School Board extends Superintendent’s contract to June 2027 with a raise, discusses Superintendent evaluation process

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – At the November 19 annual organizational meeting, business meeting, and workshop, the School Board of Alachua County set the meeting calendar, extended the Superintendent’s contract to June 2027 with a raise, heard from JBPro about rezoning, and discussed the evaluation process for the Superintendent.

Meeting dates and times

After selecting the Chair and Vice Chair (click here for our article on that discussion), the Board took up the meeting calendar for the next year. The Superintendent recommended that the Board continue to hold its regularly scheduled business meetings at 6 p.m. on the first Tuesday of each month, with a second meeting on the third Tuesday if necessary. The first meetings in December, January, and July are canceled, and the monthly workshop is held on the first Wednesday of the month.

Member Tina Certain made a motion to adopt the calendar, and Member Sarah Rockwell seconded the motion.

Member Janine Plavac asked whether the workshops (typically held at 10 a.m. on Wednesdays) could alternate between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. so she doesn’t have to take as much personal time from her teaching job to attend them. She asked to amend the motion to adopt the calendar with alternating times for workshops. 

Certain said she wanted to keep the workshops at 10 a.m. to keep staff from “having late meetings and running into the evenings.” 

Rockwell said she was “initially comfortable with that flexibility, but when I spoke with Dr. Patton, my understanding is that it is much preferred by staff to have the workshops in the morning.” 

Superintendent Kamela Patton said, “We’re here to serve whatever way you want.” She said 1 p.m. would be better than 2 p.m. and added that previous workshops that started at 1 p.m. “worked out.”

Rockwell: “I think that when you run for a position or apply to be appointed to a position, you’re committing to the obligations of that position.”

Rockwell continued, “I’ll also say School Board is my only job, because I knew that it was a time commitment that would make it difficult for me to juggle my family and another job. And I think that when you run for a position or apply to be appointed to a position, you’re committing to the obligations of that position.”

McNealy: “I’m hoping that this Board would consider a colleague, whether appointed or elected, who is now employed, because I would do the same for you. I’m surprised.”

Vice Chair Leanetta McNealy said she respected staff “and the hours that they work so diligently,” but she supported giving “very much consideration” to Plavac’s job: “I’m hoping that this Board would consider a colleague, whether appointed or elected, who is now employed, because I would do the same for you. I’m surprised.”

Chair Thomas Vu said he would be in favor of shifting times, but he thought 2 p.m. was too late, so he said that if Plavac changed it to 1 p.m., he would support her amendment.

Certain said she worked when she was first elected but then “gave it up because of the time commitment it required of me… I am in favor of having the meetings earlier… because they are work sessions for us.” She said there would likely be additional evening meetings over the rest of the school year because of the rezoning effort, “so I think committing ourselves to early meetings for work sessions would serve us better in the coming year.”

Plavac withdrew her amendment: “We’ll just go with 10 a.m., that’s fine.”

Patton pointed out that Vu also has a full-time job: “Sometimes we always think that you don’t, because your job, you are able to do it, but I just want to be sure we recognize the fact that you do also have a full-time job.”

The motion to adopt the calendar passed unanimously.

After setting committee assignments and holding the annual meeting of the Alachua County Leasing Corporation, the Board held a regular business meeting. 

Addendum to the Superintendent’s contract

The only action item on the agenda was an addendum to extend the Superintendent’s contract through June 30, 2027. The addendum states that it “includes a salary adjustment equal to the percentage increase provided to teachers in the Alachua County School District whether such increase is in the form of a salary increase or bonus.” No dollar amount was provided, no Board Member asked for the amount, and Alachua Chronicle has not received a response to our requests to Alachua County Public Schools for the amount of the new salary.

Certain made a motion to approve the contract addendum, and Rockwell seconded the motion.

Plavac: “The pay raise — we’re tying it to the teachers’ pay raise, but… a 4% pay raise on that amount of income is quite substantial.”

Plavac asked why the Board was voting on a contract extension before discussing the Superintendent’s evaluation, which was scheduled for the workshop after the regular business meeting. She said, “You know, Mr. Vu, I like rubrics. We don’t have an evaluation in place. And the other thing I’m a little concerned about is that the pay raise — we’re tying it to the teachers’ pay raise, but… a 4% pay raise on that amount of income is quite substantial.”

As mentioned above, we have not received a response about the Superintendent’s salary under the contract extension, but a 4% increase over her original base salary of $19,500 per month would be $20,280 per month, or an increase of $9,360 per year. Teachers received a 3% raise this year, plus a step increase that averages about 1% but depends on how long the teacher has been employed.

McNealy said she didn’t think the Board had already voted to extend Patton’s contract by a year, so she asked Attorney David Delaney for clarification, and he said, “What I would say is, the Board has had discussions tangential or adjacent to the fact of extending the Superintendent’s contract a couple of times, at a workshop and at a Board meeting… So it’s been discussed a couple of times up to now, and this would be the opportunity for the Board to take final action on that.”

McNealy: “I’ve never understood when we decided that the contract would be extended until 2027.”

McNealy said she understood the discussions at the workshop and how long a Superintendent search would take, “but I’ve never understood when we decided that the contract would be extended until 2027.”

