11 applicants vie for school superintendent

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — Eleven men and women are vying for the position of superintendent of the Gallup-McKinley County Public School District.

Only two of the 11 are from Gallup.

Esther Macias is the current acting superintendent for the district. Mary Reeve is director of the district’s services for exceptional children.

The only other area candidate is Richard Sharpe, who is principal of Rocinante High School, the alternative school in Farmington.

The other candidates are Sandra Rodriquez, Albuquerque; Katherine Fitzgerald, Belchertown, Mass.; Timothy O’Sullivan, Albuquerque; Arturo Candelaria, Albuquerque; Raymond Arsenault, Corrales; Gordon Swinney, Los Lunas; Loretta DeLong, Mankato, Minn; and James Hennings, Tucson, Ariz.

Three others applied but will not be considered — Jesse Sanding Courage, Raymond Macias and Larry Parsons. Macias is the principal of Tobe Turpen Elementary School and the brother-in-law of Esther Macias.

John Samford, assistant superintendent of Business Services for the district, said that the three applications were rejected because they failed to meet the deadline, which was Dec. 28, or failed to meet one or more qualifications.

Four of the candidates — Esther Macias, DeLong, Hennings and Reeve — had applied for the acting superintendent position, the one that Esther Macias currently occupies.

The district has set up a screening committee, which is now in the process of being organized, to shift through the applications and narrow the field down to three to five people. The committee will consist of 19 people, with two teachers, two classified employees, three principals, two central office personnel, two members of the local teacher’s union, two post-secondary faculty, five community members and one person representing the media.

The idea is that this committee will come up with its recommendations by the end of the month, which would then allow the school board to interview the finalists during February or early March and select someone no later than April, with the person to assume the position on July 1, the start of the new fiscal year.

Samford said that the district may also follow the procedures it used when Karen White was selected as superintendent, and that was to take the finalists individually to the various chapters and city schools to meet with the community members to learn first hand some of the parent’s concerns.

The district has been spending a lot of time up to now thinking what kind of superintendent this district needs.
In past school board meetings, board members have talked about getting someone who can “think outside the box” and can make the changes necessary to bring test score grades up, given the fact that the vast majority of schools in this district have never passed the state Adequate Yearly Progress program.

The district has also had meetings at various sites to talk to people about what kind of superintendent they would like to see and while none of the meetings got a huge crowd, district officials learned that the main concern of parents in the county was to provide an education that would preserve and encourage Navajo students in their culture, while the concern in the city was to broaden the school programs to prepare their children for college.