The Lagunitas School District administration will renegotiate two clauses of its contract with the teacher’s union concerning staff development and teacher evaluation.
The announcement, made at a sparsely attended board meeting last week, comes a month after teachers announced their intention to renegotiate salaries, benefits and class sizes and at a time when the district’s structural budget deficit will gut reserves in four years unless significant changes are made.
The administration wrote that it is interested in “enhancing its ability to direct staff development planning and activities” and “enhancing teacher evaluation, decreasing the frequency of mandatory traditional teacher evaluations for experienced teachers and developing a professionally valuable alternative evaluation program.”
Though staff partake in regular development training, the district’s current contract devotes fewer than 70 words to staff development, only noting that a committee of teachers and administrators should have an “education program,” without elaborating what that is.
And the current teacher evaluation process needs substantive improvements, he said. Currently administrators make informal classroom visits as well formal observations; probationary teachers are evaluated once a year, permanent teachers with fewer than 10 years of experience are evaluated at least every other year, and those with over a decade can choose to undergo a formal assessment every three or five years.
Mr. Carroll declined to discuss too many specifics of coming negotiations, but said he is most interested in increasing the involvement of other teachers in the evaluation process. “I don’t like it when teacher evaluation is scary. It should help them improve, not be something where the microscope is on them and it’s a gotcha moment.”