The School Board for the Pulaski County Special School District is set to spend all day Tuesday interviewing three finalists for the 12,000-student system with the possibility of making a selection as soon as Tuesday evening.
The new superintendent will run a school district that includes some of the wealthiest and some of the poorest areas of metropolitan Little Rock on both sides of the Arkansas River and is made up of the cities of Maumelle, Sherwood and parts of Little Rock and Shannon Hills, as well as smaller communities such as Wrightsville, Scott and Roland.
The School Board is seeking a replacement for Jerry Guess, who was fired by the board in July in a disagreement over which lawyers should represent the school system.
The three finalists, in the order of their interviews, are:
• Charles McNulty, associate superintendent of educational services in Waterloo Community School District in Iowa, who will meet with the board in executive session at 10 a.m.
• James Harris, superintendent of the Daniel Boone Area School District in Douglassville, Pa., is scheduled for a 2 p.m. interview.
• Erick Pruitt, area superintendent in the Houston Independent School District, is scheduled for a 4:30 p.m. interview.
"We have some really exciting people," School Board President Linda Remele of Sherwood said Friday about the finalists for the job that is expected to offer a salary of about $215,000. "I hope it goes well."
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Janice Warren, the district's associate superintendent for equity and pupil services/director of elementary education, has served as the interim superintendent this school year.
Warren, a former 10-year superintendent in the Crossett School District, applied to head the Pulaski County Special district for the long term but was not chosen as a finalist, creating some hard feelings.
Pam Fitzgiven, a district elementary school teacher, chairman of the district's Certified Personnel Policies Committee as well as president of the Pulaski Association of Classroom Teachers, said Friday in an email that she was "extremely disappointed" in the board's selection of finalists.
"Not to give Dr. Warren an interview was a huge blow to the morale of the employees in this district," Fitzgiven said. "Dr. Warren knows the complexity of this district and has worked tirelessly and effortlessly with all employees as interim Superintendent to create a positive working environment for the betterment of our schools and our students.
"The Board's decision to exclude her doesn't make sense. Dr. Warren is a proven leader of this district and should have been the only choice for our district's superintendent," she said
The three finalists were selected by the School Board last Tuesday from a pool of nine contenders recommended by Ray & Associates, an executive search firm based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A total of 36 people applied for the job, the hired consultants said.
The Pulaski County Special district, the sixth-largest in the state, previously included the Jacksonville area that detached in 2016 to form the new Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District.
A new superintendent faces the possibility of having to deal with further splintering of the district as leaders in Sherwood and Maumelle have taken initial steps in recent years to similarly separate from Pulaski County Special.
The new superintendent will head a system that remains a party in a 35-year-old federal school desegregation lawsuit and, as such, is obligated to improve the condition of its school buildings in poor and high minority-group neighborhoods to match those of the much newer schools in more affluent and predominantly white sections.
To that end, the district is in the midst of constructing a new Mills High and will relocate Fuller Middle to a new site this summer. It is also finishing construction of a new Robinson Middle School and has recently started to significantly expand Sylvan Hills High.
The district is in competition for students and state funding with an ever-expanding number of independently run public charter schools in central Arkansas.
Additionally, it will be participating for the first time in interdistrict school choice by students and their families as allowed by state law, creating the potential for the district to gain -- or lose -- student enrollment.
The district is converting all four of its high schools -- two for the 2018-19 school year and two for 2019-20 -- to schools of innovation where participating students will not be bound by traditional class periods and school hours.
A Section on 04/01/2018