The search for Superintendent Randy Weseman’s replacement is going national.

Before the Lawrence Board of Education settles on a replacement, it is going to retain a search firm to help in finding the perfect candidate.

School board President Craig Grant said he will form a subcommittee of school board members to sift through dozens of search firms, with the hopes of selecting four to six finalists by early- to mid-November. The committee will consist of Grant and board members Rich Minder and Linda Robinson. Grant called the search process “a daunting task.”

“It’s going to be a very long list, but I think that’s OK to start with,” he said.

Scott Morgan, school board vice president, said the board would like to begin reviewing candidates by late winter.

“The idea is that you want to have somebody in place in mid-spring,” he said, giving the candidate an opportunity to tie up loose ends in his or her previous district while assimilating into the Lawrence school district.

Board member Marlene Merrill said a national search gives the district the best chance of picking a candidate to meet all the needs of the community.

The last time the district used a search firm to conduct a superintendent search was in 1998, when it settled on Kathleen Williams, who left two years later to join a school district in the Chicago suburbs.

Merrill said Williams showed a lack of commitment to Lawrence, something that a search firm failed to recognize.

“One of the things that wasn’t really clear was her commitment to our community,” said Merrill, who was not on the school board at that time. “There’s enough of us on the board that remember that. It’s essential.”

Weseman’s 30 years in Lawrence school district will be hard to follow, but the board hopes the retirements of two other top-level administrators, Chief Operations Officer Mary Rodriguez and Deputy Superintendent Bruce Passman, will help attract a candidate who might fill those positions with colleagues. The district may also advertise those positions along with the superintendent opening.

To avoid a rerun of the Williams scenario – in which her husband lived in the Chicago suburbs while she worked in Lawrence, and where she didn’t register her car in Kansas – Grant said more pressing questions will have to be asked of candidates.

“It could be that we need to ask better questions when we do the personal interviews,” he said. “We’ll have to assess how we feel the person is. Sometimes you may not get it through direct questions. It may be something you sense or feel when you go through the process.”

Merrill said the community’s input, from teachers and staff as well as residents and businesses, will be important in determining who takes the helm.

“I think it’s very important that we have community input. The superintendent is going to come in contact with everybody,” she said.

Grant said he expects the search process for the firm to cost between $20,000 and $40,000.