The Hawaii public has had two years of watching public schools function under the unprecedented challenges of a pandemic, including six months in which a replacement superintendent of schools took over midstream, on an interim basis.

For a job that requires both administrative skill and an understanding of educational practice and the realities faced by classroom teachers, it’s clear that it is above all an administrative job.

Whoever holds it will be called on to oversee all the challenges the state Department of Education faced up until the end of 2019, as well as everything COVID-19 has layered on since then.

The sheer complexity of keeping campuses as safe as possible, through masking, distancing and testing. The uphill battle to overcome all the learning loss and lapses in school attendance that followed months of remote education.

That means creating the space and resources for those in the public schools community — faculty, staff, principals, unions, district officials and specialists within the DOE, and the parents and students themselves — who need help getting things back on track.

And then there is the state Board of Education (BOE) that is supposed to set policy guideposts, and politicians who are empowered to provide the funding.

To borrow an expression, it must be a bit like herding cats. And the process to find the herdsman or woman has only just begun.

This should not surprise anyone, says the woman heading the search committee, because this will be an extraordinarily difficult position to fill. BOE Chairwoman Catherine Payne said the committee is focused not on taking applications but on assessing what the nation’s only statewide school system, with 257 campuses and 171,600 students, requires to meet the needs of a diverse population.

On top of that, the panel is developing new strategic plans, replacing those that have expired, for the DOE and board, and have conducted focus groups to get input on what kind of person should stand at the helm.

That’s a lot to do, to be sure, but there’s also urgency to see that the timeline — starting with a national job posting due in a few weeks — does not fall behind. With finalists to be announced in May and the hiring to follow a month or so after that, the new superintendent already will confront a school system that has lost ground for two years.

Here are a few more pointers for the search committee to consider:

>> The superintendent should be someone with a clear approach to learning loss, one who allows for variations at individual schools, while maintaining educational quality for students who have coped better with distance learning. In fact, effective distance-learning options could be a pandemic adaptation to be refined and kept in the tool kit.

>> The job does need someone with cultural sensitivity, ideally an understanding of Hawaii’s history and ethnic mix. It is hard to run such an essentially local institution otherwise.

>> While not strictly a political job, the position requires a political navigator who can work with the Legislature to get the budget adequate for executing plans.

This may be the most frustrating aspect of the job — having to answer to multiple bosses, the elected ones at the state Capitol and governor’s office, and the appointed school board that is supposed to be the primary policy guide. Someone with the experience and deftness to stay on point through all of that is the one Hawaii needs.

Finally, the DOE needs someone with vision, ideas for resuming progress toward educational benchmarks and goals — for the good of Hawaii’s youth. COVID-19 short-circuited that effort, but that is the pathway to which Hawaii must return.