NORTHWEST ARKANSAS — The Bentonville School Board’s search for its next district superintendent has come down to two: Bonny Cain, a superintendent in Pearland, Texas, and Michael Poore, a deputy superintendent in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Both are expected to visit Bentonville this week on separate days (Poore on Wednesday, Cain on Thursday). Public forums will be held with them on their respective days at 4 p.m. in the lecture room in the North building of Bentonville High School. Theseare excellent opportunities for Bentonville residents to get to know the finalists and how they would handle the superintendent’s job.
Poore and Cain both appear to be highly qualified.
In fact, the school board didn’t even bother including a third person among the finalists, as it had originally intended to do.
One point in these finalists’ favor is that both submitted their applications by the Nov. 30 deadline - something that can’t be said for all of the candidates.
Twenty-two people met the Nov. 30 deadline for submitting applications to the search firm, BWP & Associates.
But when the school board announced its list of the final six candidates, there appeared two names that had not shown up on the original list of 22 - Steve Jacoby and Gordon Pace.
Why? Rob Barnes, a director with BWP & Associates, said Jacoby and Pace “didn’t want to have media scrutiny” until they were assured of getting serious consideration for the Bentonville job.
“They asked that we informally interview them, and if the outlook looked positive they would go ahead and apply,” Barnes said.
This smells of a back-room deal meant to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act, under which we the public are entitled to learn all sorts of things that concern the public, including the names of those applying for our school district’s most important and highest-paying job.
If Jacoby and Pace were indeed concerned about the media “scrutiny,” what does that say about their potential performance? Superintendents are subject to all kinds of scrutiny, and not just from local media - parents, students, faculty, staff, patrons. The top job in a school district is no place for someone who wishes to avoid “scrutiny.”
That said, let’s remember that it takes two to tango. The school board could have insisted that all candidates follow the rules as they were laid out. That it permitted such manipulation of the rules to occur speaks poorly of the board’s respect for the public’s right to know the candidates. It’s also disrespectful to those candidates who played by the rules and requested no special treatment.
Both Jacoby and Pace are now out of the running for the job.
Or are they? What we thought we knew about the search process before turned out to be wrong, so anything is possible.
This brings us to the big-picture point for all school boards and other governmental organizations to consider: When you eschew complete transparency, you risk losing the public’s trust.
Opinion, Pages 5 on 12/14/2010