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The timeline for Union Community School District’s superintendent search was moved up by one week during the board of education’s regular meeting on March 21 with 17 candidates submitting applications to helm the district.

The board began its search for a superintendent almost immediately following Union Superintendent Travis Fleshner’s announcement in mid-February that he had been offered a contract to be Aplington-Parkersburg Community School District’s next superintendent beginning July 1.

The Union school board approved Fleshner’s resignation at its February 21 regular meeting and shortly thereafter Union contracted with Grundmeyer Leader Services based out of Huxley, Iowa, to lead the district’s superintendent search.

During the March 21 meeting, board president Corey Lorenzen gave an update on the search process including that the stakeholder survey – pushed out to the public March 4-13 – was complete and a summary of the results had been made available to the board by Grundmeyer for review.

“I think [the survey results] are fairly consistent with what we would expect to see both specific to Union and what you would generally see in any school district,” Lorenzen told the board before asking members to review the results and let him know if they’d like to make any changes or revisions before both the results are made available to superintendent candidates.

Lorenzen then informed the board of a superintendent search timeline issue he had been alerted to by Grundmeyer.

Prior to the meeting, the school board had been set to review the candidate pool – which includes 17 submitted applications – the week of April 4, conduct semifinalist interviews via Zoom the week of April 11, and conduct formal interviews with finalists in-person the week of April 18.

“Many of the [superintendent] candidates are going to need to be making a decision on their own contract that week between [April 11] and [April 18],” Lorenzen said. “The recommendation [from Grundmeyer] is that we move up to [April 11] for our formal interviews because otherwise we’re going to eliminate multiple candidates – and multiple good candidates – out of the process if we hold off until [April 18] for our final interviews.”

Following discussion, board members present gave Lorenzen the go-ahead to move the timeline.

Finalist interviews for Union’s superintendent are now planned for Monday, April 11. The possibility of holding a screener interview the Thursday before was in the works by the end of the board’s discussion but no concrete date had been set as of publication.

Lorenzen then turned to the board’s upcoming work to create two superintendent interview committees consisting of 18-22 members each including at least three Union students, two support staff, five teachers, three administrators/directors, and five community members keeping gender balance in mind.

“As far as community members,” Lorenzen said, “my thought is we need to be very purposeful in people that we’re asking to be on the committee so that we are getting a good mix of both [Dysart and La Porte City] communities and different viewpoints .. and the same thing with teachers, the students, the support staff.”

The time commitment for a committee member would involve being available from roughly 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on April 11.

School board member Jenna Scott asked Lorenzen what would happen if a hypothetical 200 people expressed an interest in serving on a committee, to which Lorenzen said it would be the responsibility of the board to trim the number down.

Lorenzen said an email would be sent out soon to the Union community asking for interested volunteers for the superintendent interview committees.

The plan going forward is to hold a school board meeting April 11 following the finalist interviews. The meeting would include a closed session to choose the next superintendent of Union schools.