Ocean View to choose new superintendent

Ocean View School District board members will meet in closed session on Monday to review applications for a new superintendent.

The school officials will go over the applications with representatives of the Cosca Group, a private firm the district hired to search for a new superintendent after Karen Colby resigned unexpectedly last year. The business includes some prior superintendents.

On Monday, the board members will narrow the field of applicants and determine which candidates to interview. Interviews will begin June 23.

School officials declined to say how many applied for the job, but Edward A. Sussman, who has been serving as the interim superintendent since Dec. 11, was not one of them. Sussman said he plans to return to consulting working for various law firms handling very high-profile cases all over California.

It remains unclear why Colby resigned. School board member George Clemens said it’s a “personnel issue and I can’t talk about that.”

But board member John Briscoe offered a possible clue.

“She was directed by the board to finish up an important clerical job” during a board meeting, Briscoe said, adding this was before he joined the school board. “I was in the audience and heard it.”

Two weeks later at a school board meeting she was asked if the work had been done and she replied it was not completed, Briscoe said.

“The board looked at her and questioned her,” Briscoe said, and her response was, “because I just don’t feel like doing it.”

“When a board votes and tells a superintendent what to do, it’s incumbent upon that superintendent to do what’s directed,” Briscoe said. “You can imagine the temerity of saying that to the board, and that wasn’t the first time that it happened.”

Efforts to contact Colby were unsuccessful.

Morale has improved since Sussman took over, school board member Debbie Cotton said.

“I think the district’s headed in the right direction,” Cotton said. “The staff, both certificated and classified, seem to be so happy. They’re focused. They know what’s expected of them. They have direction.”

“The board is very pleased [to be working with Sussman,]” Cotton said. “There’s a lot of communication going back and forth between the superintendent, his staff and the board of trustees and we’re working as a team.”

The fall semester begins Aug. 30. The board expects to hire a new superintendent by Aug. 1, but the date is “tentative,” Sussman said. “It depends on the availability” of the new hire.