The Metro Nashville Board of Education hired Jim Huge & Associates to find a new superintendent.
After months of planning how to restart its search for the next superintendent of Metro Nashville Public Schools, the local board of education has agreed on a new firm to hunt down candidates.
A committee of the Metro Nashville Board of Education voted Friday to approve Nevada-based Jim Huge & Associates, a national search firm focused on finding leaders in K-12 education. The group will be tasked with finding a superstar superintendent to lead the struggling district of 166 schools and more than 86,000 students by late spring.
The firm's pitch to the board was stacked with recent success landing superintendents, but none in a school district as large as Metro Nashville. The closest in size was a 63,000-student district in Reno, Nev.
Although the board had not yet considered what they'd pay Huge & Associates, it will definitely cost more than the firm used for the first search, said Board Chair Sharon Gentry.
The firm used in the miserably failed search this past summer, Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates, reaped north of $40,000 for finding a candidate unwilling to take the job and other candidates the board was unwilling to hire, causing the school board to make another go of it this year.
"My primary question was, "Why do you want to do this search?," said Gentry, who had interviewed him by phone sometime prior to the meeting. "And [Huge's] responses were very vested in the success of the district and very acknowledging of the fact that there's never a good time to do a search."
The board voted unanimously to hire Huge, but must vote again at a full Board of Education committee meeting in the coming weeks. All board members were in attendance except for East Nashville School Board member Elissa Kim.
Gentry said the board's goal is to hire a superintendent before the 2016-17 year begins, and before the 45-day buffer between hiring and the school board election on Aug. 4.
