The Tennessee School Board Association will be assisting Cumberland County Schools in the search for a new director of schools.
Cumberland County School Board Member Jon Matthews said TSBA will be handling the application process and will be recommending the best candidates. Matthews said though TSBA is handling the process, the school board will ultimately make the hire.
“They’ll send us, let’s say, three or five candidates, something like that, where we’ll have the opportunity to review those and ask some of them for interviews, and we will kind of start narrowing the field down from that,” Matthews said.
Matthews said the school board is paying TSBA to help with the hiring process. Matthews said TSBA has a broader outreach, and financially, it made sense.
“By the time you figure how much it costs us in hourly wages to let our own people do it as compared to them and they’ve already got a process and everything in place to be able to check the references and to be able to, you know, hit the background and this that and the other, it’s really a simplification for us.”
Many citizens believe the school board is not on the same page as the school system has had multiple directors over the past several years.
“I think we are all looking for the best candidate for our kids,” Matthews said. “We are looking for the best candidate to take our schools somewhere where we have never been before, and I would hope that that’s the opinion of everybody on the school board.”
Matthews said he is not sure when TSBA will open applications for the director position.
