The search firm tasked with hiring Peoria Public Schools’ next superintendent is looking to begin planning work starting next month, according to a presentation provided to the Peoria Board of Education on Monday night.
From the Heart International Educational Services, led by former Springfield superintendent Walter Milton, said at Monday’s school board meeting that they would like to begin preparation for recruitment as early as Oct. 1. It would kick off a four-phase process to find the replacement for Sharon Desmoulin-Kherat, who is set to retire at the end of the 2025-26 school year.
Milton said that the process for finding the new superintendent would be “arduous” and “daunting,” noting that the superintendent might be someone from Peoria or someone from far away.
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“Your superintendent may be in your district,” Milton said. “Your superintendent may be in the neighboring district. Your superintendent may be somewhere in the state of Illinois, or your superintendent may be across the country. Our job is to work with the board symbiotically, together, to make that deep and lasting impact on the lives of children.”
The first phase will begin with the Board of Education and Milton’s group establishing the parameters of the interview process, such as the guidelines for the search, the timeline, individual meetings with the candidates and the protocols for the interviews. It will continue with stakeholder meetings and surveys, set to be sent out from Oct. 1-22.
Phase 2 will be the recruitment phase, with a regional, state, and national search to find the district’s next leader. From the Heart will recruit candidates based on the results of the surveys and findings from the stakeholder meetings, which will be distributed to board members who will discuss potential questions for semifinalists and finalists for the position.
The position itself will be advertised in regional and national publications, along with professional networks and online platforms.
The third phase will include interviews, with a list of semi-finalists to be determined by the board in closed session. Milton said that there would be around 12-15 semi-finalists chosen, with the board interviewing the semi-finalists and finalists before making their selection.
Phase 4 will provide support for the new superintendent, with coaching, mentoring and professional support being provided during their first year at the helm.
Milton said that his team, which includes former principals, superintendents and administrative staff from districts all over the country, would do their due diligence when it came to finding the right fit for Peoria.
“We have to do our homework and our due diligence to put forth a candidate that’s going to be reputable and a person that’s going to make a deep and lasting impact on the lives of this community,” Milton said.
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Milton said that the board would have discretion to set the dates for the meetings, with the process likely to be a mix of in-person and virtual meetings, even though he prefers the distinctive touch of an in-person meeting.
“I like the in-person, because you can really gravitate from the energy and the connection,” Milton said. “However, I think that some of the meetings will be Zoom.”
Milton said that any decisions on where the stakeholder meetings will be held would need to be greelit by the board themselves, although they would bring recommendations of where they should be held. He did say that they would like to hold them at schools throughout the community but wasn’t going to limit it just to those buildings.
“Schools are always important,” Milton said. “Community, professional locations are important, board offices, central offices are important in terms of meeting with principals and the administration and also the students.”
The appointment of Milton’s firm was controversial, approved on a 4-3 vote last month despite concerns from community members about potential conflicts of interest, Milton’s past roles as superintendent in several school districts and the lack of experience the firm had in hiring superintendents.
Andres Diaz, a parent who spoke in opposition to From the Heart’s appointment at the previous meeting in August, said that the district needed to reconsider the decision to appoint them in light of Milton’s past, which included a separation agreement from the Springfield school district and a state audit which found that he had employed a person accused of child sex abuse to a high paying job in the Fallsburg, New York, school district.
“That person was paid six figures and allowed to work around children,” Diaz said. “Is that good judgment?”
Milton was superintendent in Fallsburg before stints in Flint, Michigan, and Springfield, where he served as the district’s head from 2007 to 2013, when he resigned and received a $180,000 severance package to depart early from his contract.
This article originally appeared on Journal Star: Search for new Peoria Public Schools leader to begin in October