School trustees praised for courage in hiring Skorkowsky as new leader
Clark County School Board members intended to send a message when they suddenly and unanimously appointed Pat Skorkowsky permanent superintendent Tuesday night.
The message, according to sources close to the decision: Board members are in control, not special interest groups attempting to steer the search from the sidelines.
It took “a lot of courage” for the board to hire Skorkowsky as permanent superintendent, said board member and past President Linda Young, noting that her colleagues were “being hammered to do a national search by some special interest groups and politically powerful individuals.”
She wouldn’t name the groups or influential community members who pressured fellow board members, but Young said she wasn’t lobbied herself. She has opposed doing a national search since Superintendent Dwight Jones resigned on March 22.
Young has steadily pushed for Skorkowsky to finish the remaining year and a half of Jones’ contract, which she believed would give stability to the Clark County School District, the fifth-largest in the nation.
But Young’s requests fell on deaf ears until Tuesday, the continuation of a meeting that started Monday. Heavy hitters, such as former Nevada first lady Sandy Miller, voiced opinions Monday on what the board should do. Input ranged from the Las Vegas Metro Chamber of Commerce supporting a national search, to the Clark County Education Association advocating for Skorkowsky.
Up to that point, six board members were entertaining a search.
In March, Young voted against negotiating a contract with search firm McPherson & Jacobson to look nationally for a new superintendent. But she was the only dissenting vote on the seven-member board.
The board’s initial plan: McPherson would seek candidates and identify finalists for the School Board. That’s how it’s been done for every superintendent hired in recent history. The Omaha-based firm in question was the same one that brought Jones to Clark County in 2010.
The board’s original goal was to hire a superintendent in the fall. But after pausing search firm negotiations for more than a month, the School Board abandoned McPherson & Jacobson on Tuesday, before appointing Skorkowsky.
Several board members said they lost confidence in the firm after examining its actions in the 2010 superintendent search. In that search, the firm presented finalists after vetting a large group of candidates. Two candidates rose to the top, and one was Jones.
“Credible sources have said, ‘Please, don’t let it be like last time. The fix was in for Dwight,’ ” board member Lorraine Alderman said in a Friday interview. Alderman was not on the board that hired Jones.
She has been presented no direct proof, “but where there’s enough smoke, there’s fire,” Alderman said.
Young also noted “irregularities” with McPherson’s 2010 search.
“It had the perception to me that it was fixed,” Young said, without specifying by whom. “We weren’t allowed to review how they arrived at the two final candidates, and my request for additional candidates to be added to the finalists list was denied.”
Influential community members also were trying to influence the choice then, district sources said. They pushed Jones to the top of the list when he might not have qualified as a finalist, one board member said.
“They’ll (McPherson & Jacobson) deny it until the cows come home, but that’s what appeared to have happened,” Young insisted.
Young was on the board in 2010 and stood alone in voting not to hire Jones.
“I didn’t vote against Dwight Jones. I voted against the process,” Young said.
This time, six other board members came around to Young’s way of thinking and voted 7-0 on Tuesday to begin negotiating solely with Skorkowsky for the permanent position, not even allowing other local candidates to apply. Board members wasted no time, conducting an impromptu interview and hiring Skorkowsky within two hours.
But was it the right way to stand up to the kind of pressure common to elected officials?
No, said Martin Dean Dupalo, president of the Nevada Center for Public Ethics, a nonprofit watching the behavior of Nevada politicians.
“Clearly, behind-the-scenes politics hijacked the public process,” Dupalo said.
Why else would the board, which has been cautious and methodical up to now, rush to hire permanently an interim superintendent who has only been on the job two months, Dupalo asked.
“And, at no point, should you schedule a surprise interview near 11 p.m.,” he added. “Politics in the middle of the night is never healthy for the public.”
The School Board potentially violated the Nevada open meeting law with the unnoticed interview and vaguely noticed vote to hire Skorkowsky, said Las Vegas attorney Jacob Hafter, citing precedents set by the Nevada Supreme Court and the Nevada attorney general.
The board has also skipped its standard protocol in hiring a superintendent, said Dupalo, who has run for School Board in the past.
“That vetting process is there for a reason,” he said.
When the School Board last hired an internal candidate, Walt Rulffes in 2006, it followed the attorney general’s guidelines and gave public notice every step of the way, from the interview to the vote to hire him. Rulffes was also the interim co-superintendent at the time. In that case, the School Board told the public when the interviews would take place, televised them live and provided questions to the candidates in advance.
Board member Patrice Tew argued she didn’t vote for Skorkowsky to push back public pressure for a national search. She had “conversations” with community members but nothing more, she said.
The reason the board hired Skorkowsky so suddenly without considering other candidates was that “no other person in the county is up to the challenge,” said Tew, who has been on the board five months.
“There are no national candidates that could match him,” she added. “I have no apology for that.”
But the School Board can’t know who’s best for the job if they don’t look, Dupalo said.
Hiring Skorkowsky as a political maneuver only hurts him, said Dupalo, who attended Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz School of Public Policy and Management in Pittsburgh.
“This is not an auspicious start,” he said. “It’s one that only continues the string of questions and accusations from 2010.”
Contact reporter Trevon Milliard at
tmilliard@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0279.
