Teacher observations, end of the year conferences and summary assessments — they’re all part of the district’s teacher evaluation plan, which will receive an extended timeline for the 2014-2015 school year.
“It’s extremely difficult to meet the current timeline for every tenured teacher in the district,” said Karen Dewing, the district’s director of personnel, when she presented her recommendations to the Board of Education on May 27.
The deadline for end of the year conference this year was May 31.
“May 31 is an unrealistic deadline to have the end of the year conference,” she added.
The new evaluation schedule, which was approved by the board Monday night, has end of year conferences for teacher evaluations taking place on the last five days of school next year.
It’s not the only component of the plan receiving more time.
“Observations for tenured teachers in November are being changed to January,” she explained.
The original plans, which came from the state’s department of education, said all observations must be submitted by Nov. 15.
Under the revisions presented to the board, the new deadline for observations is Jan. 15.
Also, a summary evaluation will be given to all tenured teachers on the last day of school — not the second to last day, as it was approved for the 2013-2014 school year back on Aug. 22.
Board member Michael Raduazzo thought extending the timeline could prove to be problematic.
“It sounds like we’re delaying the possibility for effective change,” he said.
Ms. Dewing said that the people responsible for the evaluations — the principals — will still begin their observations in September.
“The process is going to be the same,” she said. “But the deadline to have it all completed is going to change, and the reason isn’t because the principals are waiting around to do it, they just can’t because there’s not enough time in their schedules.”
Tied to the test?
Another point of interest for some board members was how much teachers should be evaluated on standardized tests that have yet to be fully implemented.
According to the approved guidelines for this year, 22.5% of the measurements used for students’ academic growth and development should be based on standardized testing.
Assistant superintendent Kimberly Beck said the state can’t force this on a district in 2014-2015 because state-wide test results won’t be available yet.
Ms. Dewing recommended that board revise its language to evaluate teachers on “indicators other than the state test for the 2014-2015 year.”
“The testing part of the evaluation was adopted to be flexible to include measures other than the state testing,” Ms. Dewing said. “This should be locally determined because we won’t have the data which has caused the state to de-couple standardized testing with districts’ evaluation plans.”
She warned the board that they should expect more changes in this part of the evaluation plan.
“This language is just for one year,” she said. “What we had before could be back again in 2015-2016.”
Ms. Beck added that she didn’t know what tests would be measured as part of the teacher evaluation plan next year.
“It’s all preliminary discussion,” she said. “There are other tests we have that can be used.”
Ms. Dewing concluded that she would not be making any recommendations to change the district’s current administrator evaluation plan.
“The administrator model is pretty close to the state model so there’s no change to recommend at this time,” she said. “Our focus is on our teacher evaluation plan and getting that closer to where we want it to be.”