http://www.yankton.net/articles/2013/02/05/community/doc5110874fd1230861560858.txt

School Hires Firm For Supt. Search

By Andrew Atwal
andrew.atwal@yankton.net

The Yankton School District (YSD) school board approved Dakota Education Consulting (DEC) as the firm to lead YSD’s search for a new superintendent.

The decision was made at a special school board meeting held Monday at the administration building.

DEC is headed by Tom Oster and Rick Melmer, both of whom had previously served as the South Dakota Secretary of Education. Melmer currently serves as the dean of the School of Education at the University of South Dakota, while Oster is the superintendent of the Sioux Valley school system in Volga.

“Oster and Melmer run an independent search firm that helps school districts search for administrative personnel to help fill open positions,” said school board president Chris Specht. “In their proposal, they clearly pointed out that superintendent vacancies throughout South Dakota over the last 15 years have been primarily filled through people living in, or from, South Dakota, so we felt as if we didn’t need a national search firm.”

Specht added that the school board looked out how to fill the position in both the most efficient and economically reasonable way. Based on this, the board decided that the hiring DEC to lead the search was the best option.

The cost of the contract with DEC is $8,000.

“The price includes all of their travel and all of the advertising they do,” Specht said. “If the school board decides to advertise in other newspapers like the Omaha World-Herald or the Star Tribune (of Minneapolis), that is a cost we have to pay for ourselves.”

DEC will conduct all the advertising for the search and also be the recipient of all the candidate applications that are generated. The DEC is anticipating receiving between 60-80 applications for the position.

“I thought the number of applications they expect to get was a little high, but that’s the number they expect to see,” Specht said. “DEC will look through the applications and bring the board a top number of candidates that we want, which could be the top 10 or 20 candidates.”

The search group will assist the school board with paring down the search based upon applicants’ qualities, expertise and experience to the top candidates, which could be two candidates or more. The board will then decide how many rounds of interviews to conduct.

At its next meeting on Feb. 11, the school board will spend time talking with Rick Melmer about the process, including how long it takes to get applications in, how long it takes to go through them and the characteristics the board will look for in a candidate. All of those questions must be answered before DEC can begin advertising for the position.

“Our goal is to have someone hired by the end of May,” Specht said. “We think it’s a realistic time frame. If the process moves along faster than this, then great — but we would hate to see it drag on longer.”

You can follow Andrew Atwal on Twitter at twitter.com/andrewatwal