As the Interim Superintendent Departs, AISD’s New Board Gets a Running Start

Departing Interim Superintendent Anthony Mays (Courtesy of Austin ISD)

Austin ISD's Board of Trustees, with four new members coming on in January, already expected a busy new year hiring a superintendent. Now, with interim leader Anthony Mays leaving to take the helm at Alief ISD in Harris County, the new board will be diving straight into hiring another interim by Dec. 15, per outgoing Board Pres­ident Gero­ni­mo Rodriguez's statement released Wednesday.

"I think [the new trustees] are going to hit the ground running, not only because of their preparation, but because they kind of have no choice," Arati Singh, who won reelection in Place 9, told the Chronicle. "There's something about selecting a leader that brings a board together, because it really forces us to distill what we think the district needs right now."

Several trustees agree that what the district needs from an interim right now is very different from what it will need from the permanent superintendent the board plans to hire by July 1. Candace Hunter, trustee-elect for Northeast Austin's District 1, says she's looking for someone for the interim who's a comfortable fit with the AISD Central Office. "That person is going to have to really hold steady. Which is kind of funny, because that's exactly what I've been asking the district not to do, because we've been steadily heading toward a cliff."

But a "forever superintendent" should be ready to shake things up, she says; for Hunter, Mays' departure is a good thing, creating a clean slate in the wake of former superintendent Stephanie Elizalde, whose relationship with AISD teachers eroded as she placed more administrative burdens on them. Hunter feels Mays is competent but too close to "Dr. Elizalde 2.0," but Singh saw a positive shift in the climate at Central Office under Mays and thinks he could have been a contender. From her time working with Elizalde, Singh said she's learned that, for the board, "it's equally important to hire the right person as it is to manage that person well."

To get the hire right, Kathryn Whitley Chu, newly elected to Northwest Austin's District 4, has advocated for a much more transparent process than the one that led to Elizalde's hire – a desire echoed by Hunter and Singh. Chu wants to start with a public profile of an ideal-scenario hire. "When we talk about AISD a lot of times we talk about the constraints the state puts on us," Chu said. "[But] this is gonna be somebody's dream job."

While Hunter and Chu feel that the final two or three candidates, at minimum, need to be made public, Singh said she'd be open to a more secretive hiring process to encourage candidates to apply without fear of being outed to their current employers. In that case, Singh would like selected community members to interview the finalists after signing nondisclosure agreements. But she said because the community is asking for transparency and the new members were "part of the community when we went through that [2020 hiring] process, I'm really gonna value what they say they wish we would have done as a board."

At Singh's suggestion – approved by Rod­ri­guez, who was defeated for reelection by Andrew Gonzales in South Austin's District 6 – the new trustees joined the current board for a Tuesday night meeting, which included an executive session over dinner to discuss their goals in the hiring process.

The outgoing and incoming trustees agreed to create and share their recruiting, selection, and hiring processes after new members are seated Dec. 1, though it's unclear how many candidates will be made public. At that meeting, they'll start by discussing a search firm. Ahead of the interim hire, they've decided to start with a "short series of listening sessions."