A mid-year job evaluation released to the Courier-Herald by Sumner School District revealed the district board of directors gave Superintendent Gil Mendoza overall unsatisfactory performance marks prior to the two parties’ recent mutual separation agreement.

Shortly before the document was issued, Mendoza and outgoing Maple Lawn Parent Teacher Association President Nancy Dumas each issued written responses to the evaluation.

The district document evaluated Mendoza in nine broad categories, each with subcategories in which board directors could cast a vote of “unsatisfactory,” “needs improvement,” “satisfactory,” or “exceeds expectations”

The nine broad categories were:

• Knowledge of, experience in, and training in recognizing good professional performance, capabilities and development

• School administration and management

• School finance

• Professional preparation and scholarship

• Effort toward improvement when needed

• Interest in pupils, employees, patrons and subjects taught in school

• Leadership

• Ability and performance of evaluation of school personnel, and

• Board/Superintendent relations

Professional preparation, effort toward improvement, interest in pupils etc., leadership, and school personnel evaluation were each assigned overall unsatisfactory ratings.

School finance was the best scoring category with an overall satisfactory rating, and all other categories scored as needing improvement.

The summarized comments section of the evaluation stated that problems, particularly those concerning leadership, had been apparent since the prior evaluation during summer 2010. The board did not give Mendoza an overall unsatisfactory rating on that evaluation, it read, with the hope that he would be able to turn things around and regain the confidence of the district’s leadership team.

“Unfortunately, the situation has become worse, not better, since last summer’s evaluation,” it read.

Key to the board’s overall finding were the perceptions of upper-level administrators who work directly with the superintendent in the central office, as well as school principals, according to the report.

Of the 40 administrators who responded to a perception survey question about trust, 60 percent indicated they did not trust Mendoza, according to the report. Personal interviews of said administrators by board members showed a perceived history of unilateral decisions by the superintendent that would later have to be corrected after the “fall-out (sic)” began.

“Academically, the Sumner School District has continued to perform quite well during Dr. Mendoza’s tenure,” the last paragraph of the report read. “The Board’s conclusion is that this is the result of the actions of the District’s top administrators other than the Superintendent, who have been doing great work ‘in spite’ of Dr. Mendoza’s leadership, not ‘because’ of it.

“Quality administrators are in short supply, and a lack of confidence in the Superintendent will lead valued members of the District’s administrative team to leave.”

On June 17, Mendoza released a written response to the school board’s evaluation of his performance, criticizing the process by which the evaluation was completed and providing section-by-section rebuttals to the findings.

Two running theme of Mendoza’s comments were a lack of communication of problems as they were happening, if they were happening, and that his evaluation was done largely out of public meetings, in a format that was not mutually agreed upon.

“The evaluation form being used is not a ‘mutually agreed upon format,’ as my contract calls for,” Mendoza’s response read. “When the Board was exploring changing my evaluation form from the initial design, I met with director Hanon to go over proposed changes. During those discussions and mutual edits, I agreed to utilize this revised form only on the condition that a rubric—a guide, often used for grading more subjective academic assignments, that explains the expected patterns and accomplishments for different rating levels—would be designed and established to offer specific clarity to the rankings as noted on the form. That request was ignored despite my repeated requests to develop such.”

A rubric would have provided context to the ratings provided in the evaluation, Mendoza wrote. He went on to write that when he brought the issue up with the board directors after the evaluation, an unnamed member of the board insinuated he only found fault with the form because of the unsatisfactory rating and that he had not found similar fault in the past.

The lack of a rubric did lead to one unclear rating in the Leadership section, assuming all subsections were weighted equally. Of 30 bulk votes across the six subsections, 15 fell under the “Satisfactory” column, seven under “Needs Improvement” and eight under “Unsatisfactory.” The overall rating for Leadership was “Unsatisfactory” despite a majority 22 votes being cast in two more favorable categories.

The most lengthy response by Mendoza was to the rating in Professional Preparation and Scholarship. In it, he wrote that some administrators’ opinions may have been informed by biased comparison to his differences from predecessor Donald Eismann; Mendoza asserted his leadership style was backed by his doctoral studies in educational leadership.

Mendoza also stated he had been involved in attending many out-of-district training seminars alongside staff and administrators, including seminars for Response to Intervention, early learning, differentiation of instruction and standards-based grading. He also guided many reports to the board regarding contemporary educational practices the district utilizes or planned to utilize.

“I can understand how all board members may not have grasped this, given their affinity for texting and answering e-mails on their mobile phones during board meetings, while our teachers and administrators are presenting on these important topics,” Mendoza wrote in a particularly personal portion of the text.

The school board evaluation of that section mentioned, in particular, the “haphazard” roll out of the Measurement of Academic Progress testing system. The comments cited conflicting information given to principals how and when roll out would occur.

Mendoza responded that what they were unknowingly speaking to was how information was shared with parents. He described  a scenario in which he informed an elementary principal that the data would be shared during spring conferences, and she had already told teachers they would be sharing MAP data in the fall. Mendoza said he acquiesced to that request to support her credibility with staff.

That scenario was a specific example Mendoza provided of misinformation that could have been avoided, he wrote, had he been invited to participate in the executive sessions for his evaluation.

But Mendoza appeared to take particular offense to his rating in Interest in Pupils, Employees, Patrons and Subjects Taught in School.

“Are we about student learning and caring for their (students) welfare, or are we about the adults who want to be in charge and preserve the status quo?” Mendoza wrote. “The rankings and comments in his (sic) area of responsibility are an insult to my work over the last four years. For the Board to project that I do not value students and staff nor acknowledge contributions others make is a reflection of their lack of connection to what goes on in our schools.”

Dumas sent out an email en masse to community members with her response to the situation after reading both the evaluation and Mendoza’s rebuttal. She said she was not writing as a matter of PTA business, but as a concerned parent. She came out in support of Mendoza, partially citing the anecdotal information coming from teachers who frequented the business she ran until 2005.

“Speaking out against the School Board is not an option for those employed by (the school district) for fear of retaliation and being next on the list to be targeted by the Board,” she wrote.

Dumas wrote that parents had yet to be informed of the June 8 decision, as of her writing on June 21, and that parents’ opinions had not been sought in evaluating Mendoza’s performance.

Dumas cited district report card stats from the Office of the Superintendent for Public Instruction to compare three data points under Donald Eismann’s 2004-05 school year and Mendoza’s 2009-10 school year. Drop out rates were 4.4 percent under Eismann and 2.2 percent under Mendoza, graduation rates were 80.6 percent and 86 percent, and extended graduation rates were 84.3 percent and 90.1 percent, respectively.

“How are Dr (sic) Mendoza’s stat’s (sic) bad if he ‘bests’ not only Donald Eismann’s but his own numbers as well?” Dumas wrote.

She also questioned the business sense of letting Mendoza go on June 30 and paying him for a year’s salary — about $178,000 — afterward, writing that it would make more sense to allow him to stay to tie up loose ends over the period he would be paid.