The Selma City School Board will decide next Thursday who to hire as the school system’s next superintendent.

The board completed the interview process Thursday night after interviewing five candidates for the position.

“We have five great candidates, and it is going to make our job very difficult,” said school board president Johnny Moss Friday. “I don’t think we can go wrong with choosing one of the finalists.”

Moss said the board was originally going to vote two weeks after the candidates were interviewed, but they decided to push that forward.

“We’ve actually rescheduled a called board meeting for Thursday,” Moss said. “Initially, we were going to wait until the 12th, but we feel we needed to go ahead and vote on a candidate, so we’re going to have a called board meeting at 5 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 7 at Selma High School.”

Moss said there are other superintendent searches going on in the area, so they wanted to go ahead and make a decision.

“There are other areas that have searches going on, and we know that there’s only a small pool of qualified applicants in the area, so we wanted to make sure we grab our person before they got away,” Moss said. “The sooner we can get this done, the sooner we can out this behind us and move forward.”

The board interviewed D. Ray Hill, Ed.D, Regina D. Thompson, Ed.D, Arthur L. Capers, Ed.S, Avis Williams, Ed.D and Robert A. Griffin, Ed.D.

“All of the candidates possessed either superintendent experience or assistant superintendent experience, and that’s a good thing because they can come in and kind of assess where we are and where we need to go,” Moss said. “All of them interviewed well. All of them bring different things to the table, but for the most part, all of them have experience.”

Capers is currently serving the school system as the interim superintendent.

He was given that role when former superintendent Angela Mangum resigned in May.

She resigned after the board placed her on leave for an alleged breach of her contract.

Williams previously interviewed for the superintendent job in 2015, but the board hired Mangum in the end.

Moss said the board is excited to be at the end of the process of finding a superintendent.

“We’re fortunate that the school year is just a month in. We’re anticipating Oct. 1 to have someone come in and hit the ground rolling,” Moss said. “I think that whoever we select knows they’ve got to hit the ground rolling and get in there.”

The meeting will be open to the public, and Moss encourages others to attend and find out in person who the board decides to hire.