School district works to soften blow of teacher evaluations

“We’re moving really well with Senate Bill 191”

The Gunnison Watershed School District is teaming up with six other school districts and Mesa Valley Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) in preparation for the inaugural year of annual teacher evaluations required by Senate Bill 191.

Senate Bill 191—the Educator Effectiveness Bill—was passed in 2010 to establish new requirements for evaluating teachers and principals every year. The law has often been held up as an example of how school districts are having to pick up the cost of unfunded mandates from the state.
“CDE [Colorado Department of Education] has provided funding to all BOCES and if you’re not aligned with a BOCES then they align you to a BOCES to work with,” Gunnison Watershed superintendent Jon Nelson told the school board on Monday, October 29. “We are with six other districts and there is a whopping $48,000 and change for all the districts to implement Senate Bill 191.”
Last year, several “pilot” districts around the state tested the practice of teacher evaluations under the new requirements. This year all districts will implement annual evaluations. Prior to the passage of S.B. 191, only site administrators and teachers considered “probationary” were evaluated every year, while the rest of the faculty was on a three-year rotation.
Despite effectively tripling the number of evaluations the district has to conduct every year without much funding, Nelson says the changes aren’t going to be as hard to make as he once thought.
Most of the relief comes from the partnership with Mesa Valley BOCES, which is providing a platform for the districts to lobby the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) for enough funding to cover the cost of a trainer who could teach administrators how to best implement the necessary changes in their schools.
“Our initial thoughts were to take principals at one point and assistant principals and they can help train and relay information back to their districts and maybe that trainer could spend a little bit of time at each of the districts,” Nelson said.
The CDE has also taken steps to make the transition to the new rules easier for districts, putting evaluation forms online that were once available only in hardcopy. “As we looked at those [forms] last week they looked very effective and easy to use,” Nelson said.
There are also other tools becoming available to the district as the education industry responds to the changes with S.B. 191, like Bloomboard, a cloud-like online service that gives educators a place to store electronic evaluations in a way that sifts out data valuable to the CDE.
The first year, Nelson said, the method of evaluation will be most intensive, setting a baseline for the evaluations by asking teachers to set goals and offer a self-assessment. “Every year thereafter the evaluation will layer on top of that. Things that have been accomplished will get checked off and new things will be added,” he said. “I think our revelation was that it’s not going to be as cumbersome in subsequent years as it is the first year.”
Nelson met with the school district’s regional representative of the CDE, John Condie, who said Gunnison schools are on track to meet the state’s requirements as they roll out starting in 2013-14.
“I feel like we’re moving really well with Senate Bill 191,” Nelson said.