Board sets up interviews
The East Baton Rouge Parish School Board plans to start interviews Wednesday with three out-of-town applicants, followed on Monday with three more applicants, two of them with strong local ties.
The School Board has not released the interview schedule, but School Board President Barbara Freiberg announced the interview schedule on Saturday:
- Wednesday: Kelt Cooper, Samuel King and Elliot Smalley.
- Monday: Herman Brister Sr., Tisha Edwards and Marie Pitre-Martin.
School offices were closed Monday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Freiberg said she wasn’t sure in what order the candidates would be interviewed.
The interviews are scheduled to start each day at 3 p.m. The candidates will have about two hours each to make their case. The interviews are scheduled to end by 9 p.m., but could last longer. The Instructional Resource Center, 1022 S. Foster Drive, next door to the School Board office, will serve as the venue.
The School Board plans to reconvene Jan. 25 to narrow down the six semifinalists to a smaller number of finalists, perhaps three, perhaps fewer.
The three candidates being interviewed Wednesday have made names for themselves outside of Louisiana.
Cooper and King are superintendents in school districts in Del Rio, Texas, and Conyers, Ga., respectively. Smalley is the deputy for strategy and communications for the county school district in Charleston, S.C. Smalley lived in Baton Rouge as a teenager and attended McKinley High School for a time.
Both Brister and Pitre-Martin, who will be interviewed Monday, have extensive local ties, and both are Louisiana natives.
Brister, chief academic officer for the East Baton Rouge Parish school system, has worked for the system for most of his career, and has several family members in prominent positions in the school district.
Pitre-Martin got her start as a teacher in Lafayette, served as assistant superintendent for middle schools from 2006 to 2008, and is now director of K-12 curriculum for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.
The School Board opted to pay for flights for the out-of-state semifinalists, rather than interviewing them remotely via a video conference call.
Board member Craig Freeman was the only board member pressing for a video conference call. He suggested the approach would save money on five plane tickets — the sixth candidate, Brister, is in Baton Rouge — and said the board has plenty of written information to evaluate the candidates.
But Board President Jerry Arbour said as a trial attorney he’s found that live testimony can be very different from written testimony. He said he sees a value in watching how people handle themselves under the pressure of public questioning, for instance, whether they twitch when trying to answer a tough question.
“That’s something you don’t see up on a TV monitor,” Arbour said.
The board has not said how the interviews will be conducted, but Freiberg has previously said they will be similar to the way superintendent candidates were interviewed in the 2009 search that ended with the hiring of John Dilworth.
Dilworth is planning to leave June 30 when his three-year contract expires.
In 2009, board members asked each candidate one question then members of the public asked questions.
In its original proposal to the board, the Chicago area-based search firm PROACT said it would prepare an interview guide and possible questions as well as candidate rating forms for board members to use.
Board member Craig Freeman said the board’s leadership is still determining what questions to ask.
He said he wants the semifinalists to answer at least one written question in advance of the interviews to gauge their writing ability.
Chris Trahan, spokesman for the school system, said Metro 21 is recording the interviews but may not be able to show them live or have them live-streamed on the Internet as he had hoped. If the cable access channel can’t show the interviews live, it plans to rebroadcast them soon after they occur, he said.
In any case, Trahan said, the school system has set up a YouTube channel to post videos of the interviews so people can watch them after the fact.
The School Board has set up a special website to follow the superintendent search at http://news.ebrschools.org/explore.cfm/2012suptsearch/.