By By BETTY MITCHELL GRAY
Staff Writer
The Beaufort County Board of Education has received more than 20 applications for the position of superintendent of Beaufort County Schools, the consultant leading the search said in an e-mail sent late Monday to the Washington Daily News.
The application deadline was Tuesday.
“I think it is very fair to say that there has been a great deal of interest, and we have already received over 20 applications,” said Allison Schafer, director of policy and legal counsel for the N.C. School Boards Association, which is conducting the search.
Shafer declined to comment further about the applicant pool.
That number is slightly higher than the number of applications received when the school board conducted a search earlier this year, school-board member Mike Isbell said in an interview Tuesday.
“I have not seen any of them, but I have been told that the pool is impressive,” Isbell said. “I’m real optimistic about the search.”
School-board member Cindy Winstead was pleased to learn of the number of applicants.
“It’s exciting to me,” she said. “This will give us a large pool to chose from.”
The school board is scheduled to meet in a closed session Oct. 19 to review the applications and choose candidates to interview for the post, school officials said Tuesday.
Under a schedule approved by the school board in August, the board is expected to interview applicants and select finalists the week of Nov. 2-6; will interview finalists and check references the week of Nov. 19-24, and announce the selection of a new superintendent Tuesday, December 1.
The board agreed to pay a fee of $8,500 for the search, plus all out-of-pocket expenses incurred by the association during the search, under a contract approved by the school board.
Much of the advertising for the position was via Internet newsletters and Web sites of the National School Boards Association, the N.C. Association of School Administrators, the N.C. Department of Public Instruction, American Association of School Administrators and school administrators and associations in South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.