Clovis superintendent will resign in June

File photo Rhonda Seidenwurm is in her fifth year as superintendent of Clovis schools.

Clovis Municipal Schools will be undergoing massive construction projects in the coming years and Rhonda Seidenwurm said she wasn’t looking forward to the focus.

“We’re getting ready to start a really exciting phase for Clovis of redoing every building we have,” she said. “It’s going to be exciting for someone but that’s not what I want to do.”

And so Seidenwurm announced Wednesday she will resign on June 30.

“When I saw the handwriting on the wall, what the job would be with the construction, I knew I couldn’t give 100 percent,” she said. “And Clovis deserves 100 percent. Construction is not my area of expertise. I understand teaching and learning.”

Seidenwurm signed a two-year, $138,700-a-year contract in June 2008, but said Wednesday she told board members weeks ago this would be her last year in Clovis.

“She wanted to let the board know to give us appropriate amount of time to find a new superintendent,” Board President Lora Harlan said.

Seidenwurm came to Clovis in 2005 from Las Cruces.

Harlan said the board will sit down next week and decide the process and timeline for hiring a new superintendent.

“We appreciate what she has done for the district over the past five years,” Harlan said. “She has taken the district in a lot of good directions.”

Harlan and Seidenwurm said the resignation is unrelated to the recent firing and subsequent court-ordered reinstatement of varsity basketball coach J.D. Isler.

Isler was suspended from coaching in mid-December by the New Mexico Activities Association and was told he would be fired as coach by the district. A district judge has since stepped in to halt both actions until the court can review the situation.

Seidenwurm has been heavily criticized by the coach’s supporters for firing Isler.

Seidenwurm said she and her husband, Jerry, decided last summer it was time for them to move back to Albuquerque.

Seidenwurm has posted a letter to the community and district staff via the district’s Web site at:

www.clovis-schools.org

In it, she said she is leaving with “mixed emotions,” and said “Clovis, its people, and CMS will always be very dear to me.”

“I believe I’ve been the best person for the job these past five years,” she said, citing a conversion from junior high schools to middle schools and a freshman campus, a focus on “national initiatives such as High Schools That Work” and the establishment of an education foundation.

“However,” she said, “I do not believe I will be the best person for the job over the next five years,” as the school begins building projects to house expected growth at Cannon Air Force Base.”