Kennewick should come clean on why it canceled the school superintendent search | Opinion
“Forward Together: Progress, Partnership, and Promise” declared a Kennewick School District flyer that landed in residents’ mailboxes this week.
It’s hard to work together when the school board keeps the public in the dark. Parents and taxpayers deserve a full explanation of what’s going on with hiring a new superintendent.
The school board recently scrapped plans to hire a replacement for Superintendent Traci Pierce. Pierce announced more than a year ahead that she would retire in June 2025.
The board decided to use that time to find her successor and install that person as a deputy superintendent for the coming school year. That way the heir apparent could learn the ropes under Pierce before taking over.
That’s no longer the plan. The school board recently met in an executive session and decided to postpone the search. Because the meeting took place behind closed doors, the public can only speculate about what went wrong. Did school board members have a change of heart? Were the applicants that bad? What?
Elected boards and other governing bodies may meet in executive session to discuss certain sensitive topics described in Washington state law. Whether this meeting met the legal standards is debatable.
It would be one thing if school board members met in private to keep applicants’ names confidential during the initial review. But they appear to have discussed far more, coming out of the session ready to call off the search. That discussion about the hiring process should have taken place in the open.
Even if the meeting were permissible under state law, executive sessions are never mandatory. The school board made a choice to have a private conversation without public oversight. The meeting becomes an information black hole, and such secrecy breeds public distrust.
Kennewick schools can hardly afford to erode public confidence right now. District voters twice declined to pass a school levy before finally doing so in 2023.
The new property tax rates took effect this year to some taxpayer grumbling, but strong financial headwinds remain. The district expects to run deficits of millions of dollars for the next several years. It’s a time to rally the community, not keep people out of the loop.
Maybe that fiscal challenge scared off potential superintendent applicants. Turning around a financially struggling school district is a tall order, especially if you have to wait a year playing second-fiddle. Candidates of the caliber that Kennewick deserves are ready to sit in the big chair.
There’s something to be said for taking some time to get the new superintendent up to speed. There’s also something to be said for bringing someone in with a fresh vision, ready to make changes without inculcating them with the baggage of the previous administration.
Neither approach is inherently better than the other. Which one a board pursues is a strategic choice that reflects whether its members want to stay the course or shake things up.
As of the end of February, the district’s headhunter had received only one completed application. There are a lot of vacancies these days, and therefore a lot of competition for talent. Nearly one-third of districts nationwide lost their superintendent in the past five years, and nearly half of current superintendents are considering leaving their job. Many of them cite politicization of schools as a reason. So perhaps the Kennewick School Board’s turn to the right after recent elections tamped down interest.
Or maybe it was the district’s low educational attainment scores on the state report card or the fact that three top administrators are leaving around the same time, creating a leadership vacuum. At least on that last point, the school board has plans to roll two jobs into one and hire someone soon, but that’s independent of the superintendent search.
Maybe it was none of that or all of it. The district is otherwise faring well on staff retention with 91% of employees sticking around in 2023, says the recent flier.
Only the few people in the room know the truth, but school board members are using an executive session to shield themselves from public scrutiny and engagement. That’s no way to move forward together.
