Candidates for Clark County schools superintendent cut to 4
Four of the 77 candidates for the Clark County School District’s top job will move forward to the public interview and community meeting process.
Gary Ray, chairman of Ray and Associates, the consulting firm hired by the Board of Trustees to help with the national search for a successor to Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky, told trustees Wednesday that his firm had whittled the overall list to “the cream of the crop.” The board voted 5-2 to move forward with interviews with four finalists.
The names of the finalists won’t be released until Friday, when the agenda for an April 13 meeting of the School Board is posted.
Ray said the size of the candidate pool indicated interest in the position is running high.
“That’s an enormous amount of completed files (applicants) for a district this size,” Ray said. “Some of the other searches around the country, if you do some research, they would be much much smaller, probably in the 20s.”
Trustees Kevin Child and Chris Garvey argued that more candidate names should be made public for the sake of transparency, and they voted against the motion to interview the four candidates publicly. They said a list of the top 10 candidates would be better, but the other trustees saw no purpose in that.
“I don’t understand why we’d name (more candidates) if we don’t have any intent to interview them,” Trustee Lola Brooks said. “Anyone who wants to disclose they’re applying for this is welcome to do so. They have that right themselves.”
Four people with ties to the district have made it known they’ve applied. It won’t be clear until Friday whether any of them — Chief Academic Officer Mike Barton, elementary schools Principal John Haynal, Assistant Superintendent Jesse Welsh and former interim Chief Financial Officer Eva White — are finalists.
Other rumored candidates include former district administrator Jhone Ebert, School Associate Superintendent Antonio Rael, and San Antonio Superintendent Pedro Martinez. Martinez did not apply for the job. The other two did not return requests from the Las Vegas Review-Journal to confirm they applied.
The board also slightly changed the schedule of candidate interviews, community forums and the date they expect to make a decision in order to accommodate a candidate who was overseas on a preplanned trip next week.
Three of the four finalists will be interviewed April 13. The final candidate will be interviewed April 16, and the board expects to pick the new superintendent April 19.
Contact Meghin Delaney at 702-383-0281 or mdelaney@reviewjournal.com. Follow @MeghinDelaney on Twitter.
What comes next
The following is a schedule of important upcoming dates in the superintendent search. All events will take place in the Clark County School Board's boardroom at 2832 E. Flamingo Rd., Las Vegas.
Friday: The names of the four finalists will be posted online at ccsd.net at 3 p.m.
April 13: Three of the four finalists will be publicly interviewed by the trustees, begining at 9 a.m. Each interview will be about an hour in length.
April 14: The three candidates interviewed April 13 will be available to answer questions from community members, beginning at 10 a.m., for about an hour each.
April 16: The final candidate will meet will meet with interested community members at 11:30 a.m. for about an hour. The board will interview the final candidate, for about an hour, beginning at 6 p.m.
April 19: The trustees are expected to make a decision in a meeting beginning at 5:30 p.m.
Meetings will be broadcast live on ccsd.net and the district's Facebook page. They also will be recorded and posted on the district's website.
The district also unveiled an email address — superintendentsearch@nv.ccsd.net — on Wednesday and invited community members to send questions they would like asked of the superintendent candidates.
