School superintendent is one of the most important jobs in any community. The Kenosha Unified School District is looking for a new superintendent now to replace the soon-to-retire Joe Mangi.

So, what do we want?

The school district wants to know. In addition to the meetings held Wednesday seeking public comment, there is a questionnaire on the district’s Web site (www.kusd.edu) seeking comments from teachers, students, parents and anyone else in the community who might want to weigh in.

The questionnaire lists 33 qualities or characteristics and asks the responder to select up to 10. If you don’t find what you want there, there is space provided for adding characteristics and other comments.

If you want to participate, don’t procrastinate. Today is the last day for filling out the questionnaire on the Web site.

To warm you up to the task, here are a few thoughts from high atop the Kenosha News tower — meaning the second floor with a view of downtown’s most prominent vacant buildings. I’m no expert on education, but I’m a taxpayer and a parent of two children who went through the public school system, and I’ve been a close observer of school politics for more than 20 years.

The biggest hurdle for most superintendents is lack of trust because of constant turnover in the job. The expectation is that the superintendent won’t be around for long enough to really make a difference. Five years is about as long as superintendents seem to last.

That means long-term faculty members know that if they don’t like the direction the superintendent is leading, they can probably just wait it out. Pretty soon, the superintendent will be gone.

In Kenosha, it hasn’t mattered whether the new superintendent is hired from inside the district or outside; the superintendent doesn’t last long. Anthony Bisciglia was hired from inside the district, but his term lasted only six years, ending in 1995. His successor, Michael Johnson, was hired from outside the district, and his term lasted five years. Scott Pierce was hired from outside the district, but he was from here, so he was also an insider. He lasted four years.

But the chances for a longer-staying superintendent would seem to be better with someone from inside. Why has everyone been so accepting of Joe Mangi as superintendent? Everyone knows him; they know he’s not going to try to make big changes and then disappear, and they know from experience that he has the best interests of the students at heart.

It’s not as though people elsewhere don’t have those characteristics, but the people the superintendent works with — teachers, administrators, students, parents and taxpayers — need to be convinced, and that takes time.

Ironically, Kenosha usually looks outside for its superintendents, and people inside the administration take jobs as superintendents elsewhere. The most recent example was Milt Thompson, a longtime Unified administrator who became superintendent in Beloit this year, but there have been several others.

The districts where those former Unified administrators became superintendents aren’t nearly as big as Kenosha (Beloit, for example, has about one-third the students), but there really aren’t many districts with 20,000-plus students in Wisconsin. And of those, how many are really successful and have programs Kenosha should emulate?

I’m not pushing a particular candidate, but I’d be surprised if there aren’t several people already working for the district who could do the job. And it seems to me that an organization as big as Unified — more than 2,600 full-time employees — ought to have some sort of succession plan other than, “Let’s see what’s on the market when the time comes.”

Steve Lund is editorial page editor of the Kenosha News. His column appears on Thursdays.