Process to begin mid-December

By Shelby Stewart-Soldan
Staff Writer
OXFORD TWP. – During the regular meeting on Nov. 28, the Oxford Board of Education voted unanimously to hire Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates as their superintendent search firm.
“They really tailored (their proposal) to Oxford,” said Trustee Amanda McDonough. “I really think Hazard-Young stood out for a lot of the right reasons. I think they understand our community. I love that they focus on community and stakeholder involvement. I love that they go a little bit above and beyond what the other ones do.”
On Nov. 28, the school board interviewed three superintendent search firms: Michigan Leadership Institute and McPherson & Jacobson LLC, in addition to HYA.
“If you look at your vision, you talk about world class education, you talk about challenging all students,” said HYA associate Mike Richie. “When you look at your programming, it’s amazing what you offer. That alone is going to help draw candidates to the district.”
Richie outlined a three-phase plan that HYA will follow for finding the district a superintendent, the first of which will be the “engage” phase where they will discuss first with the board a timeline and go through the whole process of what needs to happen for the superintendent search. Following that will be stake-holder interviews and focus groups.
“We’re going to interview all the board members individually,” said Richie. “And then we’re going to have a number of focus groups, community forums, we’re going to really involve your stakeholders. That’s part of our process for our search. We do a lot of community engagement, and then we also have a survey we’ll send out to the community, students and staff. We put together a robust leadership profile report, which then becomes a great roadmap for your new superintendent.”
The focus groups will include face-to-face and virtual meetings, and they plan to meet the community where and when they feel comfortable.
“We’re going to go to where your stakeholders are,” he said. “The one group we insist we talk to is your high school students. We feel it’s really important that the board, the community, the parents, the staff, the administrators, they all should know what the students think of your district.”
He said the firm would speak with a variety of students with different needs to get an idea of who is represented in the district and what they are looking for in the district leadership.
Following the engage phase, they will move into the recruitment phase where HYA will recruit candidates for the position and conduct background checks, do preliminary interviews and find candidates that would like to apply for the position.
Following that, they encourage the board to interview 6-8 of the top candidates, and select three finalists in the selection phase.
“Three candidates is ideal for finalists,” said Richie. “They will all get one full day in your district. We feel it is important that they spend a full day in the district. We’ll set up tours, they’re going to do meet-and-greets with stakeholders, they’re going to meet with staff and high school students during the day, parents and business leaders at night.”
Each meet and greet will have a QR code available for participants to send feedback on the candidate directly to the board of education.
“Transparency is so important to us throughout the whole process,” he said.
Following the selection of one candidate, HYA would continue to help with the transition through a transition dashboard for free for the first six months.
“We’re here until the bitter end, if it takes one year, two years,” he said. “Don’t hire someone just to hire someone. It has to be the right fit.”
Richie has been with HYA for six years, and has placed 30 superintendents in that time, all of which are still with the district they were placed in.
Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates plan to start the search process in mid-December.