As spring approaches, the school year is coming to a close and Hackley will soon have a new head of school. The Dial spoke to Dawn Crainer, a Lower School teacher and Upper School Coach, who also serves as one of the faculty members for the Head of School Search Committee.

The search committee is composed of a few different groups of people. Primarily they are members of the Board of Trustees and three of them who are leading it include: John Canoni, Kaveh Khosrowshahi, and Hannah Saujet. There are also three parent members who are not part of the board. The three faculty members besides Dawn Crainer are Willie Teacher, Upper School Performing Arts Teacher and Upper School DEI Coordinator, and Brad Walters, Middle School Assistant Director.  

“I feel very fortunate and privileged that I’m representing the faculty in this process. The Board actually allowed us to choose who we wanted to represent,” Ms. Crainer said. 

Since Josh Samuel is the link between the faculty and Board of Trustees, he sent out a questionnaire for those who wanted to be part of the search committee so there was a lot of voting which finally led to the three faculty members selected – each from every division at Hackley.  

The search committee has held several meetings since this whole process began. A firm called Resource Group 175 – Hackley’s outside consultants – have led a lot of these meetings. They provide valuable information regarding how these searches generally run and what to expect. A few times RG 175 looked at initial dossiers and the committee received resumes as well as other writing samples. RG 175 then provided them with a lot of people and since this whole process started, they have narrowed down the candidates to about a dozen people who they are really considering.

They are going to narrow down the dozen candidates to about four finalists this month and they will make visits to Hackley in April. When that time comes more people will be introduced to the candidates.

“Nobody has physically been to campus yet and that won’t happen until the finalists come on grounds and I think part of that is because there’s a confidentiality [aspect],” Ms. Crainer said. That confidentiality is important because only some candidates tell their school that they are exploring new job opportunities but others do not. 

When asked about the timeline and whether or not they know when Hackley’s new head of school will be shared to all, Ms. Crainer could not say yet: 

“I don’t know the answer to that yet. I can tell you that very soon we’re going to be deciding this month on who the four finalists will be and those four will get scheduled in April. So once the school can assign dates to those four people then we’ll know from there.”