The evaluation process is common in most professions from sales to teaching. In the “Superintendent Evaluation Handbook,” Michael DiPaola dates the formal superintendent evaluation process back to 1980.
The Española School Board has not taken this task lightly.
Since September, the Board has been working out a new format for their superintendent evaluation.
On Sept. 27, the Board first went into executive session for limited personnel matters and to have a “discussion on evaluation of the superintendent.” The Board met five subsequent times in executive session to discuss the format for the updated superintendent evaluation.
However, by the Dec. 18 meeting, the Board was not yet ready to approve the new evaluation and voted 3-2 to suspend evaluating Superintendent Danny Trujillo until the evaluation was finished.
“We don’t have the final evaluation document for the superintendent’s evaluation,” Board President Ralph Medina said at the meeting.
By the new year, though, the evaluation was unanimously approved by the Board. The new evaluation is broken into four stages. First, the superintendent completes a yearly self-evaluation listing the accomplishments and progress made toward both personal and district goals.
Once the self-evaluation is complete, the superintendent delivers it to the board president, who then distributes a copy to each member of the Board. At this stage, each board member individually reviews the self-evaluation and then fills out their evaluation. All the evaluations are collected and tabulated by the board president. Once the results are finalized, the Board will collectively discuss the results and agree on a final result.
The final step will be discussing the results of the evaluation with the superintendent in executive session.
On Jan. 14, the Board met in a closed session for the superintendent evaluation. However, what part of the evaluation process the Board discussed was not disclosed.
“I can’t say anything yet,” Medina said in a Jan. 16 interview.
Board Secretary Annabelle Almager gave more insight into the evaluation.
“It was a nice process. The Board worked together to get the evaluation done. It was the best I’ve seen and the best, I believe, that the previous board members have seen,” Almager said.
Medina is tallying up the results of the evaluations, she said.
Trujillo said he was not involved in the Jan. 14 meeting.
“The Board deliberated on the evaluations. I was not involved with the process. I will be notified by the president of the board. That’s the protocol,” he said.
While the outcome of Trujillo’s evaluation is not yet known, other school districts in the county have conducted evaluations and implemented the results. Dulce Independent School Board evaluated Superintendent James Lesher during their December meeting. The Board voted against renewing Lesher’s contract, which will expire June 30, board minutes state.
Lesher was superintendent at Dulce for three years. He originally worked for the Dulce School District as a high school principal and then moved into the superintendent role in January 2011.
Chama Valley School District also conducted their evaluation in December. Superintendent Anthony Casados said he was given a satisfactory grade by the school board, but there has been no decision made yet on renewing his contract.
The Mesa Vista Consolidate School Board evaluated Superintendent Ernesto Valdez during their December meeting. His contract will be discussed during the Jan. 28 meeting.
Jemez Mountain School District will conduct the superintendent evaluation in February, Superintendent Manuel Medrano said.
During a 1980 joint meeting with the National School Boards Association and American Association of School Administrators, the two associations recommended all school boards begin to conduct regular, formal evaluations.
Across the map, school boards were struggling to adapt to a formalized process when former President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education released “Nation at Risk” in 1983.
The report states in its introduction, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.”
The report implicated poor leadership as the main culprit and spurned school boards to place more importance on the superintendent’s role. By 1994, the National School Boards Association had a formalized superintendent evaluation process in place for school boards to follow.