NAHANT — Effective July 1, 2024, Tony Pierantozzi will leave his eight-year post as superintendent of schools. As a result, the School Committee and district leaders will have to find the right candidate to take his place before the 2024-25 school year.
The Nahant School Committee kicked off its meeting Tuesday night by inviting Massachusetts Association of School Committees Executive Director Glenn Koocher to help outline the process of searching for, interviewing, and eventually hiring the right superintendent.
Koocher recommended assembling a search committee to engage with the community and establish criteria for its ideal candidate based on district goals between now and July.
“A search process is relatively simple when you figure out what it is you’re looking for and what it is you need,” Koocher said. “Some districts need someone who can put a curriculum together, some need someone to put the financial house back in order, others need to build buildings, and others need to build a relationship with the community. Whatever your needs might be, you put that into a job description and a list of criteria for decision-making.”
After working with faculty and the community through surveys or public hearings, Koocher said the search committee, with the assistance of MASC, would publish a notice of vacancy on the MASC website, along with other sites such as that of the superintendents association.
Koocher said once the committee finds roughly six seemingly fit candidates, they will be screened through two waves of interviews. He said the second round is typically a public interview of the search committee’s top three candidates by the School Committee.
When School Committee Chair Patricia Karras asked Koocher how extensive the candidate background screening would be, he replied that in-depth reference checks remain one of the most significant aspects of the screening process.
Koocher said all of the Commonwealth’s School Board Association members speak to one another, making reference checks relatively simple for in-state candidates.
“They might say ‘I decided to retire here in Nebraska and come back east,’ but the real story is ‘I wasn’t a good superintendent and they are firing me and I want to get as far away from Nebraska as possible.’ Sometimes that is an issue,” Koocher said. “It’s rare, but some of them don’t have the jobs that they claim to have. So there’s some diligence involved in looking at candidates — much less for someone from Massachusetts.”
The board also discussed the possibility of hiring an interim superintendent in the event that the superintendent search ends up taking longer than anticipated.
School Committee member Beth Anderson said that after the town’s recovery from the pandemic and the recent debate over its agreement with Swampscott Public Schools to send its sixth-grade class to Swampscott Middle School, the district should make an effort to hear the public’s priorities for the new candidate.
“We had to make some really difficult decisions as a community and as a School Committee last year, around our grade levels — our sixth grade, in particular — and so I’m sure there’s feelings about how we lead into the future and that will affect how we look at an ideal candidate for this time,” Anderson said. “Mr. Pierantozzi is going to be a tough act to follow in a lot of specific ways. I think it’s a good time to get community input on what that means for Nahant.”
