SAUGUS — School board member Arthur Grabowski has called for an executive session to discuss the contract of Superintendent David DeRuosi.

Grabowski, who made the request during the committee’s July 2 meeting, told the Item the reason was to give the board enough time to find a suitable replacement should DeRuosi’s contract not be extended when it comes up for discussion again in January 2021. 

“I was on the school committee (before),” Grabowski said. “It’s a nine-month process. If you want to pick the right person and you want the community to have a stake in who you pick, it’s very intensive and time consuming.”

This past January, the committee voted 3-1 to extend DeRuosi’s contract (set to expire June 30 2021) by one year — a motion opposed by Grabowski, who has been vocal in the past about his dissatisfaction with the district’s many problems, which include low test scores and high teacher turnover rates. 

“We need a superintendent to advocate strongly for budgetary reasons and to turn this district around,” he said Tuesday. 

At one of the current committee’s first meetings in November, however, DeRuosi — who joined the district in 2016 — acknowledged the district’s failings, attributing them to years of dysfunction within the system. 

“Having been an urban superintendent and an urban high school principal, working in communities like Chelsea, Revere, Malden … check the tapes, I told [the previous] committee: Saugus fell asleep at the wheel,” he told the board, later citing slow but steady growth over time as his main focus. 

When asked if he supported Grabowski’s motion for an executive session, Committee Chair Thomas Whittredge — who recused himself from January’s vote because his sister works under DeRuosi as an administrator for Saugus Public Schools — said he felt the board had more pressing issues to focus on. 

“Myself and the other committee members are concentrating on other priorities right now,” he said. “We have the budget we still have to finalize, and with (coronavirus) going on, we want to get these kids back in school.” 

He added that although he has no problem adding anything a member suggests to the committee’s agenda, the other board members were in agreement that an executive session to discuss the superintendent’s contract was not of high priority. 

“I have two kids in the system,” he said. “I’m not trying to mess it up. I’m trying to do the best we can to get these kids the best possible education they can get and bring the school system up to where it should be.”