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Candidate number three, Mark Evans says Omaha has great things happening and he's ready to take the OPS district to the next level.

For the final meet and greet, once again the community filed into the TAC building to hear Evans' pitch.

"Tonight's candidate is somebody who has good solid superintendent experience, not in a district like ours but he's worked in Wichita which is very similar to us so just gonna see what he brings to the table."

He dove right in. First and foremost Evans says to have a successful district ownership of its students is a must.

"I think that's just a key component before we can even deal with some of the student achievement issues some of the achievement gap issues. Is first we've got to take ownership and treat every one of our students all 50,000 like they were our own son and daughter ."

Evans has more than three decades experience in education. He's held positions in the Wichita Public School district and is currently superintendent for Andover Public.

He says his experience in Kansas would make him a good fit for Omaha.

"Demographics are similar with about 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 of ethnic makeup, so I saw a whole lot of similarity and very similar to a lot of work I did there to make a difference."

By studying different types of data as a starting point and creating goals with the school board community, he says will help make a plan for improvement.
 
"Specific, measurable, attainable, reliable and timely; and you create bench marking along the way, and then you create a system that is accountable that looks to see if you're making progress on whatever strategy you've identified."

Evans says if he gets the job he won't start making changes right away, he'll start listening.