Seattle Sup Next Job?

New hunt for chief of schools may be on horizon

By Sanjay Bhatt
Seattle Times staff reporter

Two years after Seattle's national superintendent search failed, the school district may be a year away from another search, this time to replace Superintendent Raj Manhas.

Manhas, 53, who says he has no plans to leave, faces at least two more years with a deeply divided School Board, a community backlash to his school-consolidation proposal and inescapable budget cuts guaranteed to rile parents.

Consider:

• The average tenure of urban school superintendents is just under three years. Manhas is in the second year of his three-year contract, and national searches generally take seven months, from hiring a search firm to landing a new leader.

• Manhas is working with a School Board that voted 4-3 in fall 2004 on his contract. Last week's election didn't alter that political balance.

• Diverse groups, including Manhas' own advisory committee, say the district's leadership is weak and unfocused. The committee's consultant, Grove Insight, recently reported that focus groups considered Manhas' school-consolidation proposal as "one of the district's biggest blunders."

For his part, Manhas acknowledges that leadership changes, budget problems and negative publicity have affected the morale of central-office staff.

But he's buoyed by strong support from the district's unions and says he's confident he can work with any board.

"I really don't know if I have even 4-3 right now, but we'll see," he said. "So long [as] I feel that we're making progress and I'm being effective, I will continue to do this job."

Earlier this month the district began taking applications for a replacement for Chief Academic Officer Steve Wilson, who will retire next summer.

Manhas acknowledges that the chief academic officer (CAO) position is a natural steppingstone to his job. The CAO is the highest-ranking official in the district responsible for what students learn and for how they're taught and tested.

After Joseph Olchefske stepped down as superintendent in June 2003, the board asked Manhas, then chief operating officer for less than two years, to take command temporarily.

Four finalists bowed out of Seattle's national search in October 2003, and the board then voted 6-1 to give a one-year contract to Manhas, a former Seattle Public Utilities executive.

A new, more-critical board was elected in November 2003. A year later, the relationship hadn't improved. Manhas held onto his job only after a contentious 4-3 vote on a three-year contract. Last month, the board barely approved a cost-of-living increase for Manhas, with no discussion of a merit-pay raise.

As a result of the district's political and financial problems, top talent probably would cost Seattle significantly more than Manhas' $175,000 base salary, said Paul Hill, director of the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education.

"Superintendent pay is going up a lot," Hill said. And, "Seattle has a reputation as a combat zone now. It didn't before."

According to Portland-based Grove Insight, Seattle residents want "a visionary leader who is both charismatic and approachable," and often mention John Stanford, a retired Army major general who roared into the Seattle superintendency in 1995. He died from leukemia in 1998.

Outgoing School Board member Dick Lilly said it's a mistake for the district to go looking for "a superintendent on a white horse."

"I think with a stronger School Board and better alignment between the School Board and the superintendent — in other words, where three people aren't constantly voting no and chipping away at him — you'd have a better school district," Lilly said.

The board members who have voted against Manhas' contract previously — Darlene Flynn, Mary Bass and Sally Soriano — haven't proposed a new search.

"I think that we have to figure out how to get the systemic change we need to assure we're going to have improvement in our schools," Flynn said in an earlier interview. "Because of the level of disruption that would be connected to a superintendent search, I am not convinced that's the best strategy."

Soriano suggested in Manhas' performance review that he be terminated for failing to ensure his senior staff members were responsive to board members' questions.

"The people who work for the Superintendent are not giving the Board what it requests," Soriano wrote. "Instead, often they are being as deceptive as possible and are not forthcoming with the information."

Manhas disagreed: "We have done an amazing amount of work, and I do not agree that we have not responded to the board's areas of focus and interest. We can always improve, no question."