The East Baton Rouge Parish School Board is about to start sorting through a mix of strangers and familiar faces as it tries to settle on who is best suited to lead Louisiana’s second-largest traditional school district.
The board has scheduled a special meeting for Tuesday to narrow the 16 applicants — one more applicant, Dallas Lee from Illinois, has already dropped out — to a smaller number of semifinalists. The board has scheduled a final vote on July 1.
It is the first superintendent search since January 2021. In that search, the Baton Rouge school board passed over an in-house favorite and instead went with a young, up-and-coming educator who had never lived in Louisiana to run a school system of more than 40,000 students and about 6,000 employees.
That in-house favorite, longtime administrator and current interim superintendent Adam Smith, is back. However, the man who beat out Smith for the post in 2021, Sito Narcisse, is not. Narcisse agreed to a voluntary buyout this past January after three turbulent years as superintendent.
This go-round, Smith, a 28-year veteran of the school system, has 15 competitors for the top job. Ten live or have lived in Louisiana. Four have worked for the school system, including current Chief Human Resources Officer Nichola Hall and former superintendent Bernard Taylor, who led the school system from 2012 to 2015.
Of the five out-of-staters who have not lived here, two have spent their careers in neighboring states. One, Adrian Hammittee, is superintendent of a small school district of about 1,000 students in the Mississippi Delta, 100 miles north of Baton Rouge. The other, Jerry Gipson, has served as superintendent of three smaller school districts in the Houston area.
Three more candidates have no previous work history in the Pelican state: David Hardy Jr., Krish Mohip, Fabby Williams.
Hardy and Mohip have previous superintendent experience, both appointed to run smaller school districts in Ohio taken over by the state due to "academic distress" — an arrangement similar to Louisiana’s Recovery School District. They spent three years each in their respective jobs. Hardy then went into education consulting, while Mohip has spent the past four years as a top administrator in Illinois’ state education agency but .
Williams has not run a school district before, but is currently deputy superintendent of schools in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a district with about 53,000 students. Williams has spent almost his entire 26-year career in the Tar Heel state, except for a two-year stint as the principal at two public schools in the Chicago area.
The candidates submitted their applications by a June 10 deadline, and they were released publicly the following day. , the firm hired to conduct the superintendent search, spent the week conducting short video interviews with the 16 still-active applicants. Those interviews .
The applications and the interviews will serve as the primary information that the School Board members will use Tuesday to try to select semifinalists. To advance to become a semifinalist,
The approved schedule speeds up quickly after that. On Thursday, the board is scheduled to narrow the field further to three finalists. Interviews of finalists would then occur June 27, with a final vote July 1.
The board, however, might yet extend that timetable. Board member Mike Gaudet has urged the board to delay finalist interviews until later in July, after the July Fourth holiday.
Interim Superintendent Smith by law can serve only six months or until July 23.
The board plans to revisit the timetable and search process when it meets Tuesday.
SSA Executive Director Christel Slaughter said she is urging the board to give her team time to do more extensive background checks on the semifinalists, but it would need more than just two days to do so as the schedule currently calls for.
“I just would like to have something else for (the board) to work with to go from semifinalists to finalists,†Slaughter said.
Of the candidates with Louisiana connections, only one, Verna Ruffin, is currently a district superintendent.
Ruffin is a native of Louisiana who spent 26 years with the Lafayette Parish school system, the first 14 as a band director at Edgar Martin Middle School in Lafayette. After leaving Lafayette, she worked in high-level school administration jobs in San Antonio and Tulsa, Oklahoma. In 2012, she began seeking superintendent jobs, applying unsuccessfully for the then vacant East Baton Rouge job.
Ruffin soon became superintendent of schools in Jackson, Tennessee, where she spent four years. She became a superintendent again in 2018 in her current job in Waterbury, Connecticut, a district with about 19,000 students.
She has had a fight of late to keep her Waterbury job.
The Waterbury board voted 9-1 in April to renew Ruffin as superintendent for three more years, but to do so , who said that "serious issues of trust and communication exist" between Ruffin and district staff. Those nine supporting Waterbury board members are listed as job references in her East Baton Rouge application. Another prominent reference for Ruffin is U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, who spent two years as head of Connecticut’s state education agency, coinciding with Ruffin’s time in Waterbury.
Two more Louisiana candidates, Kevin George and Patrick Jenkins have previously been district superintendents in Louisiana — George six years in St. John the Baptist Parish and Jenkins for more than six years in St. Landry Parish.
George has spent the past three years as director of LSU Lab School in Baton Rouge. Before his time in St. John, George rose through the ranks in Terrebonne and Lafourche parish schools. After he left St. John in 2019, George worked in New Orleans for two years. He spent the first year as CEO of , which operated two schools in New Orleans, educating about 1,300 students. After that, he spent 10 months as chief accountability officer for charter-dominated New Orleans Public Schools.
Jenkins has spent the past year as chief operations officer in the Jefferson Parish school district, the largest district in Louisiana. One of his first jobs was as a math teacher in the 1990s at Istrouma High in Baton Rouge. Between 2003 and 2016, he worked in a variety of administrative roles in the new Zachary school district after it broke away from East Baton Rouge. He was been runner-up for Zachary superintendent in 2012 and in 2023.
In its advertisement for a new superintendent, the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board made it clear it would like a traditional educator, saying Of the 16 remaining applicants, only three appear to fall short of that threshold, namely Hall, Corwin Robinson and Andrea Zayas.
The desire for a grounding in the classroom is partly a response to the hiring of Narcisse, who had just three years of classroom experience when he was hired in 2021. That lack of experience forced the school system to hire a chief academic officer in addition to hiring Narcisse. Seven months after Narcisse was hired, the state lowered the minimum threshold of classroom experience for a traditional superintendent from five to three years, allowing Narcisse to retroactively get superintendent certification.
