Hastings School Board partners with Minnesota School Boards Association as superintendent search gears up

The search for a replacement for Hastings Superintendent Robert McDowell, who is stepping down at the end of the school year, is in gear, and the Hastings School Board is taking swift action to expedite the process. 

The school board is striving to have a person in place by July 1, so time is of the essence. In the interest of expediency, the school board took unprecedented action at their previous work session on March 8 to approve a proposal from Minnesota School Boards Association (MSBA) to partner in the search. 

Board action is typically reserved for regular meetings, but the importance of finding a suitable replacement for McDowell, and the condensed timeline to do so, superseded the norm. Prior to the meeting, Hedin sought out legal advice to determine whether or not action items could even be added to a work session agenda.

Hedin was informed by the board’s lawyer that because regular meetings and work sessions are open-meetings, action items are not exclusive to either, and therefore they can be considered during both formats.

Anxious about the timeline, Chair Lisa Hedin touched base with the executive search lead for MSBA immediately following McDowell’s resignation letter to learn more about how the search can be accelerated. Knowing the steps that other district’s took for speedier searches, Hedin encouraged the board to kickstart the process by adding an action item to approve MSBA’s proposal. 

Hedin said she was told that last year MSBA assisted in 30 superintendent searches, with some of them taking place in March and April. In all of the cases, the vacancy was filled by July 1, but the spring searches needed to be expedited in order to do so. One of the ways those districts hastened their searches was by relying on an open 24-hour community input survey over the period of a couple days to gather feedback faster.

The school board is fairly experienced when it comes to an executive search, as four of the current board directors have participated in one for both an interim and permanent Hastings superintendent. Also, Director Mark Zuzek has participated as a candidate before being chosen as the 917 Superintendent. 

During board discussion, Directors Jessica Dressley and Carrie Tate, who have yet to be involved in a superintendent search, expressed curiosity about the process and MSBA’s effectiveness. They wanted to make sure that they were on the same page with the rest of the board with the proceedings to come and what they entailed.

Dressley inquired about the way input is gathered from the community, wanting to find out much they are able to weigh in on the selection process. Tate wondered if there may be another company that would be better suited for the board to work with.

To assuage their concerns, the rest of the board shared their own personal experiences and interactions with MSBA when they partnered with them in the past. Speaking on his intimate experience with superintendent searches, Zuzek said that the “vast majority” of the criteria used to rank candidates came directly from an MSBA community engagement survey. 

Vice Chair Stephanie Malm said that MSBA’s proposal to partner with the school board was far superior than the others put forth because “they know the idiosyncrasies of the community.” She felt like the questions that MSBA compiled for past candidates were well-representative of the school board’s values and strategic vision, allowing the board to keep their hands on the wheel.

“They worked with us to make sure that it was something that we owned, they were just there to facilitate,” Malm said. 

This sentiment was echoed by Clerk Becky Beissel, who said that the consultations they have had with out-of-state companies were “a waste of time.” In previous ISD 200 superintendent searches, MSBA’s attention to detail and familiarity with the terrain was a huge asset to Beissel.  

“They weren’t from Minnesota, they didn’t know the area the greatest. I just feel like MSBA has done this so much and I felt like their presentation, they were so thorough, they just ran Johnny on the spot with everything,” Beissel said.

Another concern Dressley posed regarding the proposed MSBA search contract had to do with the utility of what she called “a-la carte options.” The board did not go into detail about what exactly these items are, but they indicated that they were potential opportunities available to the board to finetune their search. 

Hedin gave her appraisal of the proposal, delineating between the base cost of the proposal and those additional opportunities Dressley referred to. Through her talks with the executive search lead, Hedin said she learned that MSBA structures this base price in relation to the size of the school district and then offers optional advertising services. 

“Inside the proposal there is a base cost, and there are opportunities, specifically as I read it, around additional advertising specifically, an effort to reach candidates that would be in less traditional pools,” Hedin said. 

Skeptical about those “a-la-carte” avenues and their financial prudence, Dressley wanted the board to seek clarification about the malleability of the proposal. 

“In here it lists the a-la-carte things, and if we’re not using those, are we cementing ourselves to those things in this proposal. Would we want more clarification in there?” Dressley said.

Her concerns were well-received by her fellow board members, and Zuzek wound up making a friendly amendment to the approval motion allowing Chair Hedin to “work out the details of the contract.” The friendly amendment was adopted and the motion ultimately passed in a unanimous decision.

Hedin and the board firmly stated that the approval of MSBA’s search proposal would not set a precedent for work session action items going forward and that the aversion from the status quo was purely due to the constricted time frame at hand.