The Boston School Committee Monday night rated Superintendent Mary Skipper “effective” as they evaluated her performance of her second year at the helm of Massachusetts’s largest school district.
Committee members had criticisms for the superintendent, in particular giving her a “developing” rating in community engagement, but overall they said that while they are far from happy with the district’s outcomes, they trusted her efforts were beginning to bear fruit.
“We believe that you are turning this district in the right direction,” said member Stephen Alkins, who compiled the individual members’ evaluations into a single presentation. “We agree, change is not going to happen overnight.”
The committee is set to vote Aug. 28, on the eve of the new school year, on their evaluation of the superintendent. Skipper stands to earn a 2.5 percent raise to her more than $300,000 salary, after she received the effective rating across the four areas evaluated: instructional leadership, management and operations, family and community engagement, and professional culture.
There was a wide range of opinions on the committee, with members Michael O’Neill and Quoc Tran rating Skipper highly effective, the top rating, in three out of four areas, and member Brandon Cardet-Hernandez rating her developing or minimally effective in all four.
Overall, the committee was positive about Skipper’s work, particularly in areas like the district’s overhaul of how it teaches students to read, momentum on improving bus transportation, and improved recruitment and retention. Much of the praise reflected Skipper’s self-evaluation, which the committee received first and which she also presented at the meeting. Skipper rated herself effective as well.
“While we are not where we want and need to be, we are moving in the right direction,” the superintendent said, noting the school system has moved out of the state’s bottom 10 percent of districts — “no small task,” she said.
But several members criticized the superintendent for the lack of a clear long-term facilities plan that lays out specific timelines for the district to consolidate properties.
“We do not have a clear systems-level facilities plan, which would really give us a sense of the goals,” Alkins said.
The committee also sought more clarity from Skipper on her plans to serve multilingual learners, after nearly all of the district’s English Learners Task Force resigned in protest last fall over the district’s inclusion plan, which would integrate them (and students with disabilities) into general education classrooms. Echoing the task force, committee members said they want the district to provide more native language instruction to those students.
A scaled-back version of the inclusion plan, which will be rolled out in some grades in the coming year, was another area of concern. Committee members criticized the administration for creating confusion for school-level planning teams by not giving them enough information about the plan.
“If you don’t tell people . . . what’s on the menu, they’re going to try to order things that are off-menu, that we’re not going to be able to do,” summarized Cardet-Henandez. “It is unfortunate that we put educators in a situation to do planning for some of our most vulnerable kids, and then they felt like the district wasn’t able to meet them there.”
Public commenters were uniformly much more critical of Skipper. Ruby Reyes and Suleika Soto, leaders of the Boston Education Justice Alliance, presented the results of a community survey they had conducted.
“Overall, superintendent Skipper received a cumulative average of 32 out of 100,” Reyes said. “We deserve so much better.”
The evaluation follows a year in which the superintendent faced major deadlines under the 2022 agreement the city negotiated to avert a takeover by the state. The district had made mixed progress on the goals of that agreement in areas including overhauling transportation, facilities, and programs for students with disabilities and English learners, state and local officials said in May.
In the coming months, the committee will meet to set new goals for Skipper’s third year with the district, which is the last year of the agreement with the state.
Rolling out the inclusion plan successfully will be one of Skipper’s key challenges in the coming year, along with continued efforts to recover from pandemic-era learning loss and a surge in absenteeism. The district’s most important contract, its agreement with the teachers union, remains outstanding, and the district’s schools and central office will also operate this year with more constrained budgets than in Skipper’s first two years in charge, after the end of federal relief funds resulted in cuts.
Last year, while they largely praised Skipper in her efforts and gave her passing grades — and a raise — the committee sought more evidence of concrete improvements in outcomes for the district’s highest-needs students. Those concerns were reflected in this year’s evaluation, which included goals in terms of test scores, absenteeism, and other measures — but many of those measures were not yet available for the 2023-24 school year.
Christopher Huffaker can be reached at christopher.huffaker@globe.com. Follow him @huffakingit.