Interest in job extends outside U.S.

Four, but no more.

At a special meeting last week, the Bainbridge Island School Board decided it would limit its finalists for the job of school district superintendent to just four candidates.

Board members met with Jim Hager, a consultant with Atlantic Research Partners, the Chicago, Illinois-based firm hired to find Bainbridge’s next chief of public schools, to get an update Tuesday on the search to replace Superintendent Faith Chapel.

Chapel, who has led the district for more than eight years, announced late last year that she would retire at the end of the current school year.

So far, 20 completed applications have been received from hopefuls for the soon-to-be-open position.

Applicants are coming from the region, as well from the East Coast, Southeast and abroad, Hager said.

“We’re getting really a lot of good candidates,” he said.

That prompted school board members to wonder just how many applicants they should invite for interviews. A two-day interview process in mid-April is planned, complete with community meet-and-greets, tours of Bainbridge and school district facilities, meetings with key members of staff, and interviews with the school board itself.

Hager told the board members that it was wise to keep the number of finalists below five.

The gap between candidates in skills, qualifications and other areas is usually quite pronounced when the finalist pool starts to deepen that much, he said.

Hager also noted the district may have well more than two dozen candidates as the Feb. 29 posted deadline for the job nears.

Many candidates who are already working as superintendents will wait until the “11th hour” to apply for confidentiality reasons. For their part, however, school members were tempted to pick just three finalists.

That approach fell by the wayside, though, when school board members decided that it might not be fair if two candidates were squeezed through the interview process in one day, while a third candidate would face a more-relaxed one-day review on the second day of interviews. The district hopes to have finalists identified by March 23-24, but that timeframe is also problematic in a way.

Two other school districts in the area — Edmonds and Olympic — are also seeking superintendents and will likely choose a superintendent before Bainbridge.

Hager said some candidates interested in Bainbridge were also looking at the other Puget Sound-area positions.

“There is some potential to lose a really good candidate,” he said.

That said, the ones he’s talked to said they would still move to Bainbridge even if they got a job offer elsewhere. The district expects to interview candidates on April 11-12.