Today's News-Gazette followup of the Urbana School Board meeting had a bit of an ominous lede:
Urbana school board narrows executive search firms down to 5Full article here. More on that search firm's issues from the Daily Herald article:
A school-executive search firm with a history of "mishandled" searches and a former employer of interim superintendent Preston Williams are among five candidates the Urbana school board is weighing as partners in the district's search for a new superintendent.
After deciding last month to bring in an outside search firm to aid the process, board members plan to invite representatives from prospective firms — including Ray and Associates; School Exec Connect; McPherson and Jacobson; the Illinois Association of School Boards; and Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates — to deliver presentations about their services.
The presentations won't cost the district anything, Williams told the board, and can be done in open meetings for the public to attend.
Suburban firm has history of mishandled searches for school superintendentsMore at the full article here.
A suburban firm paid to find superintendents for public school districts nationwide has mishandled several high-profile searches in recent years, including its failure to learn that a Des Plaines schools chief who resigned amid sexual harassment allegations in November faced similar accusations at his previous job.
Schaumburg-based Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates -- one of the country's largest educational executive search firms -- brought school boards candidates despite questionable pasts not discovered until ink dried on employment contracts, according to a Daily Herald review of the firm's searches.
The controversial superintendent hires have involved local districts in Des Plaines, Naperville and Highland Park, as well as school systems in the states of Minnesota, Michigan, Tennessee and Texas.
Hiring a superintendent -- the administrator who oversees day-to-day operations of schools -- is a school board's most important job. Picking a district's chief executive has consequences for students, educators and taxpayers, who in some of these instances funded the searches, then foot the bill for costly separation agreements when the hires didn't work out.
Yet despite the ramifications, the searches can be shrouded in secrecy, with few or no public records demonstrating what school board members knew about a hire or an accounting of search firms' work.
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