Thursday, October 1, 2026
The Merrick School District’s search for a new superintendent is under way, and to help facilitate the hiring process, the district has hired an outside firm, School Leadership LLC. The firm will conduct a nationwide search to narrow the field of candidates for the Merrick Board of Education, which will make the final decision.
Dr. Ranier Melucci, Merrick’s superintendent for the past nine years, announced that he would retire in June after 39 years as an educator.
Joanne Seibert, the Merrick Board of Education president, said that the board interviewed many firms, but hired School Leadership based on its experience in assisting with superintendent searches for other Nassau County schools in recent years. “We really felt that this search firm would give us the best candidates,” Seibert said.
School Leadership has conducted 60 superintendent searches in the past seven years, each of which resulted in a hiring. The firm has assisted in searches for many Nassau County districts, including the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District, which resulted in the hiring of its current superintendent, Dr. Henry Kiernan. The firm also conducted searches in the Baldwin, East Meadow, Hempstead, Hewlett-Woodmere, Levittown, Massapequa, Roslyn, Valley Stream and West Hempstead districts.
Heading the firm’s Merrick search is Dr. Charles Fowler, who has 35 years of experience as a school superintendent in Illinois, Connecticut and Florida as well as on Long Island. Most recently, Fowler was superintendent of the Hewlett-Woodmere School District before he retired in 2004. Assisting in the search is Dr. Kathy Weiss, who was Baldwin’s superintendent before her retirement in 2005.
The hiring process
The process of hiring a superintendent, which takes about four months, began in mid-January, when School Leadership representatives met with Merrick school board trustees to learn about what traits they would like to see in the new school chief. “We emphasize that the interview is the least reliable projection of how someone will do in a job,” said Fowler. “The most reliable projection is how people did at their previous jobs.”
