LAURENS – The Laurens-Marathon Community School District is considering a new superintendent system for next year as it tries to come up with ways of dealing with financial issues.

Members of the Laurens-Marathon board of directors heard from Jeff Kruse, superintendent of the South Central Calhoun School District, on the possibility of sharing a superintendent with a neighboring district at a special meeting Tuesday night.

Laurens-Marathon has been without a full-time superintendent since mid-March when then-Superintendent Iner Joelson resigned.

Tom Nugent is the district’s interim superintendent until the end of the year.

Kruse, who also served as a shared superintendent for both the Southern Cal and Rockwell City-Lytton school districts prior to their merger as South Central Calhoun, said there are both advantages and disadvantages to having a shared superintendent.

“Certainly you have to define who’s responsible for certain duties,” Kruse said. “You need to have good principals and good board secretaries to help the sharing arrangement, and you need to provide resources for them.”

He added that one disadvantage of having a shared superintendent is that they can’t devote all of their time to just one school district.

“The superintendent’s not going to be at every event anymore,” he said. “The time is now split. I attend every event that I possibly can, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be everywhere.”

Kruse said the decision to switch to a shared superintendent is an important one, and one that should not be taken lightly.

“We all have to be doing this for the right reason,” he said. “If we don’t have students as our main focus, and your main focus is always finances, you need to re-evaluate. That’s got to be your driving force.”

That’s not to say finances aren’t important, according to Kruse.

“I always tell boards it takes three years to fix finances,” he said. “You didn’t get here in one year and you’re not going to get out of it in one year.”

“We can fix finances,” Kruse added. “I guarantee finances can be fixed. But you’re going to have to fix it with hard decisions.”

If the decision is made to share a superintendent, Nugent said it would save the district money.

“The legislature has approved dollars for shared superintendents,” he said. “If you have a shared superintendent, it can save approximately $50,000 for each district.”

Nugent said the practice is common across Iowa.

“They’re not all small, rural schools,” he said. “Mason City and Clear Lake are sharing a superintendent. They ran into a financial situation, and if you get the right person with the right qualifications and the right skills, they can pull off a tremendous job.”

An actual decision on whether to share a superintendent won’t come until the board has more discussion, according to Nugent.

Kruse also recommended that if the school goes ahead with its sharing plan, they don’t just stop with a shared superintendent.

“Look at other positions in the code,” he said. “You could also share an HR director and a business manager. You could be creating sharing incentives for both districts.”

Kruse also stressed the importance of keeping students at the forefront of every decision.

“When you develop that plan, you want to take a pronged approach,” he said. “Start with things that have the least-impact on students and then stair-step yourself up.”