Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
QuickTake:
The board also discussed its priorities for the year, including transparency, elementary curriculum, student discipline, the future of the district’s facility and land use.
Springfield Board of Education members unanimously selected a national firm to lead its search for a permanent superintendent.
But tensions arose during the board’s meeting Monday, Oct. 26, as board members discussed priorities and timelines for the remainder of the school year.
Regarding the superintendent search, the board will use Human Capital Enterprises, a national school leadership search firm that has done work in the past for several Oregon school districts, including Bethel and Eugene 4J.
Human Capital Enterprises’ base rate for a search is $31,000. Optional services, if the board approved, could tack on a maximum of $6,200 more. The district paid $15,736 in the spring to Grundmeyer Leader Services in its search for an interim superintendent to serve this school year. The board chose Shawn Stover for the interim post.
Signing a contract with Human Capital Enterprises means the district will pay for a full search, which some board members, including Matthew Brandt and Bob Brew, have expressed hesitation about, due to the possibility that the board could promote Stover to the permanent position. Stover has expressed interest in the position.
“I’m leaning more into the (fact that) we’re likely going to go through this process fully,” Brandt said. “I think it’s important that the public be involved and having a company help facilitate that is going to take a lot of pressure off of the board and the administration to handle all that separately.”
The board and district have yet to publicly present a firm timeline of the search process.
Tensions over priorities
Board members also discussed their priorities for the year with Stover, continuing a discussion that has been going on since their August retreat. These include:
- Increased transparency about Springfield’s elementary curriculum
- Increased transparency about student discipline policies
- Collecting feedback from parents, staff and students on their experiences at the district
- Creating a facilities planning committee.
With anxiety already mounting about 2027-28 budget cuts and the 2027 state legislative session that will determine public school funding, board members expressed impatience about several of the goals.
Stover has aligned himself with the board’s priorities since arriving at the district but tried to mitigate expectations at Monday’s meeting, saying board members have to take into account other duties staff must handle in addition to board requests.
Board members repeatedly have said that they felt rushed and underinformed during planning for the 2026-27 budget and have already expressed a desire to know the amount of the deficit facing the district for the 2027-28 year.
Brew, who floated the idea of creating a committee to specifically discuss the use of vacant properties earlier this school year, complained about how the board’s goals had gotten bulky and bureaucratic. The district’s proposal for a facilities committee, which would discuss vacant land use among other topics, has a projected meeting schedule stretching from December to April.
“It’s classic scope creep, right?” Brew said. “We had a finite task we could have done in a limited amount of time, but it’s like, well, no, let’s add everything else to the soup, and suddenly it’s a year, year and a half, two-year-long process. And so the goal of trying to get some information that we can use in this year’s budget process, it’s blown out of the water.”
Board Chair Jonathan Light also said he wanted information about the districts’ facilities to give to legislators during the 2027 session to help advocate for more funding. Light also expressed frustration about the slowness of getting a facilities committee off the ground and the desire for it to be a permanent committee instead of a temporary one.
District limitations
Stover pushed back lightly on the board members’ expectations.
Stover said he would like the facility committee to make its proposal to the board in time to incorporate suggestions into the 2027-28 budget. Some processes, such as selling off land, may require more time in order to avoid legal challenges, he said.
“We have to make sure we’re not unintentionally creating other problems to solve,” he said.
Stover said he and Chief Operating Officer Brett Yancey are also talking about hiring a consultant to evaluate the district’s vacant properties. They’re already contracting FLO Analytics to update enrollment projections the firm made three years ago for the district.
“I appreciate the sense of urgency; that’s going to help me in formulating where we want to go,” Stover said. “But the actual how we get there, that really is for myself and the staff to execute on, and then you guys can evaluate and judge us on that.”
He also said he is trying to protect administrators’ time so they can focus on student and staff needs, noting that staff might have to put something of equal urgency on the back burner to fulfill the board’s requests for information.
The district’s proposal for a facilities committee recommends that the group be a superintendent’s advisory committee, meaning it would not be required to meet publicly. Bethel School District used superintendent advisory committees to evaluate building usage and ultimately plan the closure of Clear Lake Elementary and Shasta Middle schools before proposing the closures publicly.
