The Baltimore school board needs to find a CEO next year. It’s not saying much about how that’ll happen.

That lack of clarity is prompting a raft of questions and demands from the school system’s teachers and principals — and even some elected officials.

In a press conference in the searing heat in front of the school headquarters on North Avenue on Tuesday afternoon, Baltimore Teachers Union President Diamonté Brown and Karl Perry, the president of the union representing administrators, said they wanted to send a message to the school board to be transparent in selecting a new leader for the school system.

The school board recently signed a contract with Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Sonja Santelises for only one more year, ending on June 30, 2025. Santelises, who is in her ninth year, had wanted a longer contract, but the board dragged out negotiations until two weeks before her contract expired.

“We want to make certain that we — the directly impacted individuals, like the students, the parents, the school staff members — have input into who our next superintendent is,” Brown said. “We also want to build trust with our school board members.”

She said she would like the board to give the public a timeline, as is conventional in other districts. “When does it start? When will it end? Do we get a long list then a short list? Will there be a series of interviews, focus groups?”

Perry, the former principal of Edmondson Westside Vocational Technical High School, said he wanted a “trusted and reputable“ search firm that would collect community opinions. “The search firm should go out to the community meetings. The search firm should talk to the administrators. The search firm must hear from the teachers what we need, what we deserve and what it will take to lead us.”

School board chair Ronald McFadden sent a statement to The Banner on July 1, saying that the board is “committed to ensuring a comprehensive search, inclusive of input from diverse stakeholders, for the next Chief Executive Officer of City Schools.”

The statement said that when the “board is ready, we will communicate more details regarding the search process with our stakeholders, including our media partners and other inquiring media.”

McFadden did not answer The Banner’s questions about whether the board had already selected a search firm, or what firms it might be considering.

School boards usually have a public vote and issue a request for proposal to hire a firm. Most Maryland school superintendents are hired for four-year contracts that begin in July. The board typically would have someone hired by early next spring.

In most cases, the process includes extensive discussion about what characteristics the public wants in its next leader. The search firm finds candidates, but those candidates usually want their interest in the job to remain confidential if they work in other school systems.

Santelises was hired without a search, but she was well-known to the school board at the time, having served as the system’s chief academic officer. The board had hired her predecessor, Gregory Thornton, as the CEO after a national search. Two years later, the board asked him to leave and hired Santelises.

City Council members Zeke Cohen and James Torrence also asked for a national search.

“I want to be crystal clear that my expectation is a robust, community-facing public national search. We deserve the absolute best here in Baltimore,” Cohen said.