School board seeks to improve evaluation process

By TIMOTHY LA ROCHE
CLAREMONT — In the Claremont School Administrative Unit 6 School Board’s first meeting since several new members were elected, talks began last week to find an effective way of evaluating superintendent performance.

The board, which is made up of members of both the Claremont and Unity school boards, primarily develops budgets and policies related to governance of the student advisory unit. Namely, the board is responsible for overseeing the superintendent and his personnel.

With the process underway to assess Superintendent Middleton McGoodwin’s performance, SAU 6 board chair Sara Lowe said, board members should rethink their evaluation methods. 

In recent years, she said, the task of evaluating McGoodwin’s performance has drifted to the wayside as budget discussions take up an increasing amount of time.

In a bid to improve the evaluation process, board members formed a sub-committee last week to streamline and improve the process. The board will develop goals for McGoodwin and drive the evaluation process.

“It takes months and months,” Lowe said on the evaluation process. “I will be 100 percent honest with you, the last time we have done this was not last year but two years ago.”

Adding to the difficulties of undertaking the evaluation process, Lowe said, has been a lack of engagement from board members – several of which did not fill out evaluation paperwork or relay their thoughts to the board chair.

“It’s not that former SAU 6 board members didn’t care,” McGoodwin said. “It’s that the measures they had were difficult for them.”

Furthermore, she said, with the composition of the board changing frequently, having new board members undertake background research has been a challenge.

“A lot of that challenge had to do with what we are assessing the superintendent on is really a lot of how he is supervising and how he supports and oversees and manages other people,” Lowe said. “It is a challenge for this board to do that because … we are not in the schools enough to see all of that.”

As a result of the structural limitations of the evaluation process, McGoodwin said, he has not received any goals from the board on which his performance can be measured. However, language in his contract stipulates that evaluation will be based on his meeting on mutually agreed-upon goals.

“You can evaluate me or anyone you work with, but the proper way of doing it is to establish the goals up front, to mutually agree on these goals, and if you’re wise, they’re smart goals – meaning they’re measurable,” McGoodwin said.

In the set of standards that the board has in the past to evaluate the superintendent, Lowe said, many goals were subjective and unmeasurable. For instance, goals to “create a collaborative, highly empathetic team environment for each building, including staff, faculty, students and community” cannot be quantified.

“How do we actually rank that and measure that?” Lowe said.

 

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