School chief report due

• By CHARLES LUSSIER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Feb 25, 2009 - Page: 1B - UPDATED: 12:15 a.m.

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The East Baton Rouge Parish School Board will learn tonight the identity of the three finalists seeking to replace Charlotte Placide as superintendent.

While 17 people have applied so far during the past three months, representatives from the firm Hazard Young Attea & Associates are still searching for candidates, even today.

“My understanding is that they’re going to keep on taking applications until they get on the plane, maybe even later,” board President Jerry Arbour said.

If history is any guide, the three finalists named when the School Board convenes at 5 p.m. today could all be surprises.

The Glenview, Ill., search firm, when it handled the 2004 superintendent search, named three finalists who all applied at the last minute. The School Board ended up rejecting all three and instead promoted Placide from top financial officer to superintendent.

Placide is retiring at the end of June. The board plans to interview one finalist each day, from Monday to Wednesday, and make a selection Wednesday night in what promises to be a marathon meeting.

The two new names, both of whom applied in the past week, are John Covington, superintendent in Pueblo, Colo., and John Dilworth, superintendent in Montgomery, Ala. Seven of the 17 are current or former superintendents. The search firm released Covington’s and Dilworth’s applications Monday in response to a public records request.

Covington for the past three years has led Pueblo City Schools, a district with a $200 million budget and about 18,000 students. About 62 percent of Pueblo’s students are Hispanic and 68 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, an indicator of poverty. The district is adjacent to a smaller county school district that’s 70 percent white, and where 35 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

Montgomery County, where Dilworth has spent two years as superintendent, is closer in size and demographics to East Baton Rouge Parish. Montgomery County has a $370 million budget and about 32,000 students. Almost eight out of 10 of Montgomery’s students are black and about 65 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

East Baton Rouge Parish has about 44,200 students. About 83 percent of them are black and 82 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. The system’s overall budget last fiscal year was $567 million.

Of the two new applicants, Dilworth is the only one with Louisiana ties. He worked for 17 years for the Caddo Parish school system. He rose to chief operating officer there before spending three years as vice president of university affairs at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches.

The East Baton Rouge Parish School Board had planned to start interviewing candidates in early February, but delayed a few weeks to give Hazard Young Attea more time to check out 12 potential applicants suggested by the Baton Rouge Area Chamber.

Arbour said a search firm representative told him none of those 12 has as yet panned out.