An Open Letter from Supt. Jon Sills ~ BHS Principal Search / Process Update

By Jon Sills, Bedford Superintendent of Schools

Thank you to all of you who have taken the time to attend the meetings, view the videos, and take the survey, and particularly for your added commentary. Choosing our next principal is a challenging process, with high stakes for all, and I am particularly grateful to assistant superintendent, MaryLou Sallee for shepherding it along from beginning to end, to JGMS principal, Kevin Tracey for his right-hand-man assistance, and to the interview committee, for the hours of thougtful questioning and deliberation.

We have narrowed the four semi-finalists down to three finalists, whom we* will next observe in their own school settings, and then I will conduct final interviews. They are: Kate Boynton, Josh Frank and Heather Galante. Each of them has very real strengths, and all three received mostly “Agree” and “Strongly Agree” responses to all but one of the survey questions, including: “demonstrating and understanding of caring for students”, “solicit and respect teachers’ perspectives on school and district initiatives.” and “confident that this candidate has the experience and disposition to be the next principal of Bedford High School”, with Heather receiving overall the strongest responses. All three also received some negative comments.

As we move into the final phase of the search, I’d like to share some reflections on the process to date. The purposes of public interviews (students, faculty, staff, leadership team and parents) are two-fold: to gather the insights, perceptions and feedback of the various constituencies and to observe the candidates’ interactions with those constituencies. Understandably, there is not a direct correlation between the surveys and the final decision for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that each of the three finalists was the first choice for some folks and the last for others. The survey commentary and our observations of the candidates’ interactions will yield more customized questions in the final round.