School boards, even this early in the school year, are beginning to appraise their situation regarding June retirements of senior personnel.
Seeking excellence in leadership is a primary responsibility for school trustees, and finding it gets tougher as the year proceeds.
The first question is whether to recruit outside the district as well as inside. That can make all the difference for a school district for years.
A wise old superintendent once told me that recruiting from inside is one of the worst experiences a district endures.
Why? “You line up your best and brightest and then disappoint them all except one ungrateful [expletive deleted] who gets the job.”
The education business, like any business, has its own career ladder and, while teaching for 35 years is probably the toughest calling within the profession, many teachers look to advancement as the opportunity to take on different responsibilities as vice-principals, principals, directors and superintendents.
Finding the right people is becoming an art form.
The first step is to identify the best internal candidates. These are usually people who already exert natural informal leadership. They are usually excellent classroom teachers who already take on additional professional responsibilities: coaching, leadership on curriculum committees or as organizers of school events.
They do these things not as stepping stones to promotion, but because of their commitment to kids.
Taking those teachers out of the classroom and promoting them into an administrative job seems counterproductive. But these inside candidates are well known, warts and all, through direct experience and that counts for something.
At the same time, outside candidates provide an opportunity to bring in new approaches and ideas.
One significant difficulty for Vancouver Island and Lower Mainland school districts in recruiting leadership excellence from elsewhere is the relatively high cost of real estate here. Unlike a privately owned company, school districts are not in a position to provide incentives to help with this differential.
Again, should the best candidate be from another district, there is a good chance that the candidate’s spouse is also an educator who can’t consider a move because the recruiting school district, owing to seniority hiring requirements, will not be able to offer employment to the spouse.
Most people these days can’t give up half the family income in pursuit of a promotion.
There is one more hitch.
Going outside implies the necessity to rely on third-party reference checks. Breathes there a human-resources recruiter who has not been bitten at least once by a dodgy reference from a source anxious to see a problem employee seek new horizons to darken?
As a recruiter, I always asked candidates if I could check with co-workers and senior staff not quoted as referees. A “no” raised doubts in my mind.
Finally, there are exceptional candidates who have made the short list with thoroughly vetted references and demonstrated experience but do not interview as well as the candidate who is riskier but could sell water to a drowning man.
Sorting out the right candidate from those who are qualified to apply for a principal, superintendent or chief financial officer position is a formidable task.
There are potential leaders who never move beyond being excellent administrators, people who never miss a detail, rarely make a mistake.
There are possible leaders who are detail mavens but are also excellent managers of people — they have demonstrated an all-important interpersonal touch.
The best leadership candidates will have all the above, but also will have demonstrated an ability to take a school district beyond the horizon to new places that will motivate teachers and kids.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
