SCARBOROUGH – The final candidate for the top job at Scarborough High School spent the day Tuesday mingling with students, staff and parents, and an actual job offer, officials say, now awaits an assessment of how those meetings went.

David Creech, one of two assistant principals at Kennebunk High School, was at the school from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., touring the building, visiting classrooms and having lunch with the Student Council. Notices went out Friday advising parents of a 30-minute window of opportunity to meet Creech, from 2:45 to 3:15 p.m., in the school library.

Creech could not be reached for comment and the press was barred by the school from attending any of the meet-and-greet sessions.

“We would not like the press involved in this part of the vetting process,” Middle School Principal Barbara Hathorn, who is leading the hiring process, said Monday. “The candidate is just that, a candidate. We will make it public when a decision is finally made.”

“It’s still the selection process, but he is the final candidate,” said Superintendent George Entwistle. “Input will be collected from each of these venues where he’s interacted with people and based on that feedback the selection committee will either move him forward as the candidate they are recommending to me, or not.”

Entwistle said Friday he had yet to meet Creech and doesn’t “really know anything about him.”

According to Hathorn, who has led the selection process alongside Kelly Mullin-Martin, principal at Pleasant Hill Primary School, Creech’s day-long visit was part of a new hiring process developed in the past year and so far attempted only on a limited scale.

“It’s not just for administrators, it’s for all hires,” said Hathorn. “We knew we had an issue, we knew we wanted stronger candidates who would be with us for longer periods of time, so we looked at how other school districts around us conducted their hiring process.”

Hathorn said development of that process was well under way before Dean Auriemma suddenly resigned his position as high school principal in January after two years on the job. The new, semi-public vetting process ”has noting to do with that issue,” she said.

In addition to Tuesday’s meetings with various stakeholder groups, the final assessment of Creech also will include comment from the selection committee following a tour he hosted last week at Kennebunk High School. Entwistle said that “very extensive visit” occurred May 14.

According to his profile on the professional networking website LinkedIn, Creech has been a school administrator for less than a year. He began as math teacher, first at Sanford High School from 1986 to 2000, then at Kennebunk High School from 2000 until July 2012, when he ascended to the assistant principal’s job. He holds a bachelor’s degree in secondary education from the University of Maine at Farmington and a master’s in education from the University of Southern Maine.

In an April 24 interview, Hathorn said more than 30 applications were submitted to replace Auriemma, who resigned “effective immediately” Jan. 25, citing family obligations.

Hathorn and Mullin-Martin winnowed those resumes down to four, automatically eliminating any not yet certified by to be a high school principal in the state of Maine.

“We didn’t even look at those because we had plenty of others we were interested in,” Hathorn said at the time.

The four top candidates were scheduled for interviews by the full search committee during the first week of May, Hathorn said, in order “to find the best fit.”

That fit, she said, was determined, in part, from an online survey completed by parents, students and teachers.

“They told us what they are looking for in a principal and the results were very interesting, I have to tell you,” she said, adding that each stakeholder group appeared to have different desires for an ideal principal, while many of the comments were used to mold interview questions.

Survey results released by Hathorn Monday gave no quantitative measure of the results, and included none of the commentary from participants. Instead, it listed “the top six responses” from an unknown number of questions, stating that the first three “were rated in the critically important range.” No indication was given of the weight assigned to the other responses, nor of how each was rated by the various interest groups.

According to official results, the “critically important” qualities expected of any new high school principal are that he “demonstrates high visibility and has quality contact and interactions with teachers and students,” that he “maintains strong lines of communications,” and that he “have the trust of faculty, staff and students that his actions are guided by what is best for all student populations.”

Auriemma’s departure reportedly came on the heels of a no-confidence vote of staffers, said to have citied a deficiency in many of the areas highlighted by the survey.

Since Auriemma’s transfer to special project work though the end of his contract June 30, Scarborough High School has been run by a four-person committee led by the school district’s director of curriculum and instruction, Monique Culbertson. Other members of the committee are assistant principals Ray Dunn and Susan Ketch and Athletic Director Mike LeGage.

David Creech