PW-S Board aims to speed up school chief search

With an increasing number of superintendent vacancies driving competition for top administrators in Wisconsin, the Port Washington-Saukville School Board decided last week to step up its search for a school chief.
The board, which decided on Dec. 4 to conduct a nationwide search for a superintendent but has yet to hire a consulting firm to lead it, approved a request for proposals that was to have been sent on Jan. 9 to 15 companies in Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska that specialize in recruiting school administrators.
Interim Supt. Mel Nettesheim recommended the deadline for proposals be set at Jan. 22 and the board hire a firm on Feb. 12.
But board member Sara McCutcheon said the board needs to do what it can to accelerate the process so the best available talent won’t be hired first by other districts.
“I don’t want this to drag out,” she said. “I want us to get out in front of the other openings in the state, particularly in this region, so is there a way we can tighten up the timeline?”
Nettesheim said the timeline she recommended was intended to give the board ample time to interview firms before hiring one of them.
Board members agreed to try and conduct interviews between Jan. 22 and Jan. 29, when it would hire a search firm.
One of the most recently announced pending superintendent vacancies is in the Cedar Grove-Belgium School District, where Chad Brakke, who resigned as principal of Saukville Elementary School to take the job there in 2020, announced last week he will resign at the end of the school year to become superintendent of the Baldwin-Woodville School District in northwestern Wisconsin. His new job will put him closer to his wife’s place of employment in a suburb of Minneapolis.
Brakke was one of two well-respected principals to leave the Port Washington-Saukville School District in 2020 to become superintendents elsewhere. The other was Eric Burke, who left Port Washington High School to become the top administrator in the Rhinelander School District.
The Port Washington-Saukville School District, which is on its second principals at Port High and Saukville Elementary since Burke and Brakke left, is now searching for a superintendent who will settle in after an unprecedented period of turnover in the district.
The district used search firms to find Michael Weber, who was superintendent for 21 years before retiring in 2021, and most recently to hire Dave Watkins, who was a high-level administrator in the St. Paul Public Schools in Minnesota.
The board hired the Illinois consulting firm School Exec Connect to conduct what was a four-month, $16,000 search that pared the candidates down to two finalists — Watkins and Joe Koch, a Port High graduate who was deputy superintendent of the School District of Waukesha at the time.
A divided board selected Watkins only to be stunned a year later by his decision to retire at the end of the 2022-23 school year.
In working to replace Watkins, however, the board eschewed the search process and, instead of soliciting applications, promoted Nettesheim, the district’s director of business services since January 2021, in the hope she would be able to seamlessly continue key district initiatives.
Board President Brenda Fritsch said at the time that Nettesheim was the district’s presumed permanent leader but was given an interim title and one-year contract because she did not yet have a superintendent’s license.
But the board’s decision to hire Nettesheim as interim superintendent without conducting a search for other candidates has come under fire from parents and teachers, who have also criticized the board for what they perceive as management problems in the district.
The board changed course last month after Nettesheim recommended in a closed session that the board conduct a search for a superintendent who would take the reins on July 1.
Nettesheim has said she has not decided whether she will apply for the job she currently holds on an interim basis.
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Wisconsin’s largest paid circulation community weekly newspaper. Serving Port Washington, Saukville, Grafton, Fredonia, Belgium, as well as Ozaukee County government. Locally owned and printed in Port Washington, Wisconsin.
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