At a faculty meeting held after school yesterday, St. Louis U. High president Alan Carruthers announced that SLUH principal Ian Gibbons S.J. would be departing the school after the 2022-2023 school year. 

At the end of the next school year, Gibbons will have concluded his sixth year at SLUH. Jesuits are typically assigned to a position for five to six years, so Gibbons’s departure fits within the normal timeframe of reassignments made by the provincial. 

“”I've worked at five American Jesuit high schools and one in Europe. Transition is a natural part of being a Jesuit who's a Jesuit educator in secondary education,” said Gibbons. “Coming and going is a part of the cycle. You miss the people, you miss the work that you're doing and all those wonderful things that you completed.”

Over the course of six years, Gibbons has led the school community through many trials, most notably a global pandemic. Gibbons has done so with great diligence and skill, while always keeping in mind the Jesuit mission. 

“I would be remiss to not express my deep appreciation to be able to work alongside him in furthering our Jesuit mission at SLUH. Fr. Gibbons has done a tremendous job leading SLUH in such areas as academics, programming implementation, strategic planning, hiring, and crisis management—all through some of the most challenging times in our school’s history,” said Carruthers in a press statement being released to parents this morning.

The school will now begin the process of searching for Gibbons’s successor. Currently, the process is in its infancy, with two members of the SLUH community taking the lead on the search committee: Board of Trustees member and parent Tom Santel and chemistry teacher Mary Russo.
“Our role is to sort of coordinate the process for the search in terms of coming up with a job description, and collecting applications, vetting applications, and then choosing who to interview,” said Santel. “But we just do the search. The actual decisions will be made by Alan Carruthers.” 

The search is intended to be a thorough process, with the committee hoping to gather a range of diverse opinions from students, parents, and faculty members while also keeping the school community informed of their process. Over the course of the upcoming months, the committee will meet to discern what steps need to be taken to find the perfect leader for the school. 

“We're looking for Jesus Christ on a good day,” said Russo. “That is an impossible thing. But if we shoot for the moon then you will end up among the stars. Our hope is to have a clear open process that garners trust as we look to try to find a match.” 

The search committee hopes to have found a couple of good candidates to succeed Gibbons by late winter. It is not the role of the search committee to choose the next principal, that decision is left to the president and the Board of Trustees. The committee’s role is to search for a group of good candidates for the position. 

“We will look to make sure that we have an open, clear, descriptive search, and then we will handle resumes that come in and look for ones that seem to match up with our search criteria, which we'll be developing, interview the best candidates, and then we'll push all of this information forward to Mr. Carruthers,” said Russo. 

The search committee hopes to cast a wide net for candidates. 

“In very broad terms, the ideal person will be someone who's committed to the mission of SLUH,” said Santel. “They are someone who's committed to Ignatian spirituality and will help the school advance as it has in the past.” 

While the committee begins to start the process of searching for a new leader, Gibbons still has one year as leader of the school, a year that he hopes to continue to lead the school out of the pandemic and into a new era. 

“Next year is really a perfect time for a principal transition,” said Gibbons. “We will have come out of the pandemic, we will have a new schedule. We have put together all kinds of great innovations within the school with technology and Global Ed and pastoral programs. It really will be an exciting time for that first new normal spin around the block so to speak, of all these new great, wonderful things. One couldn't ask for a better way to walk off into the sunset.”