Colby superintendent search down to two candidates
The Colby School District is nearing the end of their search for a superintendent candidate to replace the retiring Dr. Steve Kolden.
The search, which is being facilitated by HYA Associates’ Scott Winch, has been whittled down to two candidates.
Matthew Spets, the current assistant superintendent at D.C. Everest High School, and Patrick Galligan, principal of John Muir Middle School in Wausau, are being considered by the board for the position.
Spets has worked as an assistant superintendent at Howard-Suamico School District and was the superintendent at the Flambeau School District from 2013 to 2015. Spets also has experience as an elementary school principal at the Northland Pines School District and as the principal of the Wakefield-Marenisco School District.
Galligan has spent a majority of his professional career in Wausau as he started as the activities/athletics director at Wausau West High School in 2016. He then took over as associate principal of Wausau West High School and then became the principal of John Muir Middle School in Wausau.
Both gentlemen have doctorate degrees from Edgewood College in Madison in Educational Leadership with Spets achieving his degree in 2015 and Galligan receiving his in 2022.
The board will conduct its final interviews on Monday, February 27 and Tuesday, February 28 before voting on the position in a special meeting to be held the week of March 6.
School board meeting
In addition to the superintendent search, the school board also discussed and approved current superintendent Steve Kolden’s request to explore setting up an education scholarship co-op with three other area schools.
While the plan is still in its infancy, Kolden stated at the meeting that he would like to explore creating a program in which scholarships would be given out to students entering collegiate schools of education with the intention of becoming teachers with the knowledge that by accepting the scholarship, they would then be required to return to the school district to teach once they had obtained their license, should there be a position available to them. It is a system that has been used by larger school districts in Appleton, Milwaukee and Madison, as well as cooperatives of several smaller schools banding together to form a singular program.
The idea behind such a program would be to give opportunity to local students to stay in the area and give the school district an additional avenue of finding teachers.
While a larger school may be able to better accommodate the logistics of such a program, a co-op between smaller schools helps to spread out the cost as well as increase the pool of both new teachers and potential open positions for those teachers.
“A co-op of schools wrote a grant through the DPI, that we would like to look at,” Kolden said while explaining how such a program would be funded. “They also had a local foundation which contributed money and then each of the schools contributed as well. They would then award the grant to one student from each of the four school districts so that every year they were adding to the pool of potential teachers.”
The district would be looking to create a co-op program between itself and the districts of Abbotsford, Owen-Withee, and Spencer, though the final plan would need to be approved by each of the school boards before it could be implemented.
