The Hartford School Board met in Executive Session on February 7th to give Superintendent Torres-Rodriguez her mid-year evaluation.

Most likely, we’ll never know what was said, or even, knowing this Board, who showed up and who didn’t.  Continuing their great attendance record from 2022, the Board held a Family & Community Committee Engagement Committee meeting on February 9th, Yahaira Escribano was the only Board member who felt engaged enough to attend the meeting.  You wouldn’t have even finished your venti cinnamon dolce latte before this meeting was over.

Connecticut Education Law requires boards of education to evaluate the superintendent, at least on an annual basis, “in accordance with guidelines and criteria mutually determined and agreed to by such board and such superintendent.”  Don’t you wish you could supply your evaluation criteria to your boss?

The board’s evaluation may be written or oral, creating a record or merely a memory.  A Hartford Courant survey in 2016 found that of the 133 school districts responding to their inquiry, 31% conducted oral evaluations in executive session, thereby creating no paper trail, for those who may be inquisitive enough to be thinking, Freedom of Information Request. 

For those thinking accountability, Hartford’s Board of Education did, at one time, provide written documents of the superintendent’s evaluation.  Former Hartford Board Chairman Richard Wareing told former Superintendent Beth Schiavino-Narvaez at her hiring, that her evaluations would be “public documents.”  Wareing told the Courant, “If you’re doing your job, there’s nothing to hide.”

This exercise in conducting government in the open, enabled the Hartford Courant to publish the results of Superintendent Schiavino-Narvaez’s first-year evaluation in 2015.  The six-page evaluation “largely [commended]” the Superintendent’s job performance, aligning with the Board’s willingness to extend her contract until 2018 during a Board meeting the night before.  Ms. Schiavino-Narvaez would be gone within a year.

No such stories were ever published in the Courant concerning her successor, Superintendent Torres-Rodriguez.  However, after the Board extended her first contract for another year in 2018, Board Chairman Craig Stallings did tell the Courant (Oct. 30, 2018, P.B5) that “the students of the city of Hartford are in good hands,” and “that the decision to extend [her] contract was made after an evaluation of her work.”  Stallings said that the evaluation recognized the Superintendent’s “strengths and weaknesses.”  And the public recognized this as empty rhetoric.

In 2019, the Hartford Courant reported on another year’s contract extension for Superintendent Torres-Rodriguez (Jun. 19, 2019, B1).  “As long as she requests annual contract extensions, demonstrating her long-term commitment to the district, the board plans to make them,” said new Board Chairman Julio Flores.  Based on the Courant’s story, it only can be said that her contract was extended after an evaluation of her “commitment” and “leadership.”  At the very least, the Superintendent is committed to asking for contract extensions year after year.

In 2019, while the Board was celebrating the Superintendent’s leadership, an audit was conducted on the district in July after the Executive Director of Financial Management was fired for health insurance fraud.  The audit found that “dozens of instances of health insurance fraud,” costing the district “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” had continued well into Torres-Rodriguez’s role as district leader.  And in April, Chief Operating Officer Jose Colon-Rivas was fired after an investigation found that he wanted to be a leader of his own Best Buy with computers he was allegedly stealing from the school district.  Operational effectiveness is but a mere element of district leadership, apparently.

Another contract extension for Superintendent Torres-Rodriguez came in September of 2022.  This one didn’t make Hartford Courant headlines.  This extension was based, in part, on the time-honored evaluation tool called, “a leap of faith,” which is how Board member Yahaira Escribano described her decision to vote “Aye” on the extension.

For those Board members looking for a bit more than “a leap of faith” in evaluating the Superintendent, they need only to look to the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education (CABE).  This organization offers workshops to Board members in such areas as “Board Roles and Responsibilities,” “Efficient Meetings,” and “Superintendent Evaluation.”  CABE joined with the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents (CAPSS) in 2016 to create a “recommended” evaluation process.

Included in this collaboration’s recommendations, are six major elements in evaluating a superintendent:

Growth in Student Achievement

Educational Leadership

Organizational Management

Community Relations

Board of Education Relations

Personal and Professional Qualities and Relationships.

Which elements are seriously considered by the current Board of Education in Hartford is something we will never know, based on the uncommon cone of silence put in place by Superintendent Rodriguez.   I will take a leap of faith, however, and say that each element has its place in the process.  The CABE/CAPSS process recommendation is just guidance, there’s a lot of room for interpretation…and leaps of faith.

Yet, Americans have an affinity for dirty laundry.  We want to know what happens behind the locked doors of our neighbors and behind the locked doors of executive committee hearings.  We want to know how a superintendent, making more money than the Mayor, is assessed for leadership effectiveness and why the city should support this superintendent’s perennial contract extensions.

Mitchell Pearlman, former Executive Director of the state Freedom of Information Commission, stated that school districts deliberately use private, oral evaluations to avoid creating written documents, thus making an “end run” around FOIA laws, “there’s no record and the public is left out of the loop…”

East Hartford Superintendent Nathan Quesnel said that when districts talks about “accountability,”  that includes the superintendent.  Quesnel stated, “we have a written document in East Hartford that memorializes the conversation that took place.”

On the cloudy side of the coin, Farmington Board Chairman Christopher Fagan likes the closed door, none-of-your-business process of superintendent evaluations.  Fagan said, “the district’s success – and, by extension, [the superintendent’s] – speaks for itself.”  And by extension then, if the district is failing, does that speak to a superintendent’s failure?   This logic simplifies the evaluation process for school boards in districts like Fagan’s, which “continually rank as one of the highest performing districts in the state and nation.”

Evidence of a positive evaluation, when districts do not want to share that information with the public, is in the contract…or in “the pudding,” said Fagan.  “There is no stronger validation of a superintendent’s performance than retaining and renewing the contract.”   This would appear to be logical, but that logic can fool you.  Hartford Board Member Escribano’s “leap of faith” vote for extending the contract of Torres-Rodriguez, does not ring of a stinging validation of performance.  For Fagan’s logic to be accurate, we would have to assume everyone has the same goal, and graft, politics, and nepotism never enter the picture.  Also, the fact that a student moves from grade to grade, or grade to graduation, sort of like getting a contract extension, does not, in all cases, represent proof of success or achievement.  

We have a fairly good idea of how students are evaluated, grades (or the lack of grades), broken down by subject matter and published, albeit, as a group.  But we know the criteria used to evaluate each individual student.  Real leaders never ask those they lead to do things the leader would not do.