Search firm hired to find new Freeman super

The Freeman School District board of directors voted last week to hire a search firm to find a new leader for the 900-student district.

Superintendent Bill Thurston announced this month that he plans to retire at the end of the school year.

The board decided to hire Educational Consultants of Spokane to begin the search for a new superintendent immediately.

“We hope to have the position filled by the first of April,” Thurston said Wednesday.

The board has done previous superintendent searches internally, but this time decided to hire the firm, which has a history of working with small rural districts, Thurston said.

“We really contemplated which way to go,” Thurston said. “It’s a lot of work to do it internally.”

“We have two new board members and we thought it would be good if somebody walked us through it,” Thurston added.

Candidates will likely be selected from a pool within Washington state, but advertisements will go out nationally, Thurston said.

Thurston, 55, has been superintendent of the mostly rural district south of Spokane Valley for the past seven years.

His retirement comes at a difficult time for the district, with voters being asked to approve a maintenance and operations levy this spring on the heels of three failed bonds.

Voters rejected an $11.7 million bond to remodel the high school and elementary school buildings in May. Two $8 million bond issues, one in the fall and spring of 2002, to update two of the district’s school buildings also failed.