State Board of Education in no hurry to find new commissioner

Members of the Missouri State Board of Education said Thursday that they do not want to rush the job of finding a new State Commissioner of Education.

Thursday was the first time the board had been able to meet in months after being left without a quorum to conduct business because of political fallout from decisions of then-Gov. Eric Greitens.

Greitens last year made unpopular political maneuvers to stack the board with appointed members who were favorable to his agenda of firing then-Education Commissioner Margie Vandeven. Greitens' five appointees to the board succeeded in firing Vandeven in a closed meeting last December.

The Greitens appointees then voted to start taking applications for commissioner Dec. 14, with a deadline of Jan. 8 to close the open application window - leaving only about three and a half weeks for people to apply, without any clear guidance on what the board was looking for in a new leader.

Board President Charlie Shields, Vice President Vic Lenz and member Michael Jones voted against that course of action.

"The idea at the time was people were really trying to push fast on this. I think they were trying to beat a potential January Senate confirmation and have somebody in place, did not want to use an outside search service, didn't spend a great deal of time determining qualifications, criteria, things like that for the search," Shields explained Thursday of how the process went before the state Senate in January refused to approve Greitens' five appointed board members.

Left with only three seats filled out of eight, the board didn't have a quorum, and so hadn't met before Thursday since January.

Gov. Mike Parson, who succeeded Greitens after the former governor's resignation June 1, appointed two board members this week - Peter Herschend and Carol Hallquist - who were sworn in Thursday morning and gave the board its quorum to be able to conduct business, including restarting the process of selecting a new commissioner.

Shields said the previous search yielded 10 applicants - which they were unable to do anything with because of the lack of board members.

"We notified those 10 applicants that that process was over and, if we started a new process, that they would have to reapply," Shields said.

Shields said he credits the leadership of Roger Dorson, interim commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, with giving the board the ability to approach the search process with patience.

"I think we need to be very deliberate about this. We need to take our time," he said of restarting the commissioner search process.

Jones asked the board to consider if it's looking for a "change agent" in a new commissioner or someone with proven leadership skills.

"However we go forward, we should be very explicit about do we think we need a change in direction, or as a policy-body, are we fundamentally satisfied with the direction in which we're going?" Jones said.

Herschend - who has served on the board previously - said he has been around for four commissioner searches - and that those searches have taken as few as three or four months up to six or seven months.

"This is a leadership question. This is not 'How many college degrees do you have?' This is not 'Do people like you?' This is 'Did you get results in the areas that count?'" he said.

The board's other business Thursday included catching up on responsibilities that had been deferred for months by the lack of a quorum - approving school calendars for 2018-19; designating A+ high schools; hearing a presentation on the state's education budget after the legislative session; ruling on disciplinary actions against some teachers' licenses and hearing an update on the development of a new Missouri School Improvement Plan, which scores schools on the Annual Performance Review reports.

The board also reapproved six charter schools Thursday.

The charter schools, while overwhelmingly renewed, also prompted debate about how they are evaluated.

Board President Charles Shields critiqued several charter schools with test scores not markedly better than nearby public school districts, prompting pushback from school representatives who argued that the comparison was unfair. Shields and other members agreed for the need to potentially reevaluate how the schools are measured.

Charter schools are usually reapproved for five-year increments, and the five approved Thursday would have lost their ability to function at the end of the month without renewal. Three are in St. Louis: Lift for Life Academy, Lafayette Preparatory Academy and Eagle College Prep Endeavor. The other two, Brookside Charter School and Gordon Parks Elementary, are in Kansas City. Together, they serve just over 2,000 students.