided. Maloy alone supports it for round two, while every other listed member agrees the third round should have reimbursement. (Commissioners Isiah Santiago and Griffin have no recorded response)

Residency was required in the opinions of Maloy, Patterson, and Santiago, with Elliott preferring it. Other commissioners did not have a recorded response.

Santiago also expressed a desire to consider interim Superintendent Demario Strickland more seriously for the position, based on his experience and expertise.

“Speaking on the importance of stability when it comes to our leadership in this district and achieving these goals, I’ll personally say that, the district and myself, has made a mistake going through a superintendent search when we have amazing potential right here next to us,” Santiago said. “They have proved themselves in three different positions and I know that decisions have already been made, but I 100 percent stand by our interim superintendent and that’s because stability is important, and I’ll also stand behind him as permanent superintendent.”

Jacob Schermerhorn is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and data journalist. The Beacon welcomes comments and letters from readers who adhere to our comment policy including use of their full, real name. Submissions to the Letters page should be sent to [email protected]

5 thoughts on “Group interviews planned for RCSD superintendent search

  1. I think Howie Jacobson raises a good question in the form of “What commonalities do RCSD or charter schools, that demonstrate high degrees of student progress and/or success, such as SOTA, the East High EOP, the Genesee Community Charter School and School Without Walls have that could be replicated at other RCSD schools?” Using the international, cross-cultural research conducted by University of Rochester and Australia Catholic University Professor Richard Ryan, on what school and teacher characteristics encourage students to become more intrinsically motivated in learning, several elements could be identified that correlate with Ryan’s conclusions:
    1. Students and parents have some meaningful degree of autonomy for choosing the kind of school that most correlates best with the students needs, interests, goals. concerns and learning styles. From this conclusion, the RCSD could be exploring the realistic opportunity for the creation of more thematic school options for students and parents, such as schools focusing on Law & Justice, Business, Human Behavior, Construction, Health and others, and which have real world connections.
    2. Teachers have the skills, mind-sets, and freedom to use student perspectives, such as individual interests, concerns, goals & needs to create student activities, projects and classes that intrinsically motivate students to meaningfully engage in learning.
    3. School administrators and teachers use negative student perspectives of school policies and teaching feedback to improve teaching and learning. For example; student feedback that a lesson is boring can be used to adjust the activity or class to increase student engagement. And, school staff responds to student concerns with positive rationales that encourage students to consider why certain subjects or classes could be beneficial to their lives.
    4. The school creates an organizational structure that facilitates positive staff-student relationships, such as daily advisory meetings, student decision-making time and student representation on school-wide committees.
    5. Student competence is assessed by means other than that of high-stakes standardized tests,
    6. Meaningful school-wide and classroom structure vs. control is pervasive, and
    7. Last, but not least; all school policies, classroom teaching and learning, standards and promotion/graduation expectations are designed from the perspective of meeting student psychological needs.
    There is no reason why the RCSD cannot compete more meaningfully with charter schools by creating a district-wide environment that reflects the Ryan research. This could include the freedom for RCSD staff, parents, colleges and universities, businesses and community organizations to cooperatively create smaller, more autonomous (with structure) schools that would meet both student and parent needs, but still be part of the RCSD.

  2. Is the current interim superintendent eligible for a permanent position? He seems to be well liked and doing a good job.

  3. The most important stakeholder is absent from the list—the city taxpayer. Taxpayers’ ability to continue funding the questionable success of the RCSD is never considered by the RTA, The School Board, parents, or the Superintendent chosen by the Board. With declining enrollment, an increased exodus to Charter Schools, and loss of population and business with a budget exceeding a billion dollars, it is about time that all these so-called stakeholders who are on the side of spending more and more taxpayer dollars need to balance the equation by giving much more consideration on reducing the expenses.

  4. Please allow me to repeat an earlier comment on the selection process:

    R – C – S– D = Rochester City School DEAFNESS!
    ————————————————————
    I hope the next Rochester School Superintendent is someone who realizes that DEAFNESS is a big problem in our schools. By DEAFNESS I mean DEAFNESS to problems and possibilities.
    Yes, there are problems in all our schools, but there may also be possibilities for solutions.
    ———————————————————————————————————–
    I created my own page: http://www.SavingSchools.org , where I list some of the problems and some possible solutions, in education, and in life, for my own use. RCSD can encourage teachers and school administrators to create their own web pages, to remind themselves of what might help, over and over, again. In this way, they might actually make some progress, right NOW!
    Why keep “reinventing the wheel” in our schools? Why the deafness? Thanks much
    —————————————————————————————————

  5. The history of the RCSD retention of a Superintendent is well known as well as the horrible graduation & learning percentages and based on the fact that the education of our City school children is not the priority of the School Board or Teacher’s Union, history will repeat itself following this new dysfunctional search.
    The article above that I just read is a great example of this dysfunction, even with a process that has been repeated over and over again.
    So here is an alternative solution. Do NOT hire a new superintendent! STOP THE SEARCH!
    Let’s have the School Board, the Community Focus groups, the organization hired to find a superintendent spend the time INTERVIEWING the programs that are producing positive graduation results and positive learning results. Here are two examples > Charter Schools and Work Scholarship Connection. I am not saying these are perfect programing models nor the only ones but there is no denying these 2 produce better results for City students than RCSD.
    To School Board members = stop looking at these programs as ‘competitors’! They were designed and put in place to serve as TEMPORARY creative instruction that would be used by RCSD to spur improvement! Obviously, RCSD forgot the purpose since over the last 30 years, both programs have produced creative instruction THAT WORKS and RCSD has failed to learn from these approaches — and by not accepting what is working, failed our children.
    Now I say to Cynthia Elliot, who this morning said on Evan Dawson’s WXXI radio show that she does not want Charter Schools to continue, ‘Cynthia, you need to look at the reality of the benefits of Charter schools creative approaches and the demand from parents to leave the RCSD system. Currently 9,000 of the districts 21,000 students are in Charters and 10,000 on Charter waiting lists!’ The RCSD can talk all they want about why they ‘dislike’ charters but they are educating our students! And Charters only receive 2/3 of the funding per student! ( Yes, Charters have some differences but they have mostly the same student profiles as RCSD And NO they do not cherry pick students!).
    So, STOP THE SEARCH! And look at the good programs that are RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU!

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