Beaufort County School Board finished superintendent’s annual review. How did he do?
Beaufort County School District’s superintendent got high marks on his annual evaluation, and he could get a raise. But major pieces of the evaluation were missing due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The school board, meeting Thursday night to announce the results of Superintendent Frank Rodriguez’s evaluation for the 2020-21 school year, gave him an overall rating of “highly effective.”
Rodriguez earned a composite score of 3.71 on a scale from one to four. The board scored Rodriguez on 37 questions, measuring governance and board relations, community relations, staff relations, business and finance, and instructional leadership.
This was a bump up from his score of 3.31 for the 2019-20 school year.
Rodriguez has not been scored on concrete measures of student achievement since he became superintendent in July 2019.
The board also voted 10-1 Thursday to “immediately discuss ways to bring his employment contract in alignment with his performance,” though the meeting was adjourned after that vote. William Smith was the lone “no” vote.
In a letter announcing the results of the evaluation, school board chairperson Christina Gwozdz cited Rodriguez’s guidance through the COVID-19 pandemic and oversight of the $345 million school bond referendum in 2019 as highlights.
“Hard work, effective leadership, flexibility and innovation by our Superintendent guided the District through this enormous challenge,” Gwozdz said.
Rodriguez is under a four-year contract that’s set to expire on June 30, 2023. His annual salary is $210,200, and the contract includes an option to increase that pay via an amendment. No changes were announced Thursday; the board’s next regular meeting is Tuesday.
What wasn’t included in the score?
Typically, the evaluation is split into two parts: The board’s review is worth 45% of Rodriguez’s score, and concrete measures for teacher recruitment and retention, financial oversight and student achievement make up the other 55%.
But those concrete measures were eliminated from this year’s evaluation and replaced with additional pandemic-related questions for the board to score.
Cathy Robine, chairperson of the board committee that oversees the evaluation, explained that choice Friday.
“We felt in all of those three areas, the pandemic had such an effect that it wasn’t a true measure,” she said. “The only one we really had some discussion about was financial oversight, and he would’ve gotten points for being under budget. But really, part of being under budget was due to the pandemic and being shut down.”
The financial oversight metric measures how well the district adheres to its annual budget and maintains its bond rating. For the 2020-21 fiscal year, the school board voted to use the same budget as the previous year due to uncertainties about state funding during the pandemic.
Beaufort County School District scored above state averages in school report cards for 2020-21, but still saw major drops in math scores that were in line with other South Carolina districts.
In a September press conference, State Superintendent Molly Spearman cautioned against comparing the 2020-21 scores to previous years, and added that the Department of Education had omitted rankings from that year’s school report cards.
The same measures were omitted from Rodriguez’s 2019-20 evaluation, also due to the pandemic. His 90-day superintendent evaluation in November of 2019 only included school board scores.
This story was originally published October 29, 2021 at 12:43 PM.