The informality of Tacoma Schools leader Charlie Milligan’s first evaluation raises concerns. Two board members refuse to vote on his performance. Tacoma School Board members abandoned tradition when they gave Superintendent Charlie Milligan his first evaluation last month.
They gave him nothing in writing.
They made no checkmarks on an evaluation form.
They didn’t emerge from their closed-door session with a list of written goals for the 2007-2008 school year.
That startles some people.
“I’m surprised. I guess I would have assumed he would’ve gotten a written review,” said Gayle Nakayama, president of the Tacoma Education Association. “I think as taxpayers the community would want to have something to show the job he’s doing.”
School Board member Kurt Miller was a bit taken aback, too.
“The process has always been that there is a written instrument provided to the superintendent in regard to the evaluation,” said Miller, who withheld his vote on Milligan’s satisfactory rating because he felt he didn’t have enough information.
The board’s intention wasn’t so much to circumvent past practice as it was to create a fresh way to view the superintendent’s performance during a new era for the district, School Board President Connie Rickman said Saturday.
“We wanted the freedom to discuss and really compare” Milligan’s performance with his effectiveness at meeting the five major goals the board set out during a retreat last summer, Rickman said.
Rickman, Vice President Jim Dugan and member Kim Golding ruled Milligan’s work “satisfactory” at the conclusion of a six-hour closed-door meeting on March 18.
Miller and board member Debbie Winskill declined to take part in the vote, saying they didn’t have enough information to effectively rate the performance of a man who’d been on the job only eight-and-a-half months.
“The scope of our discussion was very narrow, and many of these items were not discussed adequately as far as I was concerned,” Winskill said during a March 22 board meeting.
Board members didn’t fill in the six-page Superintendent Evaluation Form meant to rate Milligan’s performance in 33 categories with room in each section for board comments.
“We did have the document to do the evaluation,” Winskill said. “We’ve always filled those out in the past.”
Rickman argues the body of evidence Milligan brought to show improvements throughout the district provided plenty of written material to support the conclusion that he is taking Tacoma’s schools in the right direction. In addition to his self-evaluation, material provided to The News Tribune included “Mid-Year Reflections” reports from his top administrators and principals at each of the district’s 56 schools.
The “satisfactory” rating Milligan got from the board effectively extends his original three-year contract through the 2009-2010 school year.
Board members will vote before June 30 on Milligan’s salary for the upcoming school year, Rickman said. She told The News Tribune in March the board also would vote at a later date to lengthen the contract, though one of its provisions calls for an automatic extension for a satisfactory evaluation.
Two days after the review, Milligan said he couldn’t comment on it because he hadn’t seen a written copy. The News Tribune submitted a public records request for the written evaluation and notes from the evaluation session. The district responded on March 27, saying there was no such document.
On Friday, Milligan confirmed he hadn’t received a written review. And he added, “I don’t comment on personnel issues – mine included.”
GRADING THE CEO
Tacoma School Board members carried pens and pencils into their evaluation sessions for longtime Superintendent Jim Shoemake, records show.
His 2004-2005 evaluation, the final review before his retirement last year, employed a rating scale of 1 to 3, with a 1 meaning “needs improvement,” a 2 denoting “meets expectations” and a 3 indicating “exceeds expectations.”
Board members scored Shoemake’s progress at meeting seven goals and included written comments.
They awarded him solid scores that averaged between the “meets expectations” and “exceeds expectations” in most of 29 subcategories.
That approach is fairly typical of other Washington school boards, some of whom evaluate their superintendents twice a year.
Many superintendents’ reviews are conducted near the end of the school year. School CEO’s contracts typically run from July 1 to June 30.
Puyallup, Clover Park and Seattle school boards all emerge from those evaluations with some form of written review, representatives of those districts said.
The Washington State School Directors’ Association offers a comprehensive workshop for board members to evaluate their own effectiveness at setting policy, as well as their superintendent’s job performance, communications director David Brine said.
Evaluating a school district’s CEO “is a fairly involved process and there are different models that you can use, depending on how you want to approach it.”
The most important element is using a consistent set of criteria in a thoughtful deliberative process, Brine said.
Milligan’s CEO counterpart in the city, Tacoma City Manager Eric Anderson, will receive a written evaluation in a few weeks, said City Councilman Spiro Manthou. The process will include ratings and a commentary on how well Anderson is meeting expectations and goals.
“You should have something in writing” to document the review, said Manthou, who is coordinating the evaluation plan for the council. “I couldn’t see how you could get through the process without it.”
TOO HASTY?
Milligan asked board members to review him before the end of the school year. Miller and Winskill complained the review was done too soon in the school year and the evaluation process itself was too short.
“With Dr. Shoemake, we spent weeks” formulating the review, Miller said.
“We needed to discuss it for an extended amount of time,” Winskill said. “One day was not enough” for a thorough review, she added.
Milligan heads a school district with 29,500 students, thousands of employees and a $291 million annual general fund budget.
Although some criticized the timing of the March review, saying it would have been better to wait until nearer the end of the academic year, Rickman said there was great value to the early assessment.
Evaluations of Shoemake were sometimes “stilted” and “ambiguous,” she said. “With Dr. Milligan we had not only the very specific goals but also written information from all of the building administrators but also the central district administrators. That’s where the buck stops – with him.”
All five board members support Milligan, Miller said. His abstention from the evaluation vote wasn’t directed at Milligan, but at the process.
“In my opinion it was too early,” and done too quickly without enough deliberation, Miller said last week.
Winskill says she understands why the superintendent “wanted to get a reading of where he was.”
But she didn’t think the review process was complete enough, and she believes the evaluation form should have been filled out. The discussions aren’t over, Rickman said.
“I’m going to ask board members to have a retreat with him and review the achievement data when it comes in,” she said.
Milligan said he’ll review the district’s progress toward meeting its five goals at the end of the school year. Those goals are: Learning for All Students; Safe, Positive, Well-Maintained Schools; Quality Staff Providing Quality Services; School/Family/Community and Communication; and Acquisition and Allocation of Resources.
He expects good things.
There was great excitement among teachers during the Washington Assessment of Student Learning tests this month, he said.
Milligan said his ability to run the city’s schools will be more apparent in the next academic year because he’ll be able to set the direction.
School schedules and learning plans were developed and many decisions for the 2005-2006 school year were already made by the time Milligan officially took over in July, he said.
Milligan said his on-the-job performance gets evaluated every day.
Feedback “comes to me in a variety of ways,” he said. “Almost every board meeting is an evaluation to me,” he added.
“Improvement is not an event” that can be captured by a snapshot review, he said. “It’s a process.”
Kris Sherman: 253-597-8659
kris.sherman@thenewstribune.com
WEB EXTRA
JOIN THE DISCUSSION | Register here
We welcome comments. Please keep them civil, short and to the point. ALL CAPS, spam, obscene, profane, abusive and off topic comments will be deleted. Repeat offenders will be blocked. Thanks for taking part — and abiding by these simple rules. A thorough explanation of rules of conduct can be found in our Terms of Service. If you have any questions, including why your comment may not be showing immediately after you submit it, be sure to visit the commenting FAQ.