As our Board of Education continues on its path to completing the District 38 2024 Superintendent Search, we are committed to staying in contact with you.
In January, we informed you about a rough timeline, promising to follow up when a more concrete timeline, as well as opportunities for engagement, became available. With a timeline now in place, we are ready to share additional information and specific opportunities for engagement.
First, we want to re-share a bit about how we are approaching this search and dive deeper into who is involved. We deep-dived this in a Feb. 12 public Engage & Elevate meeting, that can be watched online:
Given the importance of this search, we have engaged McPherson and Jacobson to ensure we attack this top task in the right way. As a Board, we have ensured this planned expense will not extend beyond any current budgets, given we will have salary savings from the departure of Superintendent Somers.
Leading this search on behalf of McPherson and Jacobson is Dr. Walt Cooper, who has more than a dozen years of experience in our region as a Superintendent, both in Ellicott and in Cheyenne Mountain. Dr. Cooper has led several recent local Superintendent searches, with more than a dozen completed searches in Colorado alone. Recently, he assisted District 20, District 11 and District 49 in their search processes, and we are grateful for his experience in this process.
In partnership with Dr. Cooper, our Board and our District teams are fully committed to engaging our community of Staff, Families, Students and Friends, to ensure we hear your needs, concerns and beyond. There are multiple opportunities to innovatively receive your feedback, and we look forward to getting this decision right in partnership with each of you.
Second, we want to share current and upcoming engagement opportunities with each of you:
We cannot understate how important it is to gather the voice of our engaged community, and that is why we are starting this process with a community survey that has already received more than 600 responses. This survey is the initial way we will receive your feedback on selection criteria, to assist us in understanding what our community desires in this important leader. It is also the best way to engage as many of you as possible in this critical time. Please consider taking this survey by clicking on this link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/VTLHJ2S
As we move forward, we know there is a need to bring in engaged community voices to help advise us on in-person interview opportunities, and importantly on helping to design an upcoming Public Forum that will feature finalists, which we will touch on in the next bullet point. If you are interested in serving on this Public Forum Advisory Committee, please submit your interest by clicking on this link: https://forms.gle/4wUrg1nNW5LG2n3Y7. This will close on Feb. 28, and those selected through a random selection process will be notified via email.
Finally, as mentioned above, we will host a Superintendent Search Public Forum on April 4. Details and a location will be shared in the near future, but the event will be live-streamed via our YouTube channel. As part of this engagement, we will push a request to our community to submit feedback on our finalist candidates, and this feedback will assist our Board of Education in their interview process and ultimately, their decision.
Finally, we want to share our prospective timeline moving forward, understanding some dates may shift, and should this take place, we will continue to be in communication with each of you:
February 14: The job posting will be published online. When available, it will be linked from our Superintendent Search webpage, located here: https://www.lewispalmer.org/supersearch
February 21: The Initial Superintendent Search Survey will close
March 8: The application deadline for our job posting
March 20: Our Board of Education will convene to discuss potential finalists
April 4: Superintendent Search Public Forum
April 5: Board of Education Finalist Interviews
April 15: Anticipated announcement of the next District 38 Superintendent.
July 1: Superintendent start date.
We have a great deal of work ahead of us, and we look forward to continuing to partner with you, as well as keeping you informed through this process. You can follow updates on our webpage, linked here, and by keeping up with your email communications from District 38.