Peninsula district names list of candidates to succeed retiring superintendent Art Jarvis
Five candidates have been chosen as semi-finalists to replacing retiring school Superintendent Art Jarvis, the Peninsula School District announced on Thursday.
Jarvis, a former superintendent of the Tacoma School District and several others, has been interim superintendent since July 2018. He will be retiring on June 30.
All five candidates are from nearby school districts. They are:
Krestin Bahr, Superintendent, Eatonville School District
Heidi Harris, Assistant Superintendent, Auburn School District
John Harrison, Chief of Staff, Bellevue School District
Dana Rosenbach, Superintendent, North Mason School District
Tim Winter, Superintendent, South Kitsap School District
The school board will conduct a series of preliminary public interviews on Saturday that can be viewed starting at 8:30 a.m. on the district’s YouTube page. Each candidate will be interviewed for 50 minutes and the public will have a chance to fill out digital feedback forms that will be posted on the district website.
The district said there will also be additional interviews with three finalists sometime next week.
“The board anticipates the semi-finalists to be narrowed down to three candidates, who will then have a second interview with the board, staff, and community members next week,” the release said. “The board plans to announce its choice for superintendent on Friday, March 19 and finalize the contract at its regular meeting on Thursday, March 25. The selected individual will officially assume the job on July 1.”
The candidates were selected by the consulting firm Northwest Leadership Associates (NWLA), which provided the district with a breakdown of the 29 applicants.
The district said they included 21 men, eight women, 10 who are or have been superintendents, 16 who work in central office roles and one principal. One applicant withdrew after accepting a position in another district.
The firm said that 17 of the applicants reside in Washington state.
Jarvis had previously planned on retiring, though his contract was renewed not once, but twice by the school board. In what is now his final year, Jarvis has faced criticism from the Peninsula Education Association, the teachers’ union, whose members voted “no confidence” in December in his performance in responding to the coronavirus pandemic.
In extending Jarvis’s contract a second time last February, then-president Deborah Krishnadasan noted that Jarvis was instrumental in passing two critical funding measures for the district: a $198 million capital projects bond to alleviate overcrowding at the district’s elementary schools and an $80 million operations levy, renewed by voters Feb. 11, to fund the ongoing operations of the district.
Jarvis has worked 54 years in education, 31 of them as a superintendent. After retiring from the Enumclaw School District, he has taken on four jobs as an interim superintendent in various districts.
Jarvis’s second career dates back to 2007, when he took a job as interim superintendent at Tacoma Public Schools. The job was supposed to last a year. He ended up working there for five years.
Jarvis then re-retired, but came out of retirement again shortly after to be the interim superintendent at Shelton for a year, then at Renton for two years.
This story was originally published March 11, 2021 at 12:50 PM.
