RACINE - It's a little premature to declare Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard a candidate for the Racine Unified School District's top job. She hasn't decided yet.

Vanden Wyngaard, Unified's chief academic officer, said she hasn't decided anything, even if School Board members have said they'll consider her for the job.

She seemed to be settling into her new job, running the district's academic division, when Tom Hicks resigned as superintendent in August after an investigation into a contract he negotiated with a private consulting firm.

Vanden Wyngaard isn't sure she would qualify for the job, considering she doesn't really know what the School Board is

looking for.

The School Board hasn't decided what it's looking for, either; just this week, it started looking for a search firm that will help the district find suitable candidates and hasn't developed a list of the requirements board members will look for in a new superintendent.

"At the same time, I know that the board is probably looking for some sort of continuity and I would be one of several candidates that would probably fit the bill," Vanden Wyngaard said. "Until they pick a search firm, as an applicant you don't know what to do in order to apply."

The urban challenge

While it's difficult to find superintendents anywhere, it is considerably more difficult for urban school districts, said Miles Turner, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators.

For many years, the tenure of an urban school superintendent was about 2.5 years, Turner said. The job of urban superintendent is a difficult one, Turner said, because they're extremely political and challenging public

positions.

"Under normal circumstances it is difficult to find a quality candidate for an urban district," Turner said. "But given the ugly political nature of the loss of the previous district superintendent, it will be even more difficult."

Board President Tony Baumgardt said the district needed a better succession plan and board members had been encouraging Hicks to find people who could succeed him once he left the district.

He hired Vanden Wyngaard with that in mind, Baumgardt said.

"She's a candidate for superintendent in any urban district in the country," Baumgardt said. "She's got a ton of credentials and she's a hot commodity."

Part of the reason Hicks hired Vanden Wyngaard was to provide her the time to learn the district, learn the community and to continue to learn policy governance, with the assumption that she would succeed him as superintendent, she said.

More districts looking

In 2006-07, superintendents left jobs in 85 of the state's 426 school districts. There are

new leaders in many of those districts.

Three of Wisconsin's four largest urban school districts - Madison, Kenosha and Racine - are looking for new leaders.

While the high turnover in recent years can be partly attributed to demographics - a large number of retiring baby boomers - the politics and financial stress of running an urban district are the biggest factors, Turner said. The culture and environment surrounding the job can be poisonous, too.

"Racine has to take a good, hard look at itself and see if they want to continue to have the political turmoil," Turner said. "It's hard to recruit or sustain quality educational leadership in a volatile political environment like in Racine."