Community input helps create criteria for new superintendent; interviews to begin soon

The Northport-East Northport Board of Education (BOE) aims to appoint a new superintendent in early October 2023, with a start date on or about January 1, 2024. The district’s current Superintendent of Schools Robert Banzer announced early this year his resignation from the Northport-East Northport school district, effective December 31, 2023.

In April 2023, the BOE retained the services of International Deliverables, LLC and its consultants, Drs. Teresa Lawrence and Thomas Ramming. The board and its consultants gathered public input last May and will use a candidate profile based on that information to select the top contenders from the application pool via a closed search hiring process. With the application deadline on August 11, the selection portion of the process is about to be in full swing.

International Deliverables was one of four firms that responded to the district’s Request for Proposals and the BOE found them “exceptionally well qualified to meet the unique needs of the district,” according to the Superintendent Search page on the district website.

In consultation with Lawrence and Ramming, the BOE agreed that the search process would be transparent, while keeping in mind that confidentiality is essential to recruiting high-quality, successful candidates. To achieve this, and keeping with other Long Island districts such as Huntington, the board chose to conduct a closed search that includes “building a collaborative-based, open and transparent school community leadership profile among all district stakeholders that preserves potential applicants’ confidentiality,” according to the district website.

“A closed search means that information is held confidentially with the board. It is a preferred approach for doing superintendent searches because it enables potential candidates to pursue a position and preserve their privacy,” Board of Education president Larry Licopoli told the Journal in an interview last week. “In a closed search, you can attract people that can purposely and intentionally explore their candidacy in another school district,” Licopoli explained.

To begin the superintendent search, a school and community survey was posted on the district website and open to the public in early May. It was meant to gather input from all stakeholders, including residents with and without children in district schools, administrators, teachers and staff of the district, and students currently attending Northport-East Northport schools.

The survey concluded with 497 responses and a Consultants’ Report was created to summarize the input received from the community survey, in addition to information from 15 input sessions with focus groups that occurred both virtually and in person, and several individual interviews, including one with Superintendent Banzer. “Part of the reason why we hired [the search consultants] was to help us get all of this information from the focus groups and the surveys that we’ve done, and try to frame a candidate profile in terms of what the community has identified,” Licopoli said.

The consultants identified the following candidate qualifications to be most important:

• Expertise with budget development/financial management

• Improving teaching, learning and student outcomes

• Accountability for self and others

• Broad-based leadership experience, with previous work as principal or superintendent preferred

• Teaching experience

• Experience in a similar district

• Effective two-way communicator

• Visible and engaged in schools and community

• Able to prioritize and say “no”

• Effectively managing capital assets, including closed buildings

• Not afraid to take risks and lead meaningful change

• Innovator

• Integrity

While other groups did not highlight this qualification, the focus group comprised of students also emphasized that the next superintendent should demonstrate cultural awareness, and be respectful of and respond to issues relating to cultural and economic diversity.

Using this framework, the consultants and BOE will initially screen and meet with selected individuals who fit the community-designed criteria. The board will then interview all semi- and final-round candidates, and use the leadership profile as their “guidepost in the selection process.”

“Our process is that we are hoping to, by the end of August, debrief our search consultants and go over all applications. They will highlight who they think best fits our criteria and then we’ll have two to three rounds of interviews and hopefully have a candidate to present to the community probably by mid- to late-October,” Licopoli explained.

He also indicated that in a closed search, the entire board should be extremely confident in the candidate they put forward and will have vetted him/her carefully to ensure that the candidate aligns with the qualities outlined in the profile. Ultimately a new superintendent’s contract must be voted on by the board of education at a regularly scheduled meeting.

“The feedback was very rich and direction-setting for us,” Licopoli said of the community input via the survey, focus groups and interviews. This was the “upfront work,” he noted, and allows the consultants to go through the superintendent applications with a subjective mindset.

Licopoli explained that compared to applicant pools in the 1990s, when he applied for his own superintendency (there were over 180 applications), today’s pool is much smaller. “The work of the superintendent is like no other job and in the last five to ten years, it has become extremely complicated,” Licopoli said. The superintendency is a 24/7 job subjected to a lot of pressure, he added: “It takes a special person to decide that this is the way he or she wants to work and provide servant leadership to a community.”

When he more recently worked as a consultant for districts in Westchester and Dutchess Counties, which offered very high salary packages, there were only about 35 candidates applying for superintendent positions, Licopoli said, suggesting that the application pool for the Northport-East Northport position is shaping out to be similar.

He said that while the low pool of applicants, which is occurring across all communities, is concerning, he’s still confident that the district will have excellent candidates to choose from. This is a place for continuous movement and innovation, Licopoli said, and there are people out there with that mindset. “There’s so much about Northport that would be attractive to any person. We are a supportive community and we have the resources,” he said.