BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
The Palo Alto school board has picked its next superintendent with hopes of bringing stability and a cultural reset to the district that is fighting several lawsuits, is in the midst of tense teacher contract talks and a debate over student suicides.
Word that the board has settled on a finalist comes just 102 days after Don Austin announced he would be stepping down. The board paid Austin $596,802 to resign without a fight.
“All five of us are confident that our finalist is the leader who can build a lasting trust and respect with our community,” said a statement issued by the district, attributing the comment to board members Shounak Dharap and Rowena Chiu.
The board will announce its finalist after finishing contract negotiations. The contract will be approved on June 16, Dharap and Chiu said.
The district’s search firm, McPherson & Jacobson, received 34 applicants from across the state and country. The field was then narrowed to six.
The board used a student panel and a community panel with parents, teachers, school employees and union leaders to do interviews and give feedback over the weekend.
The board and the panels met for nine hours on Saturday and 15 hours on Sunday.
The field was narrowed down to two, and the board deliberated past 10 p.m.
“All our candidates were exceptionally qualified, and the board worked hard to make the difficult decision of choosing one finalist,” Dharap and Chiu said.
HR Director Herb Espiritu, 44, of San Jose, has been running the district since Superintendent Don Austin and Acting Superintendent Trent Bahadursingh were paid to resign.
The board agreed to give Austin $596,802 on Feb. 20 and Bahadursingh $346,673 on March 17. The board didn’t say why they left, and their separation agreements were approved behind closed doors.
Austin had been superintendent since 2018, the longest in his position since 1975.
The district was in the middle of a dozen lawsuits, tense labor negotiations and three student suicides in the past two years.
Teacher’s union president Tom Culbertson said Austin’s departure “marked the conclusion of a difficult chapter … defined by top-down mandates and a breakdown in the collaborative spirit.”
“The damage to morale and the erosion of professional trust cannot be ignored,” Culbertson said in a statement at the time.
Make no mistake: In reality they both got “FIRED” for massively screwing up the Colombo situation! When Colombo kept showing up they ran out of options and all the secrets and injustice would have come out at trial so they end up paying the guy 3.25 million to just go away. According to district records that is the biggest payout, period, in the history of PAUSD and this was on their watch, of course heads needed to roll.
All they needed to do from the beginning was pay the guy his final years salary of something like 850,000 and end of situation but they tried to bully Colombo into going away and they obviously fu……with the wrong marine! lol…. (A Few Good Men movie).
Hopefully the new Sup cleans house and resets how PAUSD handles all facets of running the district starting with honesty and professionalism.
The board is galloping along rather quickly to get a new superintendent on board before the next election. What if the next board (and we know there will be two new faces because Dharap and Segal aren’t running) decides they want somebody else as superintendent, but they’re stuck with the guy the board is hiring now? I suspect in the next election, the board will move away from the “social-emotional well-being” framework, which resulted in the dumbing down of academics and a suicide crisis. In its place will be a stronger focus on academics and a policy supporting academic acceleration for advanced learners.