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Lake Placid school district still hasn’t hired high school principal

Interim to be hired

Lake Placid Central School District Superintendent Roger Catania and Clerk Karen Angelopoulos attend a Board of Education meeting Tuesday night. (Enterprise photo — Griffin Kelly)

LAKE PLACID — With 22 days left till school opens, the Lake Placid Central School District Board of Education has yet to hire a principal for the Lake Placid High School.

At Tuesday night’s board meeting, district Superintendent Roger Catania said nine people applied for the job after the search started earlier this summer.

“Two weeks ago a group of stakeholders — faculty, support staff, administrators, board members, parents and students — were involved in reviewing four candidates,” he said. “In the discussions that followed the interviews, we discovered that we really did not have a consensus over the candidates. As a group, we decided it would be best to take a deep breath, rethink the search, appoint an interim [principal], rethink the process and the job description, and restart the search in the near future.”

The interim candidate Catania has in mind is not public yet, but the person will be identified and proposed at the school board’s next meeting Tuesday, Aug. 21.

Dana Wood, who’s been the LPHS principal for the past five years, will begin the school year in the position of business manager, a role Leonard Sauers will step down from after 10-and-a-half years.

“We always like to have things in place as early as possible,” Catania said, “but sometimes the circumstances don’t lend themselves to that. We understood when Leonard Sauers announced his retirement and we made the decision to transfer Dana Wood that a principal search at this time would be would be tight. So it’s not a tremendous surprise that we are where we are, but I’m pretty confident that where we’re going to go this year by appointing an interim to start and then reigniting the search, that things are going to work out well.”

Catania wouldn’t say who applied for the principal job, but he did say LPSCD educators aren’t generally interested in the position.

“I will say that we have a number of teachers who are very committed to teaching and who haven’t really made that decision to move into administration. So in almost all cases when we’ve done administrative searches, they’ve been for candidates outside of the district.”

While Catania said he appreciates having so many different perspectives and opinions going into choosing a principal, he admits it can lengthen the process. He also said it’s possible that the interim principal could fill the role until the Christmas break.

Lake Placid Middle-High School has around 300 students from grades six through 12. When asked if one principal could handle both schools, Catania said Lake Placid has worked with a number of administrative models over the years. About five years ago, the board decided it was best to have separate principals rather than one principal and dean of students, or one principal and no administrative help, which were both previous models.

“Here’s where we come down on this,” Catania said. “When you have a principal and a vice principal, the vice principal tends to focus on discipline alone for the most part. What that becomes is a position that really focuses on the negative, and five, six, seven years ago, we made a concerted effort in this district to focus on the positive.

“This model has been the most successful for that,” he continued. “So our school board, time and again, has landed on this model and said, ‘We like it. We like the fact that discipline isn’t being highlighted. It’s a part of things when needed, but it’s not the emphasis.'”

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