The search for the Riverhead Central School District’s next superintendent is currently underway.

The Riverhead school board has met with the official leading the search and will begin advertising for the position early next week, officials said in a presentation and subsequent interview last night. The board hopes to have the next superintendent hired by mid-March, allowing the superintendent to help fill other vacancies within the district’s central administration.

The search for the next superintendent, who will serve as the school district’s chief executive officer, is being led by East Suffolk BOCES. Eastern Suffolk BOCES Chief Operating Officer David Wicks, a former Riverhead School administrator, gave the board an overview of the search process at Tuesday’s school board meeting.

Wicks said he first met with the school board on Oct. 15 to discuss the selection process for the next superintendent, how to announce the search and priorities for the next superintendent. He said a job posting for the position could go out as early as Monday.

The position will be advertised in many places, according to Wicks, including the New York State Board of School Superintendents, the New York State School Board Association and the School Administrators Association of New York State. It will also be sent to all BOCES in New York State.

“So potentially the 730-plus school districts in New York State will see that there is a vacancy for a superintendent, for the purpose of soliciting those applications,” Wicks said.

The job posting will also be shared with “affinity groups” like the Long Island Black Educators Association and the Long Island Latino Teacher Association, Wicks said.

As candidates apply for the position, Wicks will gather public feedback on the search. A survey will be conducted “not only of those directly connected to the school, but also of the community at large,” Wicks said. “The purpose of this community survey is to give all members of this community the opportunity to give you the information they feel they need to inform you regarding the superintendent search.”

Riverhead School Board President James Scudder said the survey will be available in “all languages.”

Wicks said he would then work with the board to identify stakeholder groups he could meet with while posting the position. Wicks will spend about an hour with each of them and have “in-depth, open conversations about what these groups are looking for in their next superintendent,” he said. Scudder said these groups will include the district’s parent teacher organizations, its Special Education Parent Teacher Association (SEPTA), and bargaining units within unions representing district employees.

Once applications close, Wicks will work directly with Interim Superintendent Cheryl Pedisich and Interim Assistant Superintendent for Business Marianne Cartisano to select all applicants. In January, Wicks will meet with the school board to discuss each candidate who applied and the results of the selection process, leading to the first round of candidate interviews in mid-January. Wicks will also discuss the results of the stakeholder meetings and community survey with the board.

A second and possibly final round of interviews could conclude in early February, with an offer to the candidate delivered by mid-February and a contract negotiated and adopted by the board in March, Wicks said.

“There was a desire here that the board appoint your next superintendent by March 18, so that they could potentially be involved in filling any vacant leadership positions that you may have, with the hopes of that no one starting July 1,” Wicks said. .

Scudder said hiring a superintendent earlier in the year would give the district an advantage when it comes to hiring people in high administrative positions.

“For a superintendent coming in… if he knows he can hire (and) he has a say in who he works with in his office, instead of (saying) these are the people you have, this could deter some. superintendents are moving away,” Scudder said. “He’s like the general manager of a baseball team. They want their people, they want their coach, their managers, things like that. It’s the same thing. But it is not because they would come and have their say that the board of directors will automatically approve it,” he added.

In addition to the superintendent position, the district’s three assistant superintendent positions are also filled by interim employees. Pedisich and Cartisano, both retired superintendents, were hired in part to help restructure the district’s administration, school board members said.

Pedisich and Cartisano were hired after the abrupt resignations of former Superintendent Augustine Tornatore and Assistant Superintendent for Business Rodney Asse late last year; their temporary contracts have been extended until the end of the current school year. Other administrators retired or left the district at the end of the last school year; the school board took the opportunity to restructure the top positions.

At the Oct. 29 school board meeting, Riverhead Central Teachers Association President Gregory Wallace asked school board members to consider the needs of the district’s teachers in the search for the next superintendent. The union, he said, is represented on committees established to make hiring recommendations to all district administrators except the superintendent.

“We’ve had five superintendents since I’ve been in this position, and by July 1, we’ll have our sixth,” Wallace said.

Wallace said administrators’ obsession with “fixing” test scores should “immediately disqualify this person.” That sentence shows the person has “the arrogance to think they can fix Riverhead,” he said.

“I want to put it on the record: We don’t need someone to fix us. What we really need is someone to support us and a superintendent can’t support us unless he knows who we are, what we do, why we do it, and then he has to take the time to understand how we got here. “Wallace said.

The district and its students face many challenges, Wallace said. He said the district needs leaders “cut from the same cloth” as Pedisich and Cartisano for whom, while he doesn’t agree with every decision made, he has respect and admiration.

“Finally, for the Board of Education, a lot depends on the selection of our next leader,” Wallace said. “We are counting on you.”