District 211 begins search for next superintendent needed for 2025-26 school year
With Palatine-Schaumburg High School District 211 Superintendent Lisa Small to retire in the summer of 2025, the board of education has begun the process to search for and name her successor by the end of October.
At Thursday’s meeting, board members authorized Small to seek out potential firms to assist with a nationwide search that meets the district’s expected time frame.
The board added only one more item to Small’s recommendation of 13 required duties for the selected search firm to carry out.
“The only thing I would request is that the entire candidate pool be provided to the board of education,” Board Member Pete Dombrowski said. “I know in the last search we were only provided with a limited number, but I think it would be good to have the entire candidate pool presented.”
Under the expected time frame, the board would interview two finalists among the search firm applicants at the April 24 meeting before awarding a contract to one of them May 16.
The chosen firm would spend the summer soliciting and screening applicants while updating the school board about the search process.
Interviews with superintendent finalists and board discussions about them are tentatively planned for a closed session at the Oct. 17 meeting. A board decision on the next superintendent is expected by the end of that month.
The chosen superintendent would succeed Small July 1, 2025, and is expected to maintain regular communication with the board and Small leading up to their takeover.
Small is District 211’s eighth superintendent, and though nationwide searches have been the norm, she is the sixth to have been hired from within.
Her previous position was associate superintendent of instruction before she succeeded Dan Cates in the summer of 2020, just after the first school year to have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
When Small was selected in October 2019, former board president Robert LeFevre Jr. said the district has reaped benefits from developing leadership talent in-house, and such a directive has historically been included in the language of each new superintendent’s contract.