Woodstock
“We are still in the process of negotiating a contract,” Mary Beth Banios, currently an assistant superintendent in Shrewsbury, Mass., said in an email on Tuesday morning.
Banios said she anticipated the process would be finished “later this week.”
Banios, who received a masters in education from the University of Massachusetts in Lowell in 1990, was one of two finalists chosen from a pool of about 30 applicants, and who came to Woodstock to meet community stakeholders earlier this month.
Last Wednesday, the Windsor Central Supervisory Union School Board voted to authorize member and search committee Co-Chairwoman Jennifer Iannantuoni, of Killington, to extend a three-year contract offer to Banios, according to draft minutes of the meeting.
The vote was taken after a closed-door executive session that lasted about 50 minutes.
If hired, Banios will replace current Superintendent Alice Worth, who over the summer agreed to stay in her role an extra year, to give the supervisory union a chance to find a replacement.
It’s a particularly tumultuous time for the Windsor Central Supervisory Union, which teaches about 900 students in Barnard, Killington, Pomfret, Reading and Woodstock.
The change of guard for the superintendent post has been somewhat overshadowed by plans to merge Windsor Central’s existing school districts in order to comply with Act 46, an education reform law.
The proposal will come before Town Meeting voters in six towns next month.
Paige Hiller, chairwoman of the Woodstock Elementary School Board and co-chairwoman of the search committee, has said the supervisory union is at “a tipping point” in achieving the next level of success for its students.
Banios, an education consultant who has done work for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, has held a variety of administrative positions in the Shrewsbury Public School system, which teaches about 6,000 students.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.