Interviews for the Next Superintendent of the Cuyahoga Valley Career Center to Begin This Week

This week, the ’s Board of Education will interview six candidates for the position of superintendent.

The center’s current superintendent, Roscoe Schlachter, will step down in June 2011, according to a press release from the center. The application process to find his replacement began in December and closed on Feb. 18. 

The center serves as a career technical high school for eight local school districts, including Brecksville-Broadview Heights. It also provides career development programming for students of all ages in those districts and offers adult education courses. Whoever takes over as superintendent will have to be able to balance those services.  

The board wants the next superintendent to have a strategic vision for the future of the center, and make sure it keeps up with the changes of the world, said Board President Steve Shebeck.

“It’s going to be challenging,” he said.

And it was important to have candidates who had knowledge of both career technical education and adult education, said Kendall Lee of the Ohio School Boards Association. Lee was a consultant on the search, helping guide the board through the process and recruit candidates. He said that the board did a good job of collecting information from different stakeholders, allowing more people to be involved in the search process. 

The six candidates were narrowed down from a pool of 36 applicants, who Lee said came from as far as Montana and Arizona. 

According to a press release, the search committee used comments from the Ohio School Boards Association to narrow down the candidates. The board will now meet with the candidates on March 23 and 24.

Each interview will take about 45 minutes, Shebeck said, and the board will have the chance to discuss the candidates afterward. 

Once the interviews are completed, the board will choose two to three candidates to ask back for a second round, according to the press release.

According to the release, the candidates are:

• Wayne Blankenship, superintendent of the Nordonia Hills School District
• David Dunn, superintendent of the Norton City School District 
• Mark North, superintendent of the Lebanon City School District
• Kathleen Herrmann, a director at the Lucas County Educational Service Center
• Steven Farnsworth, superintendent of the Hudson City Schools
• Celena Roebuck, assistant superintendent at the Cuyahoga Valley Career Center