Gilroy
– For Gilroy residents, which is more important in a
superintendent: involvement in the community or prior
experience?
Gilroy – For Gilroy residents, which is more important in a superintendent: involvement in the community or prior experience?
This is one of the questions that Hazard, Young and Attea, the consulting firm charged with choosing the Gilroy Unified School District’s next head, will be trying to answer in a pair of meetings on Feb. 27 and 28.
Consultants from the company have scheduled 38 hours of meetings with individuals and community groups, including the mayor and city officials, former GUSD students, the Gilroy police chief, the president and board of Gavilan College and the chamber of commerce. The consultants will also meet with each member of the GUSD board, Superintendent Edwin Diaz and City Administrator Jay Baksa separately.
By contrast, the consultants have scheduled only two hours for open community forums. The first will be Tuesday, Feb. 27 at 7:30pm and will be conducted in Spanish. The second will be held Wednesday, Feb. 28 at 6:30pm and conducted in English with Spanish-speaking support services.
The reason they scheduled so few hours for community forum, said GUSD Public Information Officer Teri Freedman, was because they felt most people interested in contributing input are “very likely to be covered by the chamber of commerce or one of the other groups. We tried to take the whole big community and break it into smaller chunks so we can get as much out of it as we can.”
One group invited to take part was IBM, which will be represented by Jocelyn Zona, community relations manager for the western United States.
“We have a long-standing partnership with IBM,” Freedman said. “We have a lot of parents who are IBM employees. There are funding opportunities for schools via the parents. We want to make sure their opinion is included.”
Freedman cited data analysis software for teachers to assess curricular modules and Little Tikes play spaces as past contributions by IBM.
Representatives from interviewed groups and individuals attending the meetings also will be asked to fill out questionnaires that include open-ended questions and a ranking exercise aimed at determining the characteristics Gilroy stakeholders desire in a superintendent.
The responses to these questionnaires will then be compiled and presented to the GUSD Board of Directors March 8. The data will highlight which answers to open-ended answers were most common and what qualities ranked highest in the questionnaire exercise.
Stakeholders and residents unable to attend the meetings or forums can download the questionnaire off the GUSD Web site and return it by mail or fax.
