Charleston County School Board plans to hire new superintendent in March

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - The Charleston County School Board has approved a timeline for hiring a new superintendent for the school district.

That timeline has the search process beginning in September, followed by an outreach plan to be designed to help develop exclusive criteria during October.

The board plans to hire the district’s new top educator by March.

The Rev. Dr. Eric Mack, the board chair, says finding a permanent superintendent will require a lot of conversations.

“It’s a proposed timeline as we begin to progress forward with this search,” Mack said. “Of course, we know this upcoming November will be a slate of new board members coming on board. However, we wanted to get the process started by allowing the new board the opportunity to review candidates and make that selection process.”

Mack says a superintendent typically starts July 1 and ends their term the following June. He says March will give this person time to transfer, adapt and get set by July 1.

“The findings that we have discussed with previous research firms, typically beginning in January through March is the normal time frame of when it’s best to review and to select candidates,” Mack said.

Board member Lauren Herterich, who represents District 20, says the board is progressing nicely in the timeline so far.

She says the next step is to have community conversations about their goals and guardrails. This will take place at a special-called work session for board members this Friday at 11 a.m. It will be a public meeting and it will be live-streamed.

“After that is the series of meetings where the board, actually two members of the board, will be going out in the community to present on these goals, getting input from the community if those are the goals that we want to move forward with,” Herterich said regarding the upcoming training meeting and how the timeline could be affected moving forward.

Mack says the details of the superintendent position in the timeline will be discussed again at the Sept. 12 school board meeting.

The school board promoted Don Kennedy from interim superintendent to superintendent back in June, with the understanding he will serve in the full-fledged role until a permanent superintendent is selected.

Kennedy was named interim superintendent on Dec. 29.

He started working with the district as Chief Financial Officer back in 2004, serving for a couple of years and then he left for about a decade before coming back in 2018.

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