The board is expected to formally name Banda to the job at its meeting Wednesday night, according to a news release Monday from Seattle Public Schools.

After a closed-door meeting Sunday night, the board directed board President Michael DeBell to contact Banda about accepting the position.

In the news release, DeBell said, “I spoke with Mr. Banda on Sunday night and told him the Board is very interested in having him as our next leader of Seattle Public Schools. Mr. Banda expressed his willingness to accept the position if offered. We believe he is a strong fit for Seattle.”

Seattle police are investigating the possible misuse of school funds by a former principal and a parent coordinator at Van Asselt Elementary School.

Former Principal ElDoris Turner retired March 16, two days after being placed on administrative leave following the release of an ethics investigation that found a “gross waste of public funds.”

A parent coordinator, Ramona Fuentes, was fired Tuesday, according to the school district.

The investigation, conducted by the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, found $30,000 in unexplained cash withdrawals from an unauthorized school bank account and sloppy record-keeping. In addition, the investigation found that Turner accepted payments from a group using the school gym and did not turn the money over to the district, as was required.

The account, maintained by Turner and Fuentes, held proceeds from school fundraisers. The withdrawals were made over an 18-month period, according to the investigation.

The investigation could not determine how the money was used, but “could not rule out the possibility that some of these funds were converted to personal use,” the report said.

Outside experts are skeptical about the project, announced Tuesday at a news conference in Seattle, because it would likely require untold millions or perhaps billions of dollars and huge advances in technology. But the same entrepreneurs pioneered the selling of space rides to tourists – a notion that seemed fanciful not long ago, too.

“Since my early teenage years, I’ve wanted to be an asteroid miner. I always viewed it as a glamorous vision of where we could go,” Peter Diamandis, one of the founders of Planetary Resources, told reporters at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. The company’s vision “is to make the resources of space available to humanity.”

The inaugural step, to be achieved in the next 18 to 24 months, would be launching the first in a series of private telescopes that would search for the right type of asteroids.

The company’s founders pioneered the idea of selling rides into space to wealthy tourists. Investors and advisers include the CEO and chairman of Google, filmmaker James Cameron and former astronaut Thomas Jones.

Jones calls the mega-million dollar plan “the stuff of science fiction.” But he adds, like many ideas in science fiction, “it’s possible to begin the process of making them reality.”

The first step would be launching a series of telescopes to search for rich asteroid targets. The company expects to get that done within two years.

Outside scientists call the plan daring, difficult and highly expensive. They say it’s hard to see how it will be cost-effective. An upcoming NASA mission to return just 2 ounces of an asteroid to Earth will cost about $1 billion.

This computer-generated image provided by Planetary Resources, a group of high-tech tycoons that wants to mine nearby asteroids, shows a conceptual rendering of several small robotic spacecraft mining a near-Earth asteroid.

The group’s mega-million dollar plan is to use commercially built robotic ships to squeeze rocket fuel and valuable minerals like platinum and gold out of the lifeless rocks that routinely whiz by Earth. One of the company founders predicts they could have their version of a space-based gas station up and running by 2020.

Detectives were still trying to find Peter A. Keller, 41, who lives in the house where the women were found. Keller is considered a “person of interest” and has not been named as a suspect, said King County sheriff’s Sgt. Cindi West.

“We certainly have not ruled him out as a suspect,” she said. But she added, “There is a possibility that he’s also a victim somewhere.”

Keller has been unaccounted for since the Sunday morning fire at the house that he shared with his wife and daughter.

“We have two victims who have been shot and killed, weapons are missing from the house, and we have not been able to contact Keller,” said King County Sheriff Steve Strachan, in a statement. “We want to talk to him to see if he had any involvement in this case.”

Keller has no known history of violence, West said. He is an avid hiker and has spent many hours hiking the area around North Bend.

The identities of the two women have not been released.

A dog and cat also were found dead at the house, West said Monday.

Arson investigators were at the home Monday, where crews responding to the blaze also found seven gasoline containers, West said.

Created as the centerpiece of the 1962 space-themed exposition, the 605-foot-tall Space Needle has been described as looking like “a UFO on stilts” and was for many years the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. Today, the still futuristic-looking Needle is an iconic landmark in the Emerald City, its most visited attraction and home to one of the few remaining rotating restaurants in the world.

To learn more about the Space Needle – and some of its secrets – we spoke with Seattle writer Knute Berger, who attended the World’s Fair when he was 8 years old and is the author of a new book titled “Space Needle: The Spirit of Seattle.”

“The Seattle Times” says the Vatican chose Sartain because it sees him as politically moderate.

The trainer is being shipped piece-by-piece from Houston to Seattle, where it will be reassembled and displayed. Tuesday’s shipment contained three engine bells. They are about nine feet in diameter and weight about 800 pounds each.

The Pulitzers were announced Monday in New York. They are given out annually by Columbia University.

Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong from The Times won a prize for investigative reporting for a look at how vulnerable patients in Washington state were moved from safer pain-control drugs to methadone, which is less expensive but carries more risks. The Times reported that more than 2,100 people died of accidental methadone overdoses between 2003-2011. The award was the ninth Pulitzer for The Seattle Times.

Eli Sanders of The Stranger won the award for feature writing for a story about a woman who survived a brutal rape. Her partner was killed and the surviving woman testified about her ordeal in court.