CESJDS announced that it hired a new high school principal last Monday after a search that took almost two years and more than a dozen interviews.

Dr. Marc Lindner, currently the middle school director and assistant head of school at the Abraham Joshua Heschel Day School in Northridge CA, will take over the high school for the 2016-2017 school year. Dean of Students Roz Landy will replace Paul Schneider as interim high school principal next year. According to Malkus, since this hire was made so late in the school year, it would not have been fair to expect Lindner to pack up and leave immediately.

“Given Dr. Lindner’s outstanding credentials and experience, we felt that the school would be willing to delay the start of his appointment,” Malkus wrote in his letter to the community.

Linder will visit the school twice next year, once in the fall and once in the spring, in order to begin his transition to JDS.

In a letter to the JDS community, Head of School Rabbi Mitchel Malkus wrote that Lindner “is a serious, caring, and thoughtful educator who is known by his students and colleagues as an excellent listener and a reflective leader.”

English teacher Melissa Fisanich was on the 12-person committee that ran the search for a new principal. According to Fisanich, the committee was looking for, and had a fairly tough time finding, a candidate with a good mix of “Jewish education credentials and good leadership.”

“Of all of the candidates that we have interviewed over the past several years, and there have been a lot of them, a lot, he was definitely the top candidate,” Fisanich said.

The Search Committee looked at candidates’ resumes, their previous work, referrals from their current employers, and other resources. They also evaluated the candidates’ performances in interviews to see whether they would get unsettled easily, a bad trait for a principal. The committee looked to see a body of work that would fit JDS, both in terms of Judaic studies and general studies.

Linder, 46, who has a wife and two daughters, grew up on Long Island. He attended Ithaca College, where he received a B.S. in Psychology and Business and earned a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Social Psychology from the University of Maine.

Before his current job at Heschel, Lindner served as Dean of Academic Affairs at the New Community Jewish Day School in West Hills, California, where he also taught American History, English, Psychology and Algebra.

One of the most important ideas for the search committee was pluralism. According to Fisanich, the question of pluralism tripped up many of the candidates, but Lindner passed that test.

“It was a deal breaker sometimes,” Fisanich said. “We had some candidates come in who, even though they taught in a Jewish school, when we asked about pluralism they didn’t answer it in a way that showed they really understood what that means … His answer showed a genuine and deep understanding of the mission of a pluralistic day school.”

JDS students should not expect to see immediate change when Lindner comes into his job. He does not yet have any changes in mind, and wrote that he would consider changes only once he had gotten the chance to consult with students and was “immersed in the life and culture of the school”.