The Washoe County School District’s Board of Trustees has hired Jim Huge and Associates as its firm of choice to conduct a search for a new superintendent.

On Thursday, trustees attended a special meeting to discuss how to start the process of a search, whether they would seek a national or local pool of candidates and whether to hire a consultant.

The trustees are seeking a replacement for current superintendent Paul Dugan, who announced his retirement at the board’s Jan. 27 meeting, citing his wife’s health as the reason. He is set to retire Aug. 1 this year.

Huge presented a presentation of a preliminary recommendation for the board to go about its search, sharing many assumptions of the board’s desires based on previous superintendent searches among other school districts.

“I would strongly urge that it would be a national search, but that it would be Nevada/Rocky Mountain centered,” Huge said. “It doesn’t mean you don’t try to recruit people from all over the area, but you want to be careful about a cultural match. For example, someone from upstate New York in a comparable district may not be comfortable living in Nevada.”

Board members said they preferred to conduct a search process expediently and correctly for the district’s top position, agreeing that the district is too large to limit itself to concentrate solely on local candidates to replace Dugan.

“I think this decision is too important to the future of the district to say that we don’t want to at least look out there,” Trustee Dan Carne said. “We’d be derelict to not open the pool and say, ‘Look at what we got.’ ”

Trustee Scott Kelley thought it would be wiser to keep the search at the broadest level possible.

“I think it sounds kind of strange we’re only searching west of the Mississippi,” he said. “I’d like a national search, too, and see if we can get someone from a place that has a lot of outdoor activities (like we do).”

Other aspects of the hiring process were discussed, including advertisement and recruitment and community input, the last concept of which Huge said he assumed that there was a sizable portion of the community that would want to be involved.

Huge said discussing the desired qualifications in a candidate with parents, students and community business people would be essential for the county.

“A superintendent hiring is like a marriage and hopefully there’s a high degree of thinking going into that and does that person have the skill sets you want,” Huge told the board.

Part of the debate was whether to keep the search strictly on educators or to open the doors to a wider base of employees with other skill sets and backgrounds.

After deciding that having a more diverse pool of qualified candidates would be to Washoe County’s benefit, trustees then expressed that the task of the search could be too large to handle on its own.

Impressed by Huge’s presentation and feeling that the burden might be heavy to place on staff, trustees approved the hiring of Huge’s firm.

Trustee Estela Gutierrez emphasized, however, that negotiations on cost for the hiring have not yet begun.

“I see this as an investment,” Gutierrez said. “This is probably going to be one decision we make that will last for how many years?”

Carne echoed her sentiment.

“There’s no more important decision we’re going to make over the next five years,” he said. “I’m not in any position to say I can direct anyone how to do this. ... I would say we need a firm who can do this. That’s their main business.”