2025 Superintendent Evaluation

Each June, the school board evaluates the superintendent against the goals he set for himself the previous August. Those goals have to be approved by the board and then they guide his efforts over the school year. Each board member ranks the superintendent's performance on a scale of 1 to 5 pertaining to each goal, with 1 meaning "Significantly Below Expectations" and 5 meaning "Significantly Above Expectations." These ranks are then weighted and compiled for an overall evaluation score.

This year, for the first time, he has not accompanied his evaluation with a request for a contract extension. I thought it might be useful to look at the past few years to see how an individual board member's evaluation of the superintendent correlates to their vote on whether to extend his contract. The disaggregated data has not been included in the published agenda until this year. (Thank you to Josh Brown for including these data for the 2025 evaluation.) So, I submitted a FOIA request for the disaggregated data from 2021 through 2024.

Unfortunately, the data from 2022 is incomplete, as only 6 of the 12 board members' evaluations were available. However, there is still enough to get an idea of how these two sets of data interact.

There were also myriad calculation errors in the 2023 data. The final result was not off by much, but the reported averages were incorrect by my calculations.

Here is a link to a spreadsheet that has the data for each year (link).

And here's a table with with an overview:

Year | Avg  | Min  | Max  | Vote   |
-----|------|------|------|--------|
2021 | 3.41 | 1.50 | 4.50 |  8-2-1 |
2022-| 3.75 |   ?  |   ?  |  9-1   |
2023 | 3.73 | 2.68 | 5.00 | 11-0   |
2024 | 3.83 | 2.52 | 5.00 |  9-2   |
2025 | 3.31 | 2.46 | 4.43 |  N/A   |

• I can't know min and max for 2022 because of missing data, but the average was published in the June 2022 meeting agenda.

The lowest score over this time period was from Jay Galbreath in 2021, when he gave the superintendent a score of 1.5 out of 5. This was largely due to Mr. Galbreath's dissatisfaction with Mr. Golden's leadership coming out of the pandemic. Not surprisingly, Mr. Galbreath voted not to extend Mr. Golden's contract that year.

The highest score is a tie between Drason Beasley in 2023 and 2024. Both years, he gave Mr. Golden perfect marks. Each score is accompanied with an opportunity to explain the score. But both of these years, Mr. Beasley literally had no notes.

The highest score that received a "No" vote on the contract extension was from Donna Clements in 2024. She presented a 3.28, which would be between "Met Expectations" and "Above Expectations." She cited concerns regarding the superintendent's salary not being explicitly noted in the amendment as her reasoning for voting against the extension.

The lowest score that received a "Yes" vote was from Angela Durham in 2021. She gave Mr. Golden a 2.25, which is second lowest only to the aforementioned 1.5 that Mr. Galbreath assessed that same year. But, she voted to extend his contract.

Obviously most of these scores are from members who are no longer serving on the board, so there may be very little signal to derive here. But if we take Ms. Clements's line of 3.28 as the high water mark for a "no", there were 6 evaluations below that line this year. If, however, we take Ms. Durham's 2.25 mark as the low end for a "yes," all 12 evaluations were above that line.

I've glossed over a lot of nuance here. But overall, it seems that the current board is less satisfied with the superintendent's performance than it has been in the recent past.