Confidential searches: will Cincinnati's stealth superintendent hunt become tomorrow's standard protocol?

School Administrator, June, 2003 by Linda Chion Kenney

The call came out of the blue. In fact, Alton Frailey is surprised to this day that he even answered the telephone because it was after hours and he was wrapping up a quick meeting in his school district office in Houston, Texas.

The call was from Nancy Noeske, a search consultant in Milwaukee, who wanted to talk to Frailey about his aspirations for becoming a superintendent. It was the third time the 42-year-old administrator, who started as a teacher in 1983, had been approached by a search firm to talk about his career objectives, and this time he took the bait, because this time there was nothing specific to talk about.

Or so he thought.

What Frailey didn't know is that the call he answered triggered a chain of events that not only would lead to him being named superintendent in Cincinnati, Ohio, but also launched a vigorous debate over how far a search firm could--and should--go in ensuring the privacy of superintendent candidates.

One thing is certain: Frailey, by his own admission, would not have entertained, let alone accepted, the top school system position in Cincinnati had it not been for an understanding of confidentiality from the start. As Frailey himself put it, six months after accepting the job in Cincinnati: "I would not have been here had I not been able to keep my name out of the public eye, at least through that first round of discussions."

Blanket Protection

Noteworthy about the process that catapulted Frailey from assistant superintendent in Houston's 32,000-student Spring Branch Independent School District to superintendent of the 42,000-student Cincinnati schools is the extreme secrecy surrounding his naming as the first African-American male to lead Ohio's third-largest school district. After what the Cincinnati Enquirer called "a lightning-quick, two-day interview process held in private meetings," Frailey was hired on Sept. 6, 2002, to succeed outgoing superintendent Steven Adamowski, who left one month earlier for a university post in St. Louis.

The specifics are even more telling.

"We simply didn't create a record," Noeske says about the Cincinnati search, in which she interviewed the candidates by phone and took notes, not by surnames, but by code names, such as: "Candidate One" and "Candidate Two." Indeed, it was a process similar to that used by her company, Milwaukee-based Proact Search, in New Orleans in 1998, in which the search materials were, as Noeske puts it, "sanitized."

Noeske, in executive session, briefed the Cincinnati school board about the candidates, but kept their identities secret, and so, presumably, off the record. The candidates made their own arrangements to fly in for an interview and were reimbursed in cash. They checked into their hotel rooms under their code names and brought with them resumes and other background materials for the board's perusal.

"They distributed their own materials and collected them before they left, knowing that if they left them behind, they would become part of the public record," says Noeske, formerly with Overton Consulting. "So the records were never mine, or the board's, to give."

The Cincinnati Enquirer, arguing that the steps taken violated the First Amendment and Ohio's Public Records Act, challenged the school board in federal court. A judge in February rejected the newspaper's claim.

Beauty Pageants

With legal action on the Cincinnati case pending in state supreme court, search consultants and superintendents offered their views on how far confidentiality should go given the realities of today's shrinking labor pool, the growing politicization of the superintendent position, and the increasingly demanding and specific hiring criteria established by school boards, particularly in this era of high-stakes testing. Throw into the mix the ubiquitous--and some would say insidious--reach of the Internet, and the argument is extended for the case of confidentiality, at least through the initial stages of a search.

Veteran superintendent Joan Kowal, who earlier this year was between jobs and considering another superintendent search, says her late husband, a headhunter for Fortune 500 companies, used to marvel at the steps she took to advance her career.

"When he watched what I would go through as a superintendent candidate, he would mention to me that he would never get qualified candidates to consider other opportunities if they had to contend with the way most superintendent searches are conducted," says Kowal, who served as a district superintendent in California, Missouri and twice in Florida. "Florida is extremely open. From the time you submit your application, literally, it is a public document, and so, too, are the supporting documents."

Noeske raises what she calls the "beauty pageant" aspect of the traditional superintendent search, in which the candidates meet with community groups in public meetings well attended by the media. "Let's say a really top-notch person is one of the final three candidates, but that particular hometown paper doesn't like them and publishes an unflattering editorial," Noeske says.