Applications to be Haines’ new school superintendent are in — and more than two dozen people are hoping to be chosen.


Twenty-five people applied to be Haines’ new school superintendent.

The application period closed on Monday.

Applicants run the gamut from a current school employee, to a school psychologist in Wisconsin, to a principal from Glennallen. They include current superintendents across Alaska and the Lower 48. One applicant wrote he’d been “unable to sleep for weeks” because he was so excited about applying for the job.

Interim Superintendent Rich Carlson says the response was better than he’d expected. The district had been hoping to get around 15 applicants.  

“We have a number of people who have a good amount of Alaska experience, and some people from the Lower 48 that have quite a bit of superintendent experience,” he says. “There are some really good candidates.”

The hiring process is new this year. Haines is conducting the search in-house, rather than returning to the Alaska Association of School Board’s superintendent search, which helped bring Tony Habra to town last year. Habra resigned a third of the way through his contract, amid concerns about his job performance.

This year, the School Board and a designated Search Committee will review applications and whittle the list down to a group of their favorites. The board will choose semi-finalists.

 “So we’ll end up with five to seven people that will be interviewed via Skype on February 3rd. Then the board will go into executive session and determine the finalists that we’ll bring in the last couple weeks in February,” Carlson says.

The District plans to conduct site visits and in-person interviews and for those top choices. They want to get a sense of the culture in candidate’s current districts, and how they’d fit in Haines.

“Haines, like all small communities, has its own sort of ambiance. And a person has to be able to fit into that. And the good candidate will be somebody who can do that, and the good candidate will hopefully be somebody hopefully that’s going to be around for a long time,” Carlson says.

He and the School Board invite anyone interested to stop by the school to review applications — they’re open to the public.