Nearly two months after starting the annual performance evaluation of Washington Local Schools Superintendent Susan Hayward, the district’s elected officials have yet to wrap up their work, with the board’s president attributing the delay to adoption of a new review process.
The school board met June 5 and started Mrs. Hayward’s annual review with a closed-door executive session, as allowed by Ohio’s government transparency laws. Since then the board has met multiple times, but the evaluation of the district’s highest-paid employee remains incomplete.
Board president Mark Hughes said Tuesday that board members are finalizing their evaluations, and he expects the board will finish the process in the next week or two.
Mr. Hughes attributed the holdup to the board’s decision last year to adopt the state Department of Education’s superintendent performance system.
Under that system, Mr. Hughes, as board president, is responsible for collecting evaluations from each board member before compiling those into a formal document for board review. He said scheduling has made that process difficult, with some board members not having turned in their evaluation forms. He declined to specify which board members are lagging.
“Just getting everybody to give their feedback all at once has been challenging, but it’s coming,” he said.
Mrs. Hayward did not respond to a request for comment.
Board member Lisa Canales attributed the delay to the new format.
“The form is new for us, it’s very detailed and it’s just different,” she said.
Mr. Hughes also hasn’t finalized Mrs. Hayward’s midyear review, which the board started in February.
In response to a public-records request for the superintendent’s evaluation documents, district officials sent The Blade only written performance appraisals from board members Tom Ilstrup and Dave Hunter. Evaluation forms from Ms. Canales, Mr. Hughes, and board member Chris Sharp were not included.
The Blade asked for those documents in a separate public-records request Tuesday. A district spokesman said he expected they would be available next week, but Mr. Hughes said board members were not supposed to submit their own written evaluations to the district as part of the midyear review. Instead, board members were to submit their findings to him to summarize as per the newly adopted evaluation system.
Mr. Hughes said Tuesday he expects evaluations to be completed and ready for release soon.
On the written forms that Mr. Ilstrup and Mr. Hunter did complete as part of the midyear review, Mrs. Hayward earned high marks. She received one 7 from the two board members, and otherwise all 8s, 9s, and 10s on a scale of 1 to 10. Mr. Ilstrup declined to rate Mrs. Hayward in three “adviser to the board of education” categories: impact of legislation, school finance, and district compliance with mandates.
In written comments, Mr. Ilstrup said Mrs. Hayward is responsive to the school board, addresses concerns, and keeps the board informed of important matters. He also credited her with taking recommended steps to develop community ties, and for aggressively addressing what he described as holdover issues, “including Board overreach in micro-managing the district.”
“Regular and consistent community communication/partnering continues to be essential to WLS success,” he wrote. “Get/stay out there, developing those relationships.”
Similarly in past years, district officials have given Ms. Hayward high marks, with a majority of her ratings resting at a 9 or 10.
Ms. Hayward has worked for the district since June, 2016, when she was assistant superintendent. Two months later, she became the district’s superintendent. Her current contract runs through July, 2022, and she is paid a salary of $149,394, as well as an additional education stipend of $5,000 for having a doctoral degree.
Since starting the superintendent’s most recent performance review in June, board members have also moved forward with a plan to ask voters to approve a property-tax increase this fall.
The measures are an indefinite 3.9-mill levy to provide roughly $3.2 million in operating funds annually, and a 37-year, 3.0-mill bond measure to provide nearly $50 million in capital improvement funds that will be used to reconstruct and upgrade district schools.
Board members have said the millage request, if approved, would give the district the chance to leverage $50 million in bond money in order to obtain $178 million from the Ohio Facilities Commission, which would cover 80 percent of the costs of major planned improvement projects.
Voters will weigh in on the measure in November. One mill equals $1 of tax for each $1,000 of assessed property value.
First Published July 30, 2019, 10:53 p.m.
