KSD announces new superintendent!
Courtesy photo New Kellogg School District superintendent Nancy Larsen.
By JOSH MCDONALD
Staff Reporter
Alright, let’s try this again….
The Kellogg School Board of Trustees is happy to announce that Dr. Nancy Larsen has accepted the position of superintendent for the Kellogg School District.
The board met for an emergency session on Tuesday night following last week’s announcement that Lance Pearson could no longer accept the position.
The board spent roughly 30 minutes in executive session discussing their options before recalling the meeting to open session.
After getting back into open session the board took a few moments to discuss the different options that they had come up with.
The first option they looked at was the possibility of reopening the search to fill the position, but that idea was quickly quelled by trustee Bonnie Farmin.
“It’s awfully late in the year,” Farmin said. “When you consider that the fiscal year begins on July 1, and fall sports in the middle of August, and having all of the pieces in place it would be very difficult to review and interview and go through that process again.”
That process has already cost the district several thousands of dollars and would have, like Farmin mentioned, cost them even more time.
The second option was to appoint an interim superintendent, but once again the idea was shot down, this time by trustee Todd Sheppard.
“I’m not a fan of interim because there’s no ownership with interim,” Sheppard said. “We are in an ownership place, to keep the community happy, to keep the district flowing, to keep the kids educated properly in a secure place. I don’t think we gain that if we move forward with an interim position.”
The current climate in certain areas of the Kellogg School District looks to need immediate attention and the idea of an interim superintendent lends to Sheppard’s concerns.
Board chairman Art Krulitz then proceeded with the third and final option.
“We had two candidates and we could offer the position to Dr. Nancy Larsen to be the new superintendent,” Krulitz said. “Lance is gone and he’s not coming back. We were in awkward position with this, but this is an option we have.”
Trustee Carolyn Turner took a moment to weigh the options before making the motion to offer the position to Larsen, a motion that was quickly seconded by trustee Sam Gibbons, and passed by a unanimous vote.
Although this is the second time in less than 30 days that the board has selected a superintendent to take over for the retiring Woody Woodford, the board is optimistic that they made the right choice.
Larsen, the current curriculum director for KSD, was narrowly passed over last month in favor of Pearson after a grueling, drawn out process.
“We had two excellent candidates and we really agonized over that decision last month,” Krulitz said. “We spent almost four hours in here going over those two candidates it was so close.”
Pearson, the superintendent for Victor Public Schools in Victor, Montana, contacted Krulitz last Wednesday to give him the details as to why he couldn’t take the position.
“I informed Art (Krulitz) yesterday (Wednesday) that on Monday night the Victor School Board voted unanimously not to let me out of my contract,” Pearson said. “I am finishing the first year of a three year contract and when I applied at Kellogg, things were pretty stable in Victor. Since then, several key employees have retired or found another job and the Victor School Board felt like my exodus would be severely detrimental to the students of Victor. My contract says we must ‘mutually agree’ to terminate it. Although I was disappointed in their decision, I actually understand their position and do not hold any animosity towards them.”
Victor Public School also lost their current K through 8 principal to a superintendent job in Darby, Montana.
Larsen is also currently the curriculum director for the Wallace School District, so both they and KSD will need to fill that position.