Eatonville school board decides on superintendent. Teachers union worried about his past
The Eatonville School District Board of Directors unanimously voted Wednesday to hire the former superintendent of the Sequim School District to be Eatonville’s new schools leader, but some people are concerned about the choice.
Gary Neal has accepted the offer as the top administrator for the 2,000-student district. He was one of three finalists.
Asked for the superintendent contract, the district said the contract will be available for request after the May 26 school board meeting. According to The News Tribune payroll database, the current superintendent was paid $149,331 during the 2017-18 school year.
Neal will replace Krestin Bahr, who was hired as the superintendent at Peninsula School District. She will start at the Gig Harbor school district on July 1 after more than seven years leading Eatonville.
“I want you to know how humbled and honored I am to be selected as the next superintendent for Eatonville School District,” he told the board in the Wednesday morning meeting. “I am excited, and I look forward to getting to Eatonville and getting to work.”
Board member Matt Marshall said it was great to have Neal join the district.
“I’m excited as we turn this new chapter for our town and district,” Marshall said in the meeting.
Neal is a consultant for Vanir Construction Management’s K-12 programs. Prior to that, he was the Sequim School District’s superintendent from 2015 to 2019 after a year as the district’s assistant superintendent.
Sequim Education Association’s president Diana Piersoll said there were struggles between the union and Neal over “follow-through” and contact negotiations. For the first time in decades, the educators union voted to strike in 2017.
Signs were made and the Washington Education Association came out to support a strike, but she and Neal came together to avoid the strike, Piersoll said.
“We came out, hand-in-hand with (Neal) to say let bygones by bygones and we want to do what’s best moving forward. But, it didn’t happen,” Piersoll told The News Tribune and said the contract negotiations struggles continued.
The school board voted twice against renewing his contract in support of the union’s struggles, Piersoll said. The Sequim Gazette reported in 2019 that 88 percent of Sequim Education Association’s members voted against renewing his contract in an advisory poll. The union also gave Neal a vote of no confidence showing further support of the school board.
“It was more of our statement we supported the school board in not renewing his contract,” Piersoll said on the vote of no confidence.
Piersoll said she doesn’t know where the blame for the almost-strike lies, but she hopes Neal has learned from his time at Sequim.
“We all share a common goal for the best education for our students and the best environment for teachers and staff,” she said. “I hope that he has learned from these things and grown from them.”
Neal resigned a year before his contract ended. He took a job at the construction company, which oversaw the Sequim School District’s $5.75 million kitchen project during Neal’s tenure as superintendent.
He said in the community meet-and-greet that he was recruited by the construction company and enjoyed being a small district superintendent for four years.
Neal spoke about his experience with capital bond projects in the community meet-and-greet.
“I really wasn’t sure what was going on at that time, outside of this vice president for this construction management firm who was interested in me and asking me more about my background and found out my success with bonds and levies,” he said. “One of the biggest things that captured me was I wondered what it would be like if my skill set in public education up to that point would transfer to private industry. Then I was also interested to see if I could help some districts pass some bonds and levies that they typically were struggling with.”
He said the biggest thing he learned while in the private sector is that he missed working at a public school.
Eatonville Education Association’s president Michael Sniezak said he was stunned by the decision to hire Neal.
“I think there is a lot of concern that his former union didn’t support him,” Sniezak told The News Tribune. “That puts him at a disadvantage at day one. I think that job is more PR than business and to start without your primary stakeholders supporting you, it’s a tough place to be.
“To think that we have to bring in leadership not in education during the pandemic is a real head scratcher. That was the first thing people brought up right now, and education is so different than it has ever looked.”
Neal addressed the pandemic in his meet-and-greet, saying he wanted to get back into the profession at a time when many were leaving it.
“I talked with superintendents. They were worn out. They were exhausted. It was a whole new game. There was no playbook during the pandemic,” he said. “It was one of those things were I heard the boom of COVID-19 and I went running towards the sound.”
Sniezak said he does like that Neal has a track record of running bond and levy campaigns. Bonds take 60 percent approval by voters to pass. Sniezak said the last few ballot measures for bonds have failed, including Eatonville’s $4 million bond measure in 2020 to renovate athletic facilities.
The Peninsula Daily News wrote in 2016 that four attempts to pass a bond within the first two years of Neal’s superintendency failed. The Sequim School District’s $54 million bond package to build a new elementary school did not pass. Its first bond to pass the voter threshold during Neal’s superintendency was the $5.4 million kitchen bond.
Sniezak said he still hopes Neal can bridge difficult decisions between the board and the teachers union.
“Even if we are not always seeing eye to eye, we compromise and (Krestin) Bahr was good at brokering a compromise,” he said. “I just hope that Neal can step in and be the same kind of person.”
Neal said in the meet-and-greet that one of the first things he would do as superintendent is listen.
“As the superintendent you want to spend one-third of your time within the district, one-third of your time with the school board, and you want to spend one-third of your time with the community,” he said. “While I’m out meeting with those entities, I’m asking three questions to folks: what is it that you guys do that you are proud of, what could we improve upon, and if you were the new superintendent, what’s the first thing you would do.”
This story was originally published May 19, 2021 at 12:40 PM.
