Beaufort Co. schools superintendent will stay 4 more years and get a 10% raise, board says
Superintendent Frank Rodriguez will lead Beaufort County School District until 2027, the school board decided Tuesday night.
Rodriguez will also get a 10% raise, bumping his annual salary from $210,200 to $231,220, along with an increase in his annual annuity contributions to 15% of his salary and an increase in his monthly travel budget from $850 to $1,200.
Rodriguez’s contract was originally for four years, and set to expire on June 30, 2023.
The 10-1 school board vote comes three weeks after the board voted to give Rodriguez an overall rating of “highly effective” in his annual review for the 2020-21 school year. Board member William Smith was the lone “no” on both of those votes.
Rodriguez scored a composite score of 3.71 on a scale from one to four, up from his score of 3.31 for the 2019-20 school year.
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.
Superintendent evaluated on performance
The board scored Rodriguez on 37 questions, measuring governance and board relations, community relations, staff relations, business and finance, and instructional leadership. But major pieces of the evaluation were missing due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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%.
Those concrete measures were eliminated from this year’s evaluation and replaced with additional pandemic-related questions for the board to score.
“We felt in all of those three areas, the pandemic had such an effect that it wasn’t a true measure,” said Cathy Robine, the chairperson of the board committee that oversees the evaluation, in October.
“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.