East Ramapo Starts Superintendent Search; State Officials Visit Thursday

East Ramapo school trustees are officially looking for a new schools superintendent.

Current schools chief Joel Klein is in the last year of his contract, and the growing protest movement in the district has demanded his ouster. Now district officials have issued an RFP seeking a consultant to help with the search.

Applications must be submitted by 3 p.m. Aug. 20, according to the district’s Request for Proposal.

The consultant would help with search planning and execution, candidate recruitment and evaluation, and engaging the school community in the process.

Meanwhile, New York’s highest education officials are traveling to Rockland County Thursday, and it has something to do with the East Ramapo school district.

According to The Journal News, Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia will attend a 1:30 p.m. announcement at Rockland Community College. A spokeswoman for the education department could not provide further details, TJN said.

A fiscal monitor told the New York Education Department in November 2014 that he believed some form of state intervention was needed to repair school system and reverse bad decisions by the East Ramapo Board of Education.

“The district’s finances teeter on the edge of disaster,” Hank Greenberg wrote in his report, East Ramapo: A School District in Crisis.

The district, which includes parts of the communities of New City, Pearl River, Nanuet, Spring Valley, Suffern, New Hempstead, Chestnut Ridge, Monsey and Wesley Hills, has 9,000 students in its schools. However, another 24,000 school-age children live there, and go to private schools—mostly yeshivas.

Legislation to appoint a monitor for East Ramapo passed the state Assembly in June but failed in the Senate, where GOP leaders work closely with the private-school lobby.

Elia had said the state would take some action to intervene but that what would be best was not within the purview of the Regents or the department.

PHOTO: protesters outside the home of East Ramapo Superintendent Joel Klein