The Garfield Re-2 School board interviewed companies to help with the search for a new superintendent during the Nov. 13 regular meeting. 

Heather Grumley, current superintendent of Garfield Re-2 School District, announced in October her upcoming retirement at the end of the 2024-25 school year in June. 

Grumley and the school board are looking for help to find a good superintendent for the Garfield Re-2 School District and during the meeting, interviewed three companies that have thrown their names into the ring. 

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Chris Whetzel, CEO and founder of Coaching2tnl and a lead consultant for Grundmeyer Leader Services, presented to the board first. 

“I want to narrow in on the search process and talk to you about how we do it differently, to bring objectivity, transparency and integrity to the process,” Whetzel said. “That’s really important when we’re looking for a superintendent, it’s a high stakes decision.”

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Whetzel told the board that there would be four meetings if they went with Grundmeyer Leader Services. 

“The first meeting is a planning meeting,” Whetzel said. “We sit down and we talk about these things: What are the qualifications that you want for your superintendent?…we may get down to four key things, or maybe it’s more.” 

The second meeting would be recruiting people based on those qualifications and developing screening questions. 

“You see every application,” Whetzel said. “Along with the activity I’ve had, talking to people. I keep it very confidential, but you will see and feel every activity.” 

During the third meeting, screening will take place, where all the semi-finalists will be live on Zoom. 

Part of the application for Grundmeyer means having all of their social media postings shown to the board and taking a leadership assessment test to evaluate how they do under pressure. 

“Once you have chosen your person, we offer one more thing,” Whetzel said. “We meet with the hired person and the board, we help them with an entry plan…we facilitate a discussion about how the new superintendent’s going to be evaluated. We also share with them the results of the advanced insights (leadership assessment test).” 

Whetzel reiterated the integrity, transparency and objectivity he believed in while answering questions from the board. 

Ken Haptonstall, the executive director of Colorado River Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES), went on to present the company McPherson & Jacobson L.L.C., along with Norman Ridder, the owner of McPherson & Jacobson, to the board. 

“McPherson & Jacobson is a leading national firm,” Ridder said. “You guys on the Western Slope have a culture that is a very attractive area.”

Ridder stated that McPherson & Jacobson believe that every student is entitled to high quality education and that education is dependent on quality leadership. Their mission is to ensure that each search results in quality leadership for education excellence. 

“We as a search firm do not hire a superintendent, you guys do,” Ridder said to the board. “We work for you in bringing attractive candidates to you. We work strictly for the school board.”

Ridder said that the investment from the Garfield Re-2 board will not exceed $17.5k and that it might be less than that, where McPherson & Jacobson will have five phases in choosing the superintendent. 

Most of the phases were similar to Grundmeyer Leader Services, however, one difference was having a meeting with stakeholders and gathering their input. 

“The board identifies which groups they need to talk to,” Ridder said. “We can use a partner of ours called A12 Insights, which will basically send out surveys to everyone in your district.” 

The last company to present was G&H Associates from Roger Good. 

“The challenge you have in front of you is hiring an executive for what I believe to be a $60 million business,” Good said. “That’s a formidable task.”

What makes G&H unique, Good said, is that he has been on school boards for a number of different challenges and his partner is a superintendent on the western slope. 

“We have the ability to understand the role on both sides of the table,” Good said. 

He also said being the third to present is hard because they do a lot of the same things that the other companies do. 

“There’s a lot of similarities; you’ll see all the applicants, we’ll screen it down…we’ll provide you with videos of the screening,” Good said. 

However, he said there’s a number of things they do differently. 

“We found that coming to the town…we’ll spend time here, live in your community for a number of days, talk to people here during the day, talk to your police chief, talk to your chamber of commerce,” Good said. “One of the things that I always like to understand about a district is ‘are you the superintendent who lives in a school building or the superintendent who lives in the community’?”

The best way Good said they can do that is spending time in town and keeping in close contact with the board. 

“One of the other things we do a little bit differently…there’s an interviewing technique called behavioral interviewing,” Good said. “The premise behind it is past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior.”

He said they use this technique as one to extract as much information as they can from candidates despite having only a small amount of time with them. 

After all the presentations, the Garfield Re-2 School Board thanked all the presenters, but has not made a decision on which company they’ll go with yet.