MARBLEHEAD — The School Committee is interviewing five candidates to serve as the district’s interim superintendent after choosing from a pool of nine candidates.
Interviews for the position began Wednesday evening. The committee was also scheduled to interview a candidate for assistant superintendent of finance and operations.
After a discussion at the committee’s meeting, Barbara Cataldo, Thaddeus King, John Robidoux, David Thomson, and Jose Muñoz were announced as the finalists for the interim superintendent position. Cataldo and Thomson were interviewed on Wednesday, while King and Robidoux were interviewed on Thursday. Muñoz has not been scheduled for an interview yet.
At the committee’s meeting, Chair Sarah Fox said she was pleased to see the number of candidates interested in the position.
“I was really overwhelmed and very, very happy to see such a wealth of wonderful applicants,” Fox said. “We got more applications than I thought we would get given what many districts are seeing across the state, and the caliber of them was quite impressive.”
Earlier in the meeting, the committee also voted unanimously to hire LisaMarie Ippolito as the district’s assistant superintendent of student services.
Ippolito comes to the district with 30 years of teaching and administrative experience, most recently as the assistant superintendent for Newburyport Public Schools.
At the meeting, McGuinness said that “her biggest strength is her ability to provide collaborative leadership.”
“She is a proven effective leader with strong ethical reputation by all, to provide this kind of collaborative leadership and opportunities for high academic achievement for students, fostering personal growth for all students, and nurturing a true sense of community, which is what we need,” McGuinness said.
Rather than giving Ippolito the position of director, the committee agreed to create an assistant superintendent position.
“We’ll really be asking the director to take on those additional duties. So to do more than a director position and really take on a more robust job description,” Fox said.
According to Fox, per committee policy, members will need to develop a job description to create the role and then formalize it with a vote.
In other news, the committee announced the creation of a communications survey. According to a statement from the committee, the anonymous survey is “an effort to better understand the community’s thoughts regarding communication.”
Responses will be accepted until May 10. According to the statement, the responses will be read and shared with the public at a future meeting.
