BATON ROUGE - Members of the East Baton Rouge School Board will meet Thursday, Dec. 3 to discuss its search for the parish's next superintendent.

For the moment, Adam Smith serves as interim superintendent, a role he's expected to occupy until mid-January of 2021, should EBR Schools stick to its current search/hire schedule.

The schedule is one of the matters board members will discuss during their regular Thursday evening meeting, along with a public discussion of the qualifying applicants who are being considered for the position.

After carefully vetting each aforementioned applicant, the Board expects to whittle the list down to a currently undecided number of finalists by December 17.

After the winter break, the Board hopes to kick off 2021 by interviewing the selected candidates in-person from January 7-9. Only four days later, on January 14, a new superintendent will be selected.

At this time, the board has a total of 20 qualifying applicants to choose from. The names of each applicant have not been released and it's unknown if EBR Schools' current interim superintendent, Adam Smith, is among the 20.

This information is expected to be revealed Thursday night. 

Smith stepped into the role in October, after Leslie Brown resigned from the position in September due to a severe health problem.

Brown, hired on in August, led EBR Schools for seven weeks before taking emergency medical leave and then resigning two weeks later. 

Her replacement is being selected with the assistance of Austin, Texas-based search firm JG Consulting, the same firm that helped EBR Schools select Brown. 

But this secondary search for a new head of EBR Schools will take place at a much swifter pace than the last one, and is expected to wrap up by early January of next year. 

Thursday's EBR School Board meeting will be a critical discussion that will help the search move forward.

The 5 p.m. meeting will be streamed live via YouTube and a link to watch it can be found on the School Board’s website: https://ebrschools.org/about/