Community members within the South Tama School District will have two opportunities to interact with the district’s hiring search for its next superintendent of schools.

Earlier this month the district accepted the resignation of Superintendent Jared Smith who recently was hired to be the next superintendent of the Waterloo Community School District beginning in July.

Since then, South Tama has opened its own hiring search to find Smith’s replacement.

The first intersection in the hiring process between the community and the school district is a stakeholder survey open to anyone within the South Tama community that seeks to identify priorities for the board of education and the district hiring committee to consider when making their hiring decision.

The survey is available online at https://tinyurl.com/SouthTamaSuptSurvey and will remain open until March 1. It is an anonymous survey that contains six questions and takes no more than 5-10 minutes to complete.

The survey asks participants to identify strength areas or points of pride as well as challenges or areas for improvement for the South Tama County school district.

Then it provides a list of professional skills and personal traits and qualities and asks participants to select their top three most important when considering a candidate for superintendent. Finally the survey concludes with an open question soliciting advice for the new superintendent.

The hiring team will produce a general report based on the information gathered in this survey. The report will be shared with the board to advise them on what priorities the district and community stakeholders are looking for in a new leader.

The survey and hiring search process is being conducted through a contract with the Grundmeyer Leader Services (GLS) consulting firm.

The application period opened on Feb. 4 and will close on March 6.

Through most of the month of March the board of education and the GLS hiring consultants will process the applications and narrow down the pool of candidates with the anticipation of conducting semi-finalist interviews on March 22.

A pool of finalist candidates will be announced publicly soon after leading up to the final in-person interviews on March 29 with a hiring decision likely to follow soon after.

The second opportunity community members will have to interact with the superintendent hiring process will be during the final interviews in late March.

The finalists will go through three interviews, each with a panel of around 20 individuals that will ask questions and provide feedback at the conclusion of the interview.

The panels will be made up of a mixture of staff, students and community members selected by the board of education.