Board Approves Superintendent Berman's Evaluation

After meeting twice this week behind closed doors, the Jefferson County Board of Education released its evaluation of Superintendent Sheldon Berman.A new state law that went into effect Thursday allowed the board to conduct most of its review in private. After several hours of meetings, the board voted 6-0, with one abstention, to approve the evaluation. The report praises Berman for improving upon areas that were cited in previous evaluations, but asks him to focus more on improving chronically low-performing schools.Board member Carol Ann Haddad says she think the report could say more about improving academics in general."While I agree with most of it, there are some issues I feel more strongly about," she says. "Student achievement is really our focus, our test scores have gone down for three years in reading and this year in high school math. This is very disappointing."Berman says we will take the board's advice, though he's working on improving performance across the district, especially in the underperforming schools."The school improvement grants are going to be critical for us in moving those forward," he says. "The leadership and the changes in leadership, the re-staffing we've done is going to be critical. These are no simple problems. The student assignment plan will help, the restructuring we've put in place will help, but there are no quick fixes."To see the full evaluation, click here (PDF).