What changed?
What happened between June and December to alter the thinking of School Board members about deliberating lengthily and searching widely for a permanent superintendent?
When the questions were posed to Dr. Steve Levin, he answered succinctly.
“Nothing changed,” he said.
On Dec. 12, six months before an announcement was expected, the widely popular Leslie Lockhart was elevated from interim to permanent superintendent.
A 30-year veteran of the School District, Ms. Lockhart was promoted because The Force was with her.
Dr. Levin said there was not one single moment when a bulb lit for the School Board. “We all have gotten to know her over the years she has been here,” he said.
The Board nevertheless chose to follow traditional procedure.
“As elected officials,” Dr. Levin began to explain, because of the Brown Act, “there are some things you can do in closed session and some things you can do in public. All of it has to be done at a (School Board) meeting.
“So it is hard to predict what is going to happen until you get into
a meeting and can talk about it.”
Once the closed session was convened at December’s only School Board meeting, “everybody felt like
- “We were in agreement and
- From a survey it sounded as if the community was in agreement.
“Therefore,” said Dr. Levin, “it just wasn’t worth spending money to go do a search to investigate other candidates when we had somebody right in front of us we all agreed on.”
The congenial Ms. Lockhart, appointed interim last June shortly after the Board surprised most of the community by making a change, was favored from the first moment.
In June, July, August, September, October and November, “all five of us, independently, already thought Leslie was the right candidate,” Dr. Levin said. “But we didn’t want to move forward without giving the community an opportunity for input.
“Maybe somebody would say something we hadn’t thought of.
“We were moving down a path where we were prepared to do a search.”
But why put catsup on an uncomplicated task?
Drawing back a curtain and peeking inside the minds of his School Board peers, Dr. Levin suggested that “each of us privately was thinking, ‘We don’t really want to do a search.’ But we didn’t decide that collectively until” Dec. 12.