December 15, 2016 11:56 AM UTC

Jeffco School Board Considers New Direction for Superintendent

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Yesenia Robles reports for Chalkbeat, the Jefferson County School Board is pondering what to do about its Superintendent as the end of Dan McMinimee’s contract approaches:

Jeffco school board members held an executive session last week during a conference in Colorado Springs in which they started discussions on the superintendent’s contract, a district spokeswoman said. The board is scheduled to go into executive session again Thursday to continue the discussion.

“You don’t wait until the contract expires,” Ron Mitchell, the Jeffco school board president, told Chalkbeat. “Should the board be thinking we want to go in another direction, that requires a fair amount of prior planning. That’s the rationale for the timing — the only reason we’re beginning those discussions.”

McMinimee is a former assistant superintendent from Douglas County whose controversial hiring came at the hands of a now-ousted conservative school board (McMinimee was curiously the sole finalist for the job in 2014). When a new board majority was elected last November, McMinimee was given a chance to prove his mettle under a different regime. In September of this year, the board finalized an evaluation related to $40,000 worth of bonuses in McMinimee’s contract, determining that he qualified for only about half that amount:

McMinimee received the lowest scores of partially effective on three out of the 12 goals including one related to creating a new charter school application process, and for mixed results increasing the number of third-graders meeting or exceeding expectations in reading.

Based on the review, McMinimee received $20,000 in performance pay.

After that evaluation, the board started the work of setting the superintendent goals for next year. McMinimee presented a draft of his suggested goals at a meeting two weeks ago.

During that discussion, board members pushed back on the draft, suggesting that some of the goals McMinimee had set should be expectations of his job, not additional goals for bonuses. They asked for more goals that can be tied to reliable data. [Pols emphasis]

Given his fairly lackluster performance and $220,000 salary, it was pretty balsy of McMinimee to push for more money in “performance pay” for, you know, doing your job.

McMinimee’s contract expires on June 30, 2017.