What do you want in a new leader for NCS?

One thing is certain about the selection process for a new NCS superintendent: We’ll be watching.

Voter-taxpayers slumbered many years - even long before the era of Keith Richards - not watching, not caring, while NCS bellied up to the trough. Until recent years, the Advocate didn’t publish anything about NCS except sports, PR handouts, and feel-good features. Meanwhile, the budget grew, salaries grew, extras grew, and unfettered greed had a long ride.

We awoke to find ourselves mired in monstrous debt for new buildings and footing bills for an excessively expensive educational machine that can’t fully bus students nor fund extra-curriculars.

It will be like turning an ocean vessel, but that’s the task for Richards’ replacement. It will require Obama-like fresh ideas, vastly different perspectives and values, thorough and honest transparency, and most of all the bringing of people back together - all this, preferably by employing Internet savvy.

“School Superintendency” in Ohio is a caste of its own. Official licensure requirements are long and narrow. To recruit a licensed superintendent seems to imply a small pool of candidates, likely most of them with the caste mentality. From such a pool, the probability of locating the miracle worker needed in Newark could be slim, the process tedious, and result uncertain-to-unlikely.

There seems, however, to be a way NCS might hire a person more fitting to our needs, including those who are not now school administrators, opening the door to consideration of NCS teachers, even local business managers. 

If I’m comprehending Ohio Administrative Code 3301-24-12 http://codes.ohio.gov/oac/3301-24-12 one doesn’t even need a background in education to be hired as an alternative superintendent. Again, this is only my interpretation and I haven’t had verification from anybody.

Wouldn’t it be most rewarding for NCS to first search through Newark’s pool of talent to find a money manager who knows the community, its priorities, and its challenges? One who is honest, who will work for a reasonable salary, who will consider the limitations of taxpayers, who is a saver, not a spender? One who puts students as Priority Number One and considers in all school affairs the well-being and convenience of parents? One who speaks directly to constituents as does our President, rather than through a PR mouthpiece and a newspaper? One who can be so respected and forthright that he can do his job without the help of the Chamber, the Establishment, or the Advocate publisher - thereby eliminating the decades-long tradition of influence by smoke and mirrors? 

Yes it would.