Riverhead school district starts superintendent search, aiming to hire in March

The search for the next superintendent of the Riverhead Central School District is now underway.

The Riverhead Board of Education has met with the official leading the search and will start circulating an advertisement for the job by early next week, officials said during a presentation and subsequent interview last night. The board hopes to have the next superintendent hired by mid-March, which will allow the superintendent to help fill other vacant positions within the district’s central administration.

The search for the next superintendent, who acts as the school district’s chief executive officer, is being conducted by Eastern Suffolk BOCES. Eastern Suffolk BOCES Chief Operating Officer David Wicks, who is a former Riverhead school administrator, presented the board with an outline of the search process at Tuesday’s school board meeting.

Wicks said he first met with the school board on Oct. 15 to discuss the process of picking the next superintendent, how to advertise the search and the priorities for the next superintendent. He said a job posting for the position can be circulated as soon as Monday.

The post will be advertised in many places, according to Wicks, including the New York State Council of School Superintendents, New York State School Board Association and the School Administrators Association of New York State. It will also be forwarded to every BOCES across New York State. 

“So potentially, all 730+ school districts in New York State are going to see that you have a vacancy for a superintendent, for the purposes of soliciting those applications,” Wicks said. 

The job post will also be shared with “affinity groups” like the Long Island Black Educators Association and the Long Island Latino Teacher Association, Wicks said. 

While candidates are applying for the position, Wicks will collect public input on the search. A survey will go out to “not just to people that are directly tied to the school, but to the community as a whole,” Wicks said. “The purpose of that community survey is to give anyone in this community the outlet to give you the information that they feel they need to let you know regarding the superintendent search.”

Riverhead school board President James Scudder said the survey will be available in “every language.”

Wicks said he will then work with the board to identify stakeholder groups for him to meet with while the job is posted. Wicks will spend approximately an hour with each one of them and have “in-depth, open conversations about what those groups are looking for in their next superintendent,” he said. Scudder said these groups will include the district’s parent teacher organizations, its special education parent teacher association (SEPTA), bargaining units within the labor unions representing district employees.

Once applications are closed, Wicks will work directly with Interim Superintendent Cheryl Pedisich and Interim Assistant Superintendent for Business Marianne Cartisano to screen all the applicants. In January, Wicks will meet with the school board to discuss every candidate that applied and the results of the screening process, leading to the first round of candidate interviews in mid-January. Wicks will also discuss with the board the results of the stakeholder meetings and community survey. 

A second and possibly final round of interviews could be completed in early February, with an offer to the candidate delivered by mid-February and a contract negotiated and passed by the board in March, Wicks said.

“There was a desire here for the board to have your next superintendent appointed by March 18, so that they could be involved potentially in filling open leadership positions that you may have, with the hopes of this person starting on July 1,” Wicks said.

Scudder said hiring a superintendent earlier in the year will give the district a leg up with hiring people in top administrative positions. 

“For a superintendent coming in… if they know that they can hire [and] that they have a say in who they’re working with in their cabinet, as opposed to [saying] these are the people you have, that might shy some superintendents away,” Scudder said. “It’s like a general manager of a baseball team. They want their people, they want their coach, their managers, stuff like that. It’s the same thing. But just because they would come in and get a say doesn’t mean the board’s gonna rubber stamp it,” he added.

In addition to the superintendent position, the district’s three assistant superintendent positions are also filled by interim employees. Pedisich and Cartisano, both retired superintendents, were hired in-part to help restructure the district’s administration, school board members have said. 

Pedisich and Cartisano were hired after former Superintendent Augustine Tornatore and Assistant Superintendent for Business Rodney Asse resigned abruptly late last year; their interim contracts were extended until the end of the current school year. Other administrators retired or left the district at the end of last school year; the school board has taken the opportunity to restructure top positions.

At the Oct 29 school board meeting, Riverhead Central Faculty Association President Gregory Wallace asked school board members to consider the needs of the district teachers in the search for the next superintendent. The union, he said, is represented on the committees established to make hiring recommendations for all district administrators but the superintendent.

“We have had five superintendents since I was seated in this position, and by July 1 we will have our sixth,” Wallace said.

Wallace said an obsession with administrators wanting to “fix” test scores should “immediately disqualify that person from consideration.” The phrase shows the person has “the arrogance to think that they can fix Riverhead,” he said. 

“I want to go on record: we do not need someone to fix us. What we actually need is someone to support us and a superintendent cannot support us unless they get to know who we are, know what we do, know why we do it, and then they have to take the time to figure out how we got here,” Wallace said.

The district and its students face many challenges, Wallace said. He said the district needs leaders “cut from the same cloth” as Pedisich and Cartisano who, while he has not agreed with every decision made, he has respect and admiration for. 

“Lastly, to the Board of Education, a lot is riding on the selection of our next leader,” Wallace said. “We’re counting on you.”