The School Committee’s effort to find a short-term replacement for resigning superintendent Linus Guillory is underway, moving quickly but marked with tension and disagreement over the search process and how to take into account racial equity when hiring district leaders.
A 22-person Interim Superintendent Preliminary Screening Committee is tasked with hiring an interim superintendent for the beginning of the 2025-26 school year. The committee consists of four School Committee members, four parents, two students and a group of 12 educators, school leaders and administrators.
The screening committee interviewed its first five interim superintendent candidates on June 3 and aims to finalize a contract by the week of June 16. Though the interviews take place in a private “executive session” and the names of candidates are private until later in the process, the committee met publicly to develop its interview questions. Interviews with finalists will also be public.
The committee is led by Bob Weintraub, a School Committee member who was elected in May and previously served as Head of School at Brookline High School.
“We’ve got a large committee, which is great,” Weintraub said in an interview with Brookline.News. “The process is going well. It’s going very smoothly”
Unlike in past searches, the current job listing for interim superintendent does not include a clause barring the interim superintendent from applying for the permanent position, potentially raising the stakes of the short-term appointment.
So far, Weintraub has separately clashed with the Brookline Educators Union, the district’s human resources director and a Town Meeting member over the makeup of the screening committee and how to prioritize issues of race and racial equity in the search.
The BEU was not initially allowed to appoint members to the screening committee as it had for past searches, according to President Justin Brown.
“These moves told us that there was an effort to immediately attract candidates who would likely be serious contenders for the permanent position, but conducted with a disregard from past practice,” Brown wrote in an email to the union.
After pushback, the union was allowed to appoint four members to the screening committee.
How should the screening committee take racial equity into account?
At a June 3 meeting, the screening committee discussed draft interview questions that touched on topics such as the racial achievement gap amongst Brookline students and the district’s struggle to retain educators and administrators of color.
As the committee worked to condense its interview material, Weintraub proposed cutting or combining a question about retaining educators of color with another question about equity, saying that retaining educators of equity is “a universal issue.”
Several committee members, including the school district’s Director of Human Resources Alvin Cooper, pushed back against Weintraub, advocating for a question specifically asking about retaining educators of color.
“This is a very real question, and we skirt around it in Brookline because we’re so super-educated, we feel that we are beyond racism and we’re beyond prejudice, and we’re not,” Cooper said. “This is a very important question. If the committee is trying to deal with it, you need to listen and not downplay.”
The school district, which has dealt with racial achievement gaps in test scores and a recent civil rights complaint over the alleged mistreatment of a Black student, is closing its equity office due to budget cuts.
The “differences of opinion” are part of a process when more than 20 people attempt to create a dozen questions, Weintraub said in an interview.
“We came up with about 12 questions and the process was very smooth,” Weintraub said. “It worked.” (Click here to read all of the questions).
The search for an interim superintendent also became the subject of a profane exchange between Weintraub, who is also a Town Meeting member, and another Town Meeting member, Arthur Conquest.
Though Weintraub’s and Conquest’s accounts of the conversation differ, they agreed that, at Town Meeting on May 28, Conquest asked Weintraub how many Black people are on the screening committee, and whether the committee includes any Black parents. After answering the first question, Weintraub responded with frustrated profanity, both Weintraub and Conquest said in emails sent to a Town Meeting member listserv.
Conquest called on the School Committee and the town to “address the racial virus” that accounts for Brookline’s racial achievement and equity gaps.
“The test scores, academic achievement levels, college acceptance, career aspirations, and so on, expose the profound sickness within the system,” Conquest wrote in the listserv.
In an email on the listserv, Weintraub wrote that the screening committee is “full of smart people with diverse backgrounds, experiences and political perspectives, and a deep commitment to the Public Schools of Brookline” and asked that the community judge the committee on the result of its work.
In an interview, Weintraub said he “believes in working relationships,” and that he and Conquest took a walk together and had a nearly two-hour conversation on June 4, from which they are “moving forward.”
“I don’t care if people disagree with me. That’s part of being a public official,” he said. “I want to repair damage, as I always do. I want to build relationships, not destroy them.”
The person hired as interim superintendent will be tasked with hiring multiple new deputy superintendents, negotiating contracts with the Brookline Educators’ Union and other unions, and managing a budget that is already projected to have structural gaps.
The committee will interview at least two more candidates at its next meeting on June 11, according to School Committee Chair Valerie Frias, who is on the search committee.