BY MATTHEW E. MILLIKEN

mmilliken@heraldsun.com; 419-6684

DURHAM -- Durham's school board put off selecting a search firm Thursday night. However, it laid down some ground rules for hiring a new superintendent.

With member Stephen Martin absent from Thursday's monthly school board meeting due to illness, the panel delayed choosing from one of four search proposals. That will be done Dec. 1, although board member Fredrick Davis might be out of town then.

The selection will be made at most a few hours before the board holds a kitchen table conversation at which it will solicit opinions from the community on what qualities to seek in the next schools chief.

Superintendent Carl Harris announced Nov. 2 that he will leave in January for a U.S. Department of Education job.

The board has search proposals from the North Carolina School Boards Association; Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates (Glenview, Ill.), Ray and Associates (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) and Jim Huge and Associates (San Francisco). All but the first were recommended by the Broad Foundation of Los Angeles.

The board also has a proposal from the Center for Reform of School Systems, a Houston-based organization tied to the Broad Foundation, to conduct a training session on superintendent searches.

After moving the search-firm selection deadline, the board heard comments from three members of the public. That led to setting a few ground rules for the search.

Durham Council of PTAs vice president Elizabeth Chandler requested a forum in which the public could question three finalists for the superintendent job.

Kristy Moore, the president of the Durham Association of Educators, asked the board to appoint someone who will be open to hearing from front-line employees.

"We need somebody who will not make top-down decisions but will listen to those of us who are in a classroom every day," Moore said.

She asked that the community have a voice in the superintendent selection process.

Parent Natalie Beyer, of late a regular speaker at board meetings, asked the panel to shun the Broad Foundation, a self-described venture philanthropy organization.

Broad has promoted charter schools, performance-linked teacher pay, longer school days and school years, and increased mayoral control of school districts, among other ideas. Last summer the board completed two years of training with the Center for Reform of School Systems that were sponsored by Broad.

"We must keep the influence of venture philanthropy in its appropriate place," Beyer said. "In a transparent debate about what our schools should be."

She asked that the board spurn search firms with Broad ties and make teachers and parents voting members of the search committee.

The comments led to some discussion on search conduct. Chairwoman Minnie Forte-Brown, evidently with her colleagues' support, asserted that there will not be public interviews or non-board selectors in the search.

By publicizing candidates, Forte-Brown said, "We'd run off any candidate that had any interest in coming here.... Confidentiality is the name of the game."

Search experts say sitting superintendents don't wish to jeopardize their current jobs by having candidacies elsewhere made public.

Board member Kirsten Kainz asked Forte-Brown if any non-board-members could vote on the next superintendent. She was told no.

"Is that because we're fascist dictators?" Kainz asked. "What's the rationale for that?"

"That is the law," Forte-Brown replied.

School board attorney Ann Majestic noted that applications for public school jobs are confidential under state law and that finalists' identities could only be made known with their consent.

Forte-Brown and others asserted that the Dec. 1 kitchen table conversation will be the first of multiple opportunities for the public to express qualities it wants in the next superintendent.