BRADENTON, Fla. — Manatee County School Board members hope to make crucial steps Tuesday in the search for the district’s next superintendent.
Board members plan to pick a consulting firm that will help facilitate the search and then set the timeline that the search and interview process should follow.
Charlie Kennedy, who represents District 3, says the board is working towards having a new superintendent selected and contract signed by the start of school on Aug. 11.
Kennedy says his top priority is to the find the highest quality person for the job that they can.
“It would be nice to have somebody in by the start of the year because that way you’re kicking off the school year with new leadership,” he said. “But the most important thing is getting it right.”
This is what Kennedy called a “compressed” timeline — given the search two years ago that netted Dr. Jason Wysong as the superintendent — took between seven to eight months.
Wysong kept the top spot for just shy of two school years, before the school board voted 3-2 to terminate his contract last month.
His termination agreement states he will be employed with the district through mid-August but only as an “Administrative Transitional Consultant."
Manatee County has struggled to find stability with superintendents over the last 12 years. Between 2013 through 2018, both Rick Mills and Diana Greene only stayed for a few years each. In 2018, the district decided to forgo a nationwide search instead hiring Deputy Superintendent Cynthia Saunders to take the spot. Saunders was serving as interim superintendent at the time and soon after she took over was accused of inflating graduation rates.
She then announced her retirement in 2022, and the most recent exhaustive superintendent search kicked off.
Kennedy says it’s important to him that the new superintendent has experience within the state of Florida, but it doesn’t need to be experience within the Manatee County School District itself.
“The Florida education landscape is just such rocky terrain with finance and education law and the culture war stuff that’s still bubbling out there,” he said. “So you need someone who can handle all of that. I’m going to keep an open mind. I just want to see us cast the widest net we can.”
There’s at least three consulting firms that have submitted proposals to head up the superintendent search.