‘This does not pass the smell test.’ Rush to hire Miami school superintendent angers many
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Down to three
Jose Dotres, Rafaela Espinal and Jacob Oliva are the finalists to be Miami-Dade Schools superintendent, and the vote could come Monday.
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They say history repeats itself, and Miami-Dade County Public Schools’ superintendent search seems intent on proving that axiom.
In 2008, as the School Board managed the buyout of former Superintendent Rudy Crew’s contract, members agreed to forgo hiring an interim superintendent and instead name a permanent leader before Crew’s last day: Alberto Carvalho, who had been a senior aide to the last three superintendents and started with the district as a teacher in 1990.
“I think it does well to our district to have someone who understands the district and the community and tries to reach out to every group,” said Perla Tabares Hantman, the vice chair of the School Board, said at the time. Today, she’s the chair.
Some members, including Marta Pérez, urged the board not to rush the process.
Now, more than two decades later, as the School Board searches for Carvalho’s successor, similar scenarios have played out — with derisive pushback from community members, parents and teachers over what they say has been a rushed process designed not to elicit community input, nor produce a rich roster of applicants who can address the inequities in a district where students in poorer neighborhoods fail state standardized tests at alarmingly higher rates than students in affluent neighborhoods.
Earlier this month, the board agreed to a seven-day application window and a plan to hire Carvalho’s replacement in a few weeks’ time before his final day, Feb. 3. Many school districts, when hiring a new superintendent, hire an interim leader, set up a search committee comprised of a diverse group of stakeholders and tap a firm to conduct a nationwide search.
“The process was suspect and not in the best interests of Miami-Dade County,’’ said Joseph Gatlin, who answered a query from the Herald asking readers about the process. “Other qualified candidates both internal and external were excluded simply based on the process chosen. This does not pass the smell test.”
“We can’t have a national search because it takes too long?” T. Willard Fair, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Miami, told the Herald earlier this month. Fair maintained that one of Carvalho’s executives should have stepped in while the School Board conducted a deeper search.
The Urban League was one of more than two dozen local groups whose leaders signed and sent a memo to the board, calling on members to reconsider their search. Among the organizations that signed the letter: the League of Women Voters, URGENT Inc., South-Dade NAACP, and the Overtown Youth Center.
Throughout the search process, members have doubled down on one of the key qualifications they say the next leader should embody: Someone with a deep understanding of the Miami-Dade community. (Only one of the three finalists has a long history with Miami-Dade Schools.)
The board also agreed the candidate should be an educator at heart, with classroom, principal and district leadership experience.
Carvalho, 57, announced in December that he was leaving Miami after 14 years as superintendent to head the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest district with about 450,000 students. Miami-Dade, the nation’s fourth-largest district, has a $7 billion budget, nearly 400 schools, 17,000 teachers and 335,000 students between traditional and charter schools.
The three finalists
Sixteen candidates applied for the position by the 5 p.m. Jan. 12 deadline the School Board had set for applications. On Jan. 18, the board narrowed the pool to three finalists: Jose Dotres, Rafaela Espina and Jacob Oliva.
Seven applicants met the board’s criteria, officials said, but the board failed to discuss why Dotres, Espinal or Oliva stood out among the others. Two applicants dropped out before the Tuesday meeting.
Dotres, 59, is the deputy superintendent of Collier County Public Schools, which includes Naples. Before taking that post last year, he was a part of Miami-Dade Public Schools for more than three decades, serving as a teacher, principal, Carvalho’s chief of staff and the district’s HR chief.
Espinal, 51, has more than 28 years’ experience with the New York City Department of Education, including a post as one of its regional superintendents in the Bronx.
Oliva, 47, is senior chancellor at the Florida Department of Education and was superintendent of Flagler County Schools in northeast Florida.
The search process will move forward Monday as School Board members interview the three finalists for the superintendent’s job and “select and appoint a candidate for the position,” according to the meeting’s published agenda.
How to watch Monday’s School Board meeting
The special meeting is set for 2 p.m.; information on the meeting and how to watch it can be found at https://www3.dadeschools.net/SchoolBoard/information.
For its part, the board has defended its timeline and transparency. After a five-hour tense meeting Tuesday in which they narrowed down the list of applicants to three finalists, they agreed that holding public interviews would ensure the public was included in the process.
School Board Vice Chair Steve Gallon III, however, was against the board publicly interviewing the candidates, saying at that meeting that a public interview “creates more liability and exposure for the candidate and for the board.”
In fact, Gallon nominated Dotres to be the next superintendent at the meeting, only to rescind his nomination after fellow board members criticized him for attempting to bypass the process that a majority had agreed on.
In publicizing the Monday meeting on its website, the district said all those interested in submitting a comment or question could do so by submitting their query by Friday, Jan. 21.
“I think it’s important for the public to hear the responses and the temperament [of the candidate] of who we are considering to be the next superintendent,” School Board member Christi Fraga said Tuesday. “It’s important to hear the questions the community has and hear the answers from that candidate.”
Miami Herald Research Director Monika Leal contributed to this report.
This story was originally published January 23, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
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