The Riverhead school district will begin its search for a superintendent, with the goal of hiring in March

The search for the next superintendent of the Riverhead Central School District is now underway.

The Riverhead Board of Education has met with the official leading the search and will begin distributing an advertisement for the job early next week, officials said last night during a presentation and subsequent interview. The board hopes the next superintendent will be hired by mid-March, which will allow the superintendent to help fill other vacancies within the district’s central administration.

The search for the next superintendent, who will serve as CEO of the school district, will be conducted by Eastern Suffolk BOCES. Eastern Suffolk BOCES Chief Operating Officer David Wicks, a former Riverhead school administrator, presented the board with an outline of the search process during Tuesday’s school board meeting.

Wicks said he first met with the school board on Oct. 15 to discuss the process of choosing the next superintendent, how to advertise the search and priorities for the next superintendent. He said an advertisement for the position could be circulated as early as Monday.

According to Wicks, the post will be advertised in many places, including the New York State Council of School Superintendents, the New York State School Board Association and the School Administrators Association of New York State. It will also be forwarded to all BOCES in New York State.

“So potentially all of the 730-plus school districts in New York State will see that you have a vacancy for a superintendent, for the purpose of recruiting those applications,” Wicks said.

The job posting will also be shared with “affinity groups” such as the Long Island Black Educators Association and the Long Island Latino Teacher Association, Wicks said.

As candidates apply for the position, Wicks will gather public input on the search. A survey will be conducted “not just among people directly connected to the school, but among the community as a whole,” Wicks said. “The purpose of that community survey is to give everyone in this community the opportunity to provide you with the information they feel is necessary to inform you of the superintendent search.”

James Scudder, chairman of the Riverhead school board, said the survey will be available in “any language.”

Wicks said he will next work with the board to identify stakeholder groups he can meet with as the vacancy is posted. Wicks will spend about an hour with each of them and have “in-depth, open conversations about what those groups are looking for in their next superintendent,” he said. Scudder said these groups will include the district’s parent organizations, the Special Education Parent Teacher Association (SEPTA) and bargaining units within the unions representing district employees.

Once applications close, Wicks will work directly with Interim Superintendent Cheryl Pedisich and Interim Assistant Superintendent for Business Marianne Cartisano to screen all applicants. In January, Wicks will meet with the school board to discuss each candidate who has applied and the results of the screening process, leading to the first round of interviews in mid-January. Wicks will also discuss the results of the stakeholder meetings and community survey with the board.

A second and possibly final round of interviews could be completed in early February, with an offer made to the candidate in mid-February and a contract negotiated and accepted by the board in March, Wicks said.

“There was a desire here that the board would have appointed your next superintendent by March 18 so that they could potentially be involved in filling any open leadership positions that you may have, with the hope of this person starting July 1,” Wicks said . .

Scudder said the hiring of a superintendent earlier this year will give the district a head start in hiring people into top administrative positions.

“For a superintendent coming in…if they know they can hire people (and) that they have a say in who they work with in their cabinet, as opposed to (saying) these are the people you have, that can make some shy make inspectors away,” Scudder said. “It’s like being a general manager of a baseball team. They want their people, they want their coach, their managers, things like that. It’s the same. But the fact that they come in and have a say does not mean that the board is going to put a stamp on it,” he added.

In addition to the superintendent position, the district’s three assistant superintendent positions are also filled by interim staff. Pedisich and Cartisano, both retired superintendents, were hired in part to help restructure the district’s governance, school board members say.

Pedisich and Cartisano were hired after former Superintendent Augustine Tornatore and Assistant Superintendent of Business Rodney Asse abruptly resigned late last year; their interim contracts were extended until the end of the current school year. Other administrators retired or left the district at the end of the last school year; the school board has taken the opportunity to restructure top positions.

During the Oct. 29 school board meeting, Gregory Wallace, president of the Riverhead Central Faculty Association, asked school board members to consider the needs of district teachers in the search for the next superintendent. The union, he said, is represented on the committees created to make hiring recommendations for all district administrators except the superintendent.

“We’ve had five superintendents since I’ve been in this position, and on July 1 we’ll have our sixth,” Wallace said.

Wallace said an obsession with administrators wanting to “fix” test scores should “immediately disqualify” that person from consideration. The phrase shows the person “has the arrogance to think they can fix Riverhead,” he said.

“I want to make it clear: we don’t need anyone to fix us. What we really need is someone to support us, and a superintendent can’t support us unless they know who we are, know what we’re doing, know why we’re doing it, and then they have to take the time to figure out how we get here have ended up. ,” said Wallace.

The district and its students face many challenges, Wallace said. He said the district needs leaders who are “cut from the same cloth” as Pedisich and Cartisano, for whom, while he doesn’t agree with every decision made, he has respect and admiration.

“Finally, for the Board of Education, much depends on the selection of our next leader,” Wallace said. “We count on you.”