Certain said, “For me, I’m okay with the extension we talked about, extending Dr. Patton in the workshop… We didn’t vote, because we don’t vote in a workshop. We just had a general consensus, of the majority, of that was the way that we would go.”

Regarding the salary, Certain said, “We’re paying a competitive salary. We were in a tight spot [when Patton was hired]… Sometimes you have to pay a premium to get where you need to be. And I figure that’s where we are… I think [Patton] is doing a very good job of really raising up our organization… She walked into a wreck, and I appreciate her tenacity and not just giving up, and her willingness to stay here, but it is costing us… And as far as the pay increase, I can kind of be okay with that connection to the pay with the teachers.”

Rockwell said she was “also okay with the contract as presented.” She said that because Patton does not have insurance or retirement through the district, her current compensation is less per month than the previous Superintendent’s: “She’s also currently making less than if we had an elected Superintendent… who was making the salary assigned by the state.” She praised Patton’s work and concluded, “I think we’re getting on the right path, and… doing a very intentional search process with time for onboarding of a new Superintendent, which we have not done before, I think we will continue on a very strong trajectory.”

McNealy: “We are backwards… I’m still at the point where I would not agree with the extension.”

McNealy said she has appreciation and respect for Patton, but the evaluation should have been completed before voting on the contract extension, “and so, to me, we are backwards… I’m still at the point where I would not agree with the extension.”

Vu said he supported the contract extension because “now I feel like we have a very strong leader who understands how things should operate.” He said he particularly appreciated Patton’s management of the budget, leading to a 3% raise (plus the step increase) for teachers this year, an increase from last year’s 1.3% raise. Vu said the only reason the Board was doing evaluations of the Superintendent was that he recently reminded them that their policies require that by the end of the year.

The motion to approve the contract addendum passed 3-2, with McNealy and Plavac in dissent.

During Board Member Requests, Vu said that although Plavac withdrew her request for later workshops, he was interested in revisiting that later, with a start time of 1 p.m. for the afternoon workshops. 

Rezoning overview

During the workshop that followed the regular business meeting, Director of FTE and State Reporting Kim Neal said the district’s rezoning effort, which was referred to as the “Comprehensive School Strategy Plan,” will work to “right-size our schools, and, even more importantly, our school district,… to the footprint and… the enrollment that we have… We know that our families in our community have so many school options, and we want to make sure that, as Alachua County Public Schools, we are doing everything we can do so our families choose us.”

Click here for the Comprehensive School Strategy Plan presentation. 

Kathie Ebaugh from JBPro said the project will include understanding the district’s programming; the instructional capacity; and the instructional demand for electives, magnet programs, and after-school programs. She said that although the project will produce zoning maps, it will also be a “long-term strategy, and I’m using that word very specifically because this is a strategic plan.” She said the community engagement would include both in-person and online components. 

Neal said the results of the first round of community engagement will be presented at a School Board workshop on January 12, and that will be followed by a second round of community engagement, with a second workshop on February 17, maps by the end of February, and a vote on the plan on March 12.

Ebaugh emphasized that they want everyone in the community, from pre-K students to UF students to grandparents, to participate in the community engagement process.

Click here for the dates and locations of the first round of community engagement meetings.

After a discussion in which Delaney warned the board that it would be a “challenge” to adhere to State public notice laws if multiple Board Members attended the same event, each Member selected one or two community engagement meetings to attend, with the understanding that other Members would not attend those meetings.

Superintendent’s evaluation

During a discussion of the Superintendent’s evaluation, Delaney explained that the policy “was drafted in such a way that it could be sort of all things to all different Boards.” He said that without a Strategic Plan, there are no clear priorities that can be used to measure the Superintendent’s performance.

Although no documents were posted in the meeting backup, Delaney said each Member had a form in front of them that meets the requirements of the policy and can be used to evaluate the Superintendent. He recommended a workshop in January or February in which the Board could lay out priorities or goals for the Superintendent, build an evaluation rubric around those goals, and then establish a timeline for annual evaluations; this process would then lead to updating the policy “and set the Board up for success going forward, not just with this Superintendent, but with future Superintendents.”

Vu and Rockwell both thought it would be better to evaluate the Superintendent at the end of the school year instead of the end of the calendar year. Rockwell said she was fine with the form, but she would prefer to have a list of goals, for example, instead of a general question that asked about progress toward the educational goals of the district.

Plavac said the Board should develop a Strategic Plan in 2026, even though “I know we have a lot going on next year, but I think that has to be another priority, because it’s not fair to an incoming Superintendent if we don’t have a Strategic Plan in place so they even know what we expect of them.”

Certain said the form would be fine for this year, but she didn’t like the Board’s recent practice of having each Member list their priorities for the year; she said if they wanted to set priorities, the Board should adopt a single set of goals.

Rockwell asked if the Superintendent’s self-evaluation would be complete before the Members have to complete their evaluations, and Patton said the short timeline was one reason why she recommended doing the evaluation in July. They all eventually agreed that Patton would complete her self-evaluation by December 10, and the Members will submit their evaluations by December 12, so they can be added to the backup materials for the December 16 Board meeting.