Candidates for Edwardsville school superintendent include Belleville administrator
The Edwardsville CUSD 7 school board is scheduled to vote on a contract for the district’s new superintendent Monday night.
In the meantime, it has narrowed it’s list of candidtes to three. They include Dave Deets, superintendent of Harmony-Emge SD 175; Brent O’Daniell, superintendent at Genoa-Kingston CUSD 424; and Patrick Shelton, assistant superintendent of elementary education at Lee’s Summit R-VII School District in Missouri.
According to the agenda, the board will be voting on whether to approve a three-year employment contract effective July 1.
Superintendent Jason Henderson gave his resignation, effective June 30, to the school board in November. His salary was $150,000 in 2020, and he worked in the district for two years.
Edwardsville 7 is the biggest district in the metro east, with 7,538 students in 2020, according to the Illinois Report Card.
Harmony-Emge District 175 in Belleville, the elementary district Deets oversees has 808 students. Genoa-Kingston 424, where O’Daniell is superintendent, has 1,587 students. Lee’s Summit in Missouri, where Shelton is assistant superintendent of elementary education, had 18,075 students in 2019.
Deets is a Belleville native who’s been superintendent of Harmony-Emge 175 since 2018. When his predecessor announced her retirement, some parents lobbied the school board to hire Deets, then-principal, rather than open up a superintendent search. The board obliged, and Deet’s initial salary was $104,000.
O’Daniell was hired to lead Genoa-Kingston 424 in 2017 at a starting salary of $165,000, according to the DeKalb Daily Chronicle. He has previously worked in administrative positions in several small school districts in western and southern Illinois.
Shelton has been assistant superintendent in Lee’s Summit for one year, according to the Lee’s Summit Tribune. He previously worked in a district in Chesterfield, Missouri and earned his master’s in education administration and doctorate in educational leadership from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His salary for the year is at least $130,868, according to the Lee’s Summit administrative salary schedule.
The Edwardsville School Board meeting starts at 7 p.m. on Monday and will be streamed on the City of Edwardsville’s Facebook page.
This story was originally published March 8, 2021 at 5:00 AM.