By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
APRIL 18, 2025 | Most often when you read that there is a vacancy for a high-powered executive office, you find out, lo and behold, there’s going to be a “national search” to fill that position.
That’s right, the entity, whether a government, or non-profit, or for-profit company, is opening a national search to bring in the very best person to become the next chief executive. And it goes without saying that there will be a consulting company hired to fill this position that specializes in placing high-quality people for positions like this. In other words, big bucks will be shelled out to find a person for this important position.
National search? We say “Baloney!”
Before paying out good money for an executive search firm, why shouldn’t the group trying to find a new leader look around, especially within their own organization? After all, most successful companies or governments have often been run fairly well. And the previous top executive must have had a dependable staff of people working with him. Could one of those do just as good a job, and there be no need to pay high fees to find this successor?
After all, these staff members know the business well, live in the community, have done their job for a while, and they probably wouldn’t even need any relocation expenses. Should some of them not be considered?
Many times successful entities, whether businesses or governments, will announce that a leader is leaving the company for some reason, often retiring, or even taking a new job. But at the same time this is announced, these successful companies will announce who the new leader will be, often promoted from within.
Members of the Gwinnett County Board of Education, 2025.
Yep, the Gwinnett Board of Education is doing what? Yes, in a national search for its new superintendent of schools. Oh, boy!
Why do boards hire executive employment search firms to do their job?
Short and simple, they do it so that they will not be criticized. There’s a phrase for it that we won’t use.
Perhaps the divided Gwinnett school board does not know the history of replacing school superintendents since 1977. When J.W. Benefield, a former Gwinnett agriculture teacher, retired in 1977, Alton Crews was recruited from Charleston as superintendent. He was somewhat known since he was the former Cobb County superintendent.
Crews was followed 13 years later by George Thompson, previously a principal on the Gwinnett system. David Crews was then an interim superintendent and followed by an outsider, Sidney Faucette, from a national search. He left under a cloud in about a year.
That’s when Alvin Wilbanks was hired, remaining with the school board for 25 years, and leading it to nationally-recognized heights. And where did the School Board pull Alvin from? Why, he was an employee of the system, previously president of Gwinnett Tech, which at that time was run by the Gwinnett school board. No national search needed.
So in recent years, the current school board found that Alvin Wilbanks would not bend to their wishes. Their results: fire him, with a major payout. Then bringing in Dr. Calvin Watts, guess what? The board could not work with him either, himself the product of a national search, though he had experience in Gwinnett. And so they canned him, too.
It makes you wonder if the school board will even consider local executives, or even if they posted the job for locals to apply.
Meanwhile, the board has appointed Dr. Al Taylor to be the interim superintendent. We wish him well trying to work with three members of the dysfunctional Gwinnett school board.
- Have a comment? Click here to send an email.
Follow Us