MARS — Mars Area School District will work with Amy Schafer, Thiel College’s director of athletics, to complete its search for a new varsity head football coach.

The board approved hiring Schafer as a consultant at a meeting Tuesday night at a cost of $1,200 plus mileage. Schafer will facilitate the interview process for the district.

Superintendent Mark Gross said the decision was made because the longtime previous football coach, Scott Heinauer, also is the district’s athletic director.

“In order to protect him, to keep him out of the limelight of who’s hired and who’s not hired, we’re basically asking for a consultant to step in to help the district hire a football coach,” Gross said. “Amy Schafer is from Thiel College, in the northwest, and it’s far enough away from Mars that we feel that we have a neutral party.”

Gross said that the district received 23 applications for the head football coach position.

“We are going to narrow that down to six to eight semifinalists based on resume screening,” he said. “We also have a committee internally of administrators and staff who will basically serve on the interview committee that Amy would be facilitating and help her with the interviews.”

This list will be provided to Gross by Friday, he said, and the first round of interviews should be between Mar. 14 and 16. Two or three finalists will be brought back around Mar. 17.

Gross predicted that the process would find a final candidate for coach by the end of March. A special board meeting may be called to hire the new coach depending on how close the process’s finish comes to the April board meeting dates, he said.

“We certainly want to get this coaching position hired sooner than later, because we all know that any athletic program requires a lot of off-season activity,” he said.

Gross said he thought it was only fair to Heinauer to keep him as far from the process as possible so that the decision is not skewed for or against him.

“It’s certainly no discredit to our current AD,” Gross said. “He could do this and could do it quite well, hiring a coach for us, but just the fact that he happened to be the person vacating the position, I think it’s best to do this through a neutral means.”

Parents, friends and members of Mars Cub Scout Pack 413 spoke at the meeting to advocate for the changing of a policy that would otherwise increase facility rental costs for the group.

Speaking on behalf of the pack, Valencia resident Aaron Best said the district’s rental policy change last year to require a 90% active residency membership clause for discounted space rental rates would cause the pack’s costs to skyrocket from $15 an hour for rental to $135 an hour.

Best explained that a request was sent to the pack to provide a roster and addresses of members to qualify for the discounted rate, and that with the pack’s current composition of 44 Mars Area School District residents and eight non-Mars residents, their resident percentage falls just short of the rule.

“Clearly, on paper, we are a Mars organization. We are also chartered under Boy Scouts of America as the Mars pack,” Best said. “Anytime you have a Mars organization with under 100 members, those nonmembers will always carry more weight against the organization’s total.”

The pack’s treasurer, Mars resident Sreekar Gadde, elaborated that the increased costs would mean the pack’s rental fees would jump from $250 a year to more than $2,000.

Best requested that the rule be reconsidered or that an alternative lease agreement with the pack be drawn up.

Board president John Kennedy said that the facility-use policy would be discussed further at next week’s meeting.