New London - The Board of Education tonight will appoint seven staff members to various positions throughout the district and its central office.

Two of the positions, a director of student services and a chief talent/human resources officer, are brand new. The other five positions are the result of replacing high school department heads with department coordinators who will work with more than just one department.

When former assistant superintendent of schools Christine Carver left the district in March, her position was filled by Katherine Ericson on an interim basis. The district has decided to eliminate the position, and with the board's approval tonight, make Ericson instead the district's chief academic officer.

In the past, the assistant superintendent was responsible for myriad items that included handling human resources functions and grievances, special education, and curriculum and instructional changes, for example.

Some of those responsibilities will now be handed over to Miriam Morales-Taylor and Cherese Chery, who will be named the district's new director of student services and chief talent/human resources officer, respectively.

Those positions are new for the district and were created largely with the influence of the district's special master, Steven Adamowski.

Superintendent Nicholas A. Fischer said Wednesday that Morales-Taylor will be responsible for three areas: special education, English Language Learner/bilingual, and gifted and talented education.

"She has considerable experience in all three areas," Fischer said of Morales-Taylor, who is coming to the district from Hartford with 34 years of education experience.

Chery will assume a majority of the human resources functions and will design a talent approach that will address a number of different areas but focus specifically on ways to improve recruitment of minority staff, Fischer said.

He said that Chery has "extensive experience in the private sector" and most recently worked for the State Education Resource Center in Middletown.

The district's former literacy supervisor, Grace Conti, will become the response to intervention coordinator; English teacher Deanna Brucoli will become the high school's humanities coordinator; Margaret Bucaram, a dean at the high school, will become the bilingual coordinator; and Zato Kadambaya, who currently works at Norwich Free Academy and will join the New London schools shortly, will become the science and math coordinator.

Fischer said those four positions will be comprised of 60 percent administrative time and 40 percent teaching time.

The school board meets at 7 tonight at the Science and Technology Magnet High School.

Child care is available for parents who would like to attend the meeting. For more information on child care, email Kathryn Patterson at pattersonk@newlondon.org.

j.hanckel@theday.